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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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On Vitality…
David Mason I generally don’t care for omnibus reviews. They too often display what Seamus Heaney called a “faults-on-both-sides tact,” and as a result one doesn’t get a point of view so much as ad hoc approval or condemnation, often enough with less than half a dozen lines quoted from any of the books because the reviewer is so anxious to demonstrate his or her own prowess with words. Of course, that “generally” in my first sentence begs the question of particulars.Read More
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Contra Auden
Mexican poet Javier Sicilia Luckily, no one seems to have told Javier Sicilia that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Something amazing is happening in Mexico. A few weeks ago, a 14-bus caravan, which had been traveling under the leadership of Javier Sicilia, a poet and the founder of the Movement for Peace With Justice and Dignity, arrived here after a 10-day trek around the country. Its every move was followed by the national media, and thousands showed up to greet its return.Read More
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Something of a Ramble…
Seed Magazine has this illuminating conversation between linguist/anti-war activist Noam Chomsky and evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers. Their overarching topic is “deceit,” but the subtopics they touch on (“groupthink,” “maintaining credibility,” and “denial”) are powerful contributing factors to the human ability—exacerbated by bureaucracies and media—to deceive ourselves and others. In the discussion of “groupthink,” Trivers makes an observation that may explain why political poetry is so difficult to write well.Read More
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Thinking (as in the Just-Previous Post) of Kenny G.
Karl Shapiro | newyorktimes.com Lower the standard: that’s my motto. Somebody is always putting the food out of reach. We’re tired of falling off ladders. Who says a child can’t paint? A pro is somebody who does it for money. Lower the standards. Let’s all play poetry. Down with ideals, flags, convention buttons, morals, the scrambled eggs on the admiral’s hat. I’m talking sense. Lower the standards. Sabotage the stylistic approach. Let weeds grow in the subdivision. Putty up the incisions in the library façade, those names that frighten grade-school teachers, those names whose U’s are cut like V’s.Read More
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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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On the Blognoscenti
Conrad “at home” I’ve recommended Conrad DiDiodato’s Word-Dreamer: poetics blog before, and as if his fine work there weren’t enough, he’s hit upon a fascinating project: the development of a “blogger poetics text,” drawing on blogging by writers he calls “blognoscenti”. (You can read all about the project here. Be sure to read from the bottom up!) Conrad has generously cited this blog as part of his project, but I would be following it anyway because he has an eye for pithy notions whose significance one can spend quite a pleasant while unpacking.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. 
