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Mastery
Several remarkable items in this morning’s online reading… This interview in Guernica Magazine with the inimitable Arundhati Roy Conrad DiDiodato’s trenchant meditation on certain observations by Donald Hall and their relevance to Canadian poetry and the avant-garde at large Jonathan Mayhew’s comments on writing about María Zambrano (more on this below) A tantalizing report on some scientific progress regarding the Voynich manuscript Among all these wonderful irruptions of insight, the one that made me jump up and ruffle my hair (as Nabokov said certain readers of Invitation to a Beheading would do) was Jonathan Mayhew’s: “I actually like learning more…Read More
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Nicholas Hughes, Individual
We finally have a fairly lengthy portrait of Nicholas Hughes from his good friend, Joe Saxton. It’s a welcome resurrection of Nick Hughes the man from the mausoleum of his role, so fanatically designed by the literary Death Eaters, as the Tragic Victim of his parents’ marriage, his mother’s depression, his father’s infidelity, his genetic heritage, or some combination of all or some of these elements. The Tragic Victim makes a perfect figure for the Death Eaters’ favorite narrative; but Hughes’s real life story is more significant than these cannibal fantasies.Read More
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Adios, Nicholas Hughes … Hello, Death Eaters
I’ve felt mysteriously shaken by the suicide of Nicholas Hughes, son of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. In part it’s because I remember with such affection the tenderness in Ted Hughes’s letters to and about Nicholas, whose deep knowledge of the natural world Hughes loved and admired. But part of my feeling involves the dread of Death Eaters; not those demonic Harry Potter wizards and witches, but their literati equivalents: critics, biographers, opinion page hacks and the like.Read More
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Mexico Books 2008: Installment 5
Longing Distance, by Sarah Hannah. I had just ordered this collection, Sarah Hannah’s first, when I learned that Ms. Hannah had died, apparently by her own hand. That fact unfortunately colored my experience of her book, making it seem perhaps darker than it really is. There’s nothing wrong with the more somber registers, of course; Sylvia Plath made enduring poetry from them, and there is more than a passing resemblance between Plath and Hannah.Read More
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The Guardian’s Great Poets Series
Britain’s The Guardian offers up a series it calls “Great Poets of the 20th Century,” a link-rich glimpse into the English public intellectual class’s image of itself. American readers may be surprised that the editors claim America’s own Sylvia Plath for England (anticipating, I suppose, the outcry that would have greeted their inclusion of Ted Hughes without her) and mysteriously elevate Sassoon over Owen. Still, it seems well worth reading.Read More
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On the Letters of Ted Hughes V
Finishing The Letters of Ted Hughes—which I managed to do while recovering from a nasty bout with the flu—left me with a strange mixture of exaltation and biting sadness: something, I mean, beyond the sadness that books like this (biographies, letters, etc.) inevitably inspire because they end in the grave.Read More
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The Astonishing Sinéad Morrissey
I don’t remember how I first head of the young Irish poet Sinéad Morrissey, but I’m grateful to Serendipity for sending her work my way. Her first two collections, There Was a Fire in Vancouver and Between Here and There are lively and adventurous, but her third, The State of the Prisons, places her among the half-dozen finest poets of her generation. That book’s eponymous poem, subtitled “A History of John Howard, Prison Reformer, 1726-1790,” is a masterpiece, but it’s too long to quote here.Read More
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On the Letters of Ted Hughes II
These piquant passages are from a letter written by Ted Hughes to his sister Olwyn, dated August 22, 1957. Hughes and Plath had moved to Eastham, Massachusetts, where the couple lived before she took up a teaching job at Smith College, her alma mater, in nearby Northampton. His outsider’s insight into the condition of ’50s America reminds me of Tocqueville, though Tocqueville’s fascination yields, in Hughes, to a visceral alarm: What a place America is. Everything is in cellophane. Everything is 10,000 miles from where it was plucked or made.Read More
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On The Letters of Ted Hughes
I’ve been reading The Letters of Ted Hughes, which I’m finding impossible to put down. Like all letters written by people of genius, Hughes’s letters are a magical mix of erudition, crank notions, unguarded humor, soap opera, and authentic emotion. Hughes—who for my money stands as the greatest British poet of the last century—has more valuable things to say about the practice of poetry than anyone I’ve read. Herewith an example: “Up to the invention of Caxton’s press, and for most people long after, all reading was done aloud. Most people were incapable of reading silently.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. 
