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My Year in Books (2017)
This year’s list is longer than usual, in part because I created two literature courses for the Professional Creative Writing program I direct at D.U.’s University College, a process that entailed lots of reading.Read More
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Cult of the Fragment
The final chapter of A. Alvarez‘s thoughtful short book, The Writer’s Voice, is titled “The Cult of Personality and the Myth of the Artist,” and in it he argues that we have become more interested in the lives of artists than in their work because we have a lost any stable idea of what a “good work” is. In fact, the chief feature of postmodernism—the dominant “ism” of our moment—is its resistance to the very idea of value, which is considered an elitist cultural construct.Read More
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MacNeice Contemplates the 99 Percent
Louis MacNeice It was something of shock to encounter the 99 percent—not the phrase, but the demographic—deeply considered in the third section of Louis MacNeice’s long poem Autumn Journal (see Katy Evans-Bush’s excellent essay about it here), published in 1938. I had read the poem in my callow youth, but my ignorance of Britain between the wars was like a featureless river stone upon which the poem could simply not get a firm grip. I remembered it mostly for its tone—personal, notational, meditative, acerbic and humorous by turns—and didn’t appreciate exactly what MacNeice was trying to tell me.Read More
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A Life-Altering Friendship: Dale Jacobson on Thomas McGrath
Dale Jacobson I can’t thank Lyle Daggett enough for posting on his blog this link to a long, powerful memoir by poet Dale Jacobson about his friend and mentor, Thomas McGrath. It’s exciting to have this essay for several reasons. One, McGrath deserves to be more of a presence on our cultural radar, if only because his work has been severely undervalued and almost certainly suppressed—not by some conspiracy of nefarious political opponents, but (worse) by a pernicious aesthetic correctness, according to which poetry that embodies a profound systemic political critique is somehow not “first order” poetry.Read More
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Friday Notebook 07.22.2011
The world is that small spaceyou occupy. The rest is rumor.Be careful where you choose to go.You have freedom, but only thinkyou can live there. Rememberhow you refused that cap and gownget-up to collect your family’s firstcollege degree? How your mother cried?Freedom! And now she’s gone. Somebonds are roots, others—fetters.Freedom can be fetters, too. * After hurricane Rita, this placewas just shredded jungle. Nowit’s Jesús and Lídia’s casa,built by him, by hand, on weekendsand vacations, the way my fatherbuilt our first house.Read More
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Cattywampus
Just want to encourage you all to swing by the new Pemmican, where you’ll find some fine new poems by Lyle Daggett (here and here). In one of my favorites, “road song and annunciation,” you’ll get to walk with Tom McGrath on Whitman’s open road and see wonderful sights like these: … a gap in the fence where a spring colt canters off cattywampus the tack and yammer of a one-eyed crow from a lone pine hallooing down the small rain… Any poem with “cattywampus” in it is bound to be good.Read More
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A Prophecy for Our Lives Now (written sometime in the Reagan Era)
Neighborhood Watchby Don Gordon They are waiting for the night visitorWho comes unseen through the iron grid.They are praying for the family jewelsOr the sacred white jaguarLocked in its cave in the dark. Meanwhile the dehydrated old manIs dying of loneliness in his house.The widow next door strangles a cat for the same reason.The husband and wife in the doomed bungalowAre on the crumbling edge of mayhem. A country in love with itselfCannot regurgitate its worldly goods in time.It awaits the millennium in the museumWhere the stuffed eagle stares with glassy eyesInto the lean and ghostly past.Read More
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File Under: The Truth Hurts
From Indians we learned a toughness and a strength; and we gainedA freedom: by taking theirs: but a real freedom: bornFrom the wild and open land our grandfathers heroically stole.But we took a wound at Indian hands: a part of our soul scabbed over.We learned the pious and patriotic art of exterminationAnd no uneasy conscience where the man’s skin was the wrongColor; or his vowels shaped wrong; or his haircut; or his country possessed ofOil; or holding the wrong place on the map–whateverThe master race wants it will find good reasons for having.Read More
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Who Speaks to You?
I’m rereading Thomas McGrath’s magnificent Letter to an Imaginary Friend, in which he several times mentions Don Gordon. Don Gordon? A poet, it turns out, one of the many I’d never heard of until some other reader (usually another poet—in this case McGrath) brings them to my attention. Now I’ve discovered Don Gordon’s Collected Poems and am waiting for a check or two to clear so I can buy it.Read More
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The Great Debate
No, not Obama v. McCain, but this (a repost of a November 2007 post by Bill Knott on his blog today [links not in the original]): Randall Jarrell, writing in 1941: ”Realizing that the best poetry of the [1920s] was too inaccessible, we can will our poetry into accessibility—but how much poetry will be left when we finish? Our political or humanitarian interests may make us wish to make our poetry accessible to large groups . . . . “ The debate—whether one should strive to make one’s verse accessible—still rages of course.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. 
