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On the Fear of Influence
CULTIVATED GROUND When young, one is fearful of being influenced by other writers. With maturity that fear dissipates and one detects the sound of foreign voices on one’s home ground and is often delighted to be helped with a few thrusts of the spade. It is more important that the earth be properly cultivated than that every potato be planted with a jerk of the arm uniquely one’s own.Read More
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The Deleted Mind
David Orr dressed for workas the NY Times Poetry Columnist I found this review online a few weeks back, in which David Orr focuses mostly on Robin Robertson‘s versions of poems by Tomas Tranströmer, gathered under the title The Deleted World. After pointing out numerous mistranslations*, Orr makes these odd statements: The Deleted World is pleasurable whether or not it’s a good translation of Tranströmer. […] Is that enough? In some ways, certainly — we read poetry for entertainment, not nutritional value.Read More
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Göran Sonnevi’s First Book in English
The Economy Spinning Faster and Faster by Göran Sonnevi My rating: 4 of 5 stars I thought I’d done fairly well with keeping up with one of my favorite poets, Robert Bly—both with his own books and his translations—so I was surprised when I read, in the recently published Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer, that Bly had been working on translations of poems by Swedish poet Göran Sonnevi, whose work I became a fan of when I encountered it in 1993, in A Child Is Not a Knife: Selected Poems of Göran Sonnevi, beautifully translated by…Read More
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Tranströmer Wins the Nobel
My Introduction to Tranströmer: fromRobert Bly’s Seventies Press,translated by Bly, 1970, with theSwedish originals en face I have heard the Swedes singing cheek to cheek.I do not think they will sing to me. But that’s ok. I feel like they’ve sung to me—sort of—because Tranströmer was on the No Bull Prizes list I posted back in 2007. The NYT calls his poetry “bleak but powerful,” which is only half true, because Tranströmer (it seems to me) is seldom bleak.Read More
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
