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Legions of the Sun—Now Available
The companion anthology to “War of Words” is now available.Read More
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Legions of the Sun
Good news! The companion anthology to “War of Words,” Legions of the Sun, has arrived just in time for you to purchase it at the event! The book includes all the poems performed in “War of Words” as well as poems about WWI but written later. The latter section includes work from the immediate post-war (Jeffers, Pound, Eliot, Cummings and more) along with poems about the war by more recent poets, ranging from Louise Bogan, Archibald MacLeish, and Yehuda Amichai to Thomas Lux, Nicholas Samaras, Robert Cooperman, and Kierstin Bridger.Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: Eavan Boland
What Language Did The evening was the same as any other. I came out and stood on the step. The suburb was closed in the weather of an early spring and the shallow tip of washed-out yellows of narcissi resisted dusk. And crocuses and snowdrops. I stood there and felt the melancholy of growing older in such a season, when all I could be certain of was simply in this time of fragrance and refrain, whatever else might flower before the fruit, and be renewed, I would not. Not again. A car splashed by in the twilight.Read More
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Walt Whitman Spins in His Grave
First book awards are apt to be contentious. The major ones—Yale Younger Poets, the APR/Honickman, Cave Canem, the Walt Whitman—produce winners that are as often ignored as praised. In poetry, everything is arguable. But the 2013 Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award winner is especially distressing. Judge John Ashbery chose Chris Hosea‘s Put Your Hands In, which has been issued by Louisiana State University Press. I have to confess that I haven’t read the book and will not, based on the odious excerpts from it published in the Spring-Summer 2014 issue of American Poets.Read More
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On Vitality…
David Mason I generally don’t care for omnibus reviews. They too often display what Seamus Heaney called a “faults-on-both-sides tact,” and as a result one doesn’t get a point of view so much as ad hoc approval or condemnation, often enough with less than half a dozen lines quoted from any of the books because the reviewer is so anxious to demonstrate his or her own prowess with words. Of course, that “generally” in my first sentence begs the question of particulars.Read More
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WaPo Intern Pokes Poetry, Concludes It Is No Longer Living
On her aptly titled ComPost blog, Harvard grad and erstwhile pundit/humorist Alexandra Petri uses Richard Blanco as a footstool (much as Marlowe‘s Tamburlaine did the Emperor of the Turks) and from that elevation declaims her negative opinion of American poetry.Read More
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Bacon Flavored Erasure Poetics
I’m sitting in bed at the moment next to my lovely wife, who’s reading a holiday catalog. She is fixated on a spread peddling bacon-themed gifts. Bacon-strip ties. Tee shirts imprinted with images of bacon. Bacon Christmas ornaments. No shit. She remarks, “This is the most moronic thing I’ve ever seen. Who is this stuff aimed at?” I don’t answer because I’m engaged in something even more idiotic. I’m reading about a book called Gentle Reader!. It is a product generated by three contemporary poets through a process of erasing passages from certain works of Romantic-era writers.Read More
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One Reading of Linda Hogan’s Indios
One characteristic of great writing is that it offers layers of richness that invite contemplation and inspire not only self-examination but an impulse to reach beyond the text. In the case of Linda Hogan‘s compelling new book, Indios, the text takes the form of a harrowing and luminous poetic monologue. It is a psychological, cultural, and spiritual tour de force, written in verse that is musical and direct, tactful (in the sense of “adroit and sensitive”), and free of the empty cleverness one finds in so much American poetry these days.Read More
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DiDiodato in Mexico
Conrad and Friend (perhapsa member of the Redwood Nation) Mexico, where we go (on the Caribbean coast of Yucatán), inspires concentration. We’re usually there in April or early May, around my sweetie’s Yoga Fiesta—and where we stay (where we’ve stayed for 17 years now) is a quite, “boutique” hotel with a pool, a bar, a lending library, and hammocks scattered here and there in palapa shade and the shade of palm and almond trees.Read More
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Broken Flutes
As you know, if you noticed, I missed another Friday Notebook. My notebook has become a not-book. The pages hate me. This is because I’m spending all my energies on old poems, proofing pages for Thread of the Real, flirting with the gone rhythms, the tropes obvious or arcane, the little turns in the path no one knows about but me. No notebook entries, no. And besides, there have been no compelling poems from others at the moment (though some are in the offing—that is, in the stack by my bed—I feel sure).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. 
