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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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Adios, Robert Bly
It’s startling to think of Robert Bly moving on, leaving us here without his energy, his restlessness, his exemplary dedication to opening a path toward a different way of imagining the purpose of poetry. Dana Gioia famously asked, “Can poetry matter?” Bly showed that it could matter … that poetry provided a way into the reaches of spiritual life that had been hidden away from us by America’s utilitarian values.Read More
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A Short Trip to Storm Island
In my 2020 Annual Reading List post, I mentioned a wonderful collection from Scott King’s Red Dragonfly Press called Storm Island, by Thomas R. Smith. Now I’m thrilled to report that you can enjoy Thomas himself reading a selection of poems from the book.Read More
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My Pandemic Year in Books
So Many Books, So Little Time I could have sworn that I’d read far fewer books this year than in past years, but it seems not to be so. It must be one of the few benign side effects of the pandemic. Of course, the pandemic has been hard on my writing, poems—at least poems of my kind—seeming fairly pointless amid the waves of infection and death and the tide of fascism rising out of the GOP (the Goosestepping Old Party).Read More
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Adventures in Reading 2018
Old Reading Room at BookBar (Photo: Tricia M.) Let me admit up front that I’ve included half a dozen books here that were read as part of my work with the Professional Creative Writing program at University College. But they all turned out to be worthwhile reading experiences. Even those I couldn’t quite connect with—Juan Gelman’s The Poems of Sidney West, Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw, and Adonis’s powerful Concerto al-Quds, which is also recondite and nakedly anguished by turns—continue to haunt me. This is usually an early indicator of re-readings in the offing.Read More
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Thomas R. Smith’s “Note to Self”
As usual, Thomas R. Smith cuts through the externals to touch the beating heart of the issue by setting it in the larger context … that is, within the body politic. His fine poem “Note to Self” begins like this: Well, we die whether we stay together or fall apart. Finally the world goes on its way without us. The most scourge-like name alive today will one day be spoken seldom if at all. To what purpose this sighing and raging? To what purpose this pain? The poem is especially piquant in the wake of last night’s unpresidential debate—or presidential undebate.Read More
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Robert Bly at 86
Laurie Hertzel of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune paints a tender portrait of Robert Bly reading last week at the University of Minnesota, with some assistance from his friend and fellow poet Thomas R. Smith. Bly’s new book, Stealing Sugar From the Castle: Selected and New Poems 1950-2013, almost (unbelievably) escaped my notice, but my copy is on the way. I’ve noted before the influence Bly had on me when I was first trying to write poems.Read More
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The Condition of Vision: Tom Hennen’s Collected and New Poems
Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems by Tom Hennen My rating: 5 of 5 stars Some French writer when I was a boy said that the desert went into the heart of the Jews in their wanderings and made them what they are, I cannot remember by what argument he proved them even yet the indestructible children of earth, but it may well be that the elements have their children.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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Thomas and Uncle Dan
I want to draw your attention to this extraordinary post about poetry and politics on Thomas R. Smith’s blog. Note as well that Thomas’s new book, The Foot of the Rainbow, is now available from Red Dragonfly Press.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. 
