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On the Fear of Influence
CULTIVATED GROUND When young, one is fearful of being influenced by other writers. With maturity that fear dissipates and one detects the sound of foreign voices on one’s home ground and is often delighted to be helped with a few thrusts of the spade. It is more important that the earth be properly cultivated than that every potato be planted with a jerk of the arm uniquely one’s own.Read More
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Adventures in Reading 2021
It was another pandemic year, in some ways more challenging than the first. There was a sense of fraying in the fabric of social life, work life, personal focus (my poetry journal full of fragments that I’m not postmodern enough to throw down on pages and pretend that they cohere as poems), the persistent floating anxiety. Among the various costumes that relief arrived in were books, of course.Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: Bei Dao
Mission The priest gets lost in prayer an air shaft leads to another era: escapees climb over the wall panting words evoke the author’s heart trouble breathe deep, deeper grab the locust tree roots that debate the north wind summer has arrived the treetop is an informer murmurs are a reddish sleep stung by a swarm of bees no, a storm readers one by one clamber onto the shore [From The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems, translated by Eliot Weinberger and Iona Man-Cheong] ~ From the publisher’s Web site: The Rose of Time: New & Selected Poems presents a glowing selection…Read More
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My Year in Books (2015)
I, too, dislike “best books” lists except when they bring me news of books I want to read but somehow overlooked, which is surprisingly seldom. Over 60-plus years of reading, beginning, as I recall, with Little Golden Books, I’ve developed enough self-awareness to guess correctly about 70 percent of time which books will bring me that mixture of pleasure and revelation that is my particular addiction.Read More
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The Deleted Mind
David Orr dressed for workas the NY Times Poetry Columnist I found this review online a few weeks back, in which David Orr focuses mostly on Robin Robertson‘s versions of poems by Tomas Tranströmer, gathered under the title The Deleted World. After pointing out numerous mistranslations*, Orr makes these odd statements: The Deleted World is pleasurable whether or not it’s a good translation of Tranströmer. […] Is that enough? In some ways, certainly — we read poetry for entertainment, not nutritional value.Read More
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Göran Sonnevi’s First Book in English
The Economy Spinning Faster and Faster by Göran Sonnevi My rating: 4 of 5 stars I thought I’d done fairly well with keeping up with one of my favorite poets, Robert Bly—both with his own books and his translations—so I was surprised when I read, in the recently published Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer, that Bly had been working on translations of poems by Swedish poet Göran Sonnevi, whose work I became a fan of when I encountered it in 1993, in A Child Is Not a Knife: Selected Poems of Göran Sonnevi, beautifully translated by…Read More
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Friday Notebook 10.14.11
I’m posting this two days late because the calendar and I have been on the outs lately, both work and personal deadlines slipping like fish through the pirate-skeleton’s bony fingers…. A detail from Lascaux. The photographer’s watermarkdoes not date from the paleolithic. The following passages are drawn from Clayton Eshleman’s Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld. I’ve never developed a liking for Eshleman’s poetry, which takes up much of this book, but the prose sections are illuminating: Poetry twists toward the unknown and seeks to realize something beyond the poet’s initial awareness.Read More
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Tranströmer Wins the Nobel
My Introduction to Tranströmer: fromRobert Bly’s Seventies Press,translated by Bly, 1970, with theSwedish originals en face I have heard the Swedes singing cheek to cheek.I do not think they will sing to me. But that’s ok. I feel like they’ve sung to me—sort of—because Tranströmer was on the No Bull Prizes list I posted back in 2007. The NYT calls his poetry “bleak but powerful,” which is only half true, because Tranströmer (it seems to me) is seldom bleak.Read More
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Package Words
John Latta today notes: Pound, in 1956, to a BBC interviewer: “You cannot have literature without curiosity, and when a writer’s curiosity dies out he is finished—he can do all the tricks you like, but without curiosity you get no literature with any life in it.” (Pound’s next remark—mandatory reading for the insistently egregious purveyors of dopey labels: “Confusion is caused by package words. You call a man a Manichaean or a Bolshevik, or something or other, and never find out what he is driving at.Read More
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Stein and the Objectification of Language
On his excellent blog, Fluid/Exchange, Steve Halle has put up an intriguing post on Gertrude Stein‘s lecture “Poetry and Grammar.” I won’t rehash it here. But I will draw attention to one passage that is fraught. Halle is too good a writer to make it seem fraught, but it is, and its fraughtness says a lot, I think, about the influences (good and bad) that Stein has had on poetry various avant-garde movements. Here’s Halle’s statement: Stein begins the essay by exploring the writer’s relationship to words, and this is important because writing is made out of words.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. 
