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Adventures in Reading 2022
PART ONE: DISTRACTION AND ENCHANTMENT 2022 was unkind to my habit of reading lots of books. Partly my paid work was to blame: growing pains (which I am too old for) of the professional kind. Then there was the several weeks I wasted on Thomas Mann‘s Doctor Faustus, which I had to abandon. What drudgery! What a distraction! I’d read and admired a number of Mann’s short stories, but Doctor Faustus struck me as all posturing, a ponderous performance with no point in sight, almost every moment of it arriving via second- or third-hand reports about Mann’s fictional, Schoenbergian composer, Adrian Leverkühn.Read More
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Imagine My Surprise…
I have a lovely but inexpensive set of novels by Thomas Hardy, whose poetry I’m familiar with but whose prose I’ve put off reading. I can’t say why I’ve put off that pleasure, but I’m in the process of correcting it now. The writing is rich, interweaving description and action and moving from heights to depths and back, at times in the same paragraph. But fifteen chapters in, I was unprepared for an idea whose origin I thought I knew: the idea that we all pass the anniversary of our death every year without knowing it.Read More
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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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The Drama of War-Time Poetry
The performance of “War of Words” went off without a hitch last night in the Black Box Theater at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities. Having written the script, I was surprised by how moving it was—how the century-old poems sprang to life with such power and subtlety from the mouths of the five actors. Among the many enlivening elements were smoothly delivered accents—Hardy’s Dorset English, Apollinaire’s bon vivant playfulness, the taut Germanic sounds of Trakl, and the sly Chicagoan cadences of Carl Sandburg.Read More
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An Alert from the Poetry Early Warning System
This is far in advance, I know, but I’m hoping you’ll all put this event on your calendars then jump on those devices to snag tickets! The event is a performance by four Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities actors of a script I’ve written/assembled, which aims to flesh out the conflicting and conflicted reactions to the U.S. entry into WWI by twelve North American poets.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. 
