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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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Chinese Fire
My good friend Joe Nigg, wrote an extraordinary 2016 book, The Phoenix: An Unnatural Biography of a Mythical Beast. It includes a chapter on “Poetic Fire,” which itself includes a poem of mine—rooted in the phoenix image—called “Revenant.” Now, between Joe’s inclusion of “Revenant” and the book’s appearance in print, I revised the poem, making several minor and a few substantial changes. In particular, the arc of the second version became … well, darker … and it was that second, darker version that subsequently appeared in my collection The World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015.Read More
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My Year in Books (2016)
As I did at the end of 2015, I’m laying out my past year’s book reading in the spirit of sharing the often haphazard journey of mind and heart that is my chief solitary pleasure. (There are other pleasures, of course, not solitary at all, but they don’t involve this particular addiction.) Again, the books listed below are ordered according to when I read them. I won’t comment on all of these titles because all of them are well worth reading.Read More
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(UPDATED) Second verse . . .
. . . same as the first.* Nothing against Don Share, of course. But “[a]fter an extensive national search” … really? Still, what could we expect from an organization whose “incoming president” could—with a straight face, I’m sure—remark, “Don Share represents significant change as well as continuity.” Just as Poetry Magazine represents good poetry as well as bad, I suppose. Still, maybe along about January I’ll re-up to see if Mr. Share’s editing “bears the handprint of necessity” (to steal the luminous phrase that Laurence Lieberman, I believe, once used in a review to describe W. S.Read More
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The Writin’s on the Wall
My previous couple of posts may paint me as a stick-in-the-mud, an opponent of “innovation,” a reactionary sonneteer or lover of Tradition (cue Tevye). No. There is a dimension of the avant-garde I enjoy and admire (the two responses need not align, but it’s best if they do), and I believe one of the best spokesman for this dimension these days is Kent Johnson. I bring Kent up merely to direct Perpetual Birders to his Chicago Review takedown of Marjorie Perloff’s “Avant-Garde Poetics” section in the latest edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.Read More
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W. S. Merwin on Being Sure
W. S. Merwin (top) & John Berryman Berryman by W. S.Read More
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Friday Notebook 10.21.11
Merwin, Wright (Charles), Rengetsu, Issa, and … Hutchison? Thanks to Don Wentworth for letting my Earth-Boat into his harbor…. * * * I’ve been on a vacation from verse, it seems—stymied in my own work, disappointed in the four or five collections I’ve been eking away at for weeks (no need to name names; it may be just my mood, but is recent American poetry not withering from being over-fertilized by cleverness?). Anyway, I recently finished Lawrence Durrell’s Monsieur.Read More
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Adios, Dizzy
We’ve had to let go of our 12-year-old Dalmatian, the second of two Dals—Mingus and Dizzy (after Charles and Gillespie)—that we rescued 11 years back. Mingus we said adios to three years ago; Dizzy, younger (by how much we don’t know) and more rambunctious, moved on this morning.Read More
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My Pleasure
“Poppy Pleasure” by Minaz Jantz I’ve argued before in this space that pleasure is the primary value when it comes to reading, and especially reading poetry. It’s a pleasure, then, to find W. S. Merwin making the same point in response to a request for reading advice by interviewer Ed Rampell in the November 2010 issue of The Progressive: Yes, one important thing: Read for pleasure. Read junk. Read every kind of book. But read for pleasure. The reason the Puritans wanted to stamp out poetry was because it gave pleasure.Read More
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More on The Poem in Its Skin
I mentioned Paul Carroll’s The Poem in Its Skin in the previous post but forgot to scan the cover. So here it is. I have to scan it because it’s out of print, along with all of the books from Carroll’s Follett Books imprint, Big Table Books. Via Big Table Carroll published the fat and important anthology The Young American Poets (1968), as well as the first collection of W. S.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. 
