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My Year in Books (2016)
As I did at the end of 2015, I’m laying out my past year’s book reading in the spirit of sharing the often haphazard journey of mind and heart that is my chief solitary pleasure. (There are other pleasures, of course, not solitary at all, but they don’t involve this particular addiction.) Again, the books listed below are ordered according to when I read them. I won’t comment on all of these titles because all of them are well worth reading.Read More
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50 Best Poetry Books Since 1950
Back in 2009, Tony Barnstone initiated a game on Eratosphere that involved readers posting their choices for “the Best 100 Poetry Books of the 20th Century.” It was a great exercise because it was more than a list: each reader could choose only one book and had to write a brief paragraph explaining why that book belonged on the list. Well, we’re almost a decade and a half into the 21st century, and the 20th “best books” lists have been done to death. So I’d like to adapt Barnstone’s game to our current situation.Read More
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Sylvia Plath (Part Six)
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Sylvia Plath (Part Five)
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Sylvia Plath (Part Four)
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Sylvia Plath (Part Three)
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Sylvia Plath (Part Two)
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Sylvia Plath (Part One)
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Ted Hughes’s “The Thought-Fox”
I remember a luminous floating breathlessness the first time I read this poem, in the dusty yellow light of the cage I worked in (a literal cage: one chainlink wall separated my gray metal desk and the cramped, brown-and-tan linoleumed room it sat in from a store-room where crippled book trucks awaited repair amid stacks of gray metal shelving and the hulks of gray metal file cabinets whose drawers were too battered to close). This was 1970.Read More
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Honoring Ted Hughes
There’s a move underway to honor the great Ted Hughes in Poet’s Corner, and I for one can only applaud the idea. He was certainly, as Simon Armitage writes, “a genius with an unparalleled gift, a once-in-a-generation poet whose work was a major contribution to English literature.” Leading the effort, apparently, is the Nobel Prize winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney, and his effort strikes me as an act of great friendship and humility. Heaney is a fine poet, but his work doesn’t match Hughes’s in power, range, and sheer adventurousness.Read More
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 17 books, including a translation of flash fictions by Mexican author Miguel Lupián, and co-edited two anthologies. He lives in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. He teaches at the University of Denver's University College, where he currently directs three programs: Professional Creative Writing, Arts & Culture Management, and Global Community Engagement. 
