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Exciting News about Under Sleep’s New Moon
Thanks to the judges at the Colorado Authors League for choosing Under Sleep’s New Moon for the 2022 Book Award for poetry. Very exciting! And more than a little surprising, given the puzzlement some folks have registered upon reading the title. More than one person has asked me a simple question: “What does it mean?”—my somewhat mysterious title. I get it.Read More
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A Backward Glance O’er National Poetry Month
Phantom in the early 1800s poets walked for days talking to each other pouring significance into the names of what they say lake sky nightingale mountain forest grasses darkness ether gold sea saying them now I sense natural power and how it must have felt to place them so exactly a spell that worked now they hardly mean anything or too much one word always quietly resisted light on water it just reflected everything that tried to make it more than what it was it hasn’t really changed since it was said by the Greeks and even now when it’s…Read More
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Adventures in Reading 2019
2019 was a challenging year—deaths, health scares, creative dysfunction—but as ever, reading sustained me. I finally read Juan Rulfo‘s classic Pedro Páramo—one of those books that makes me wonder why I waited so long. It’s a visceral, phantasmagorical novel with all the psychic force of Greek tragedy. I knew that it is widely considered the first fully-realized instance of magical realism, and I can see how unlikely it would be for us to have One Hundred Years of Solitude without Rulfo’s influence.Read More
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Nothing Is Truer than Truth
More than fifteen years ago I became convinced that the man named William Shakspere, resident of Stratford-upon-Avon and identified since the mid-18th century as the author William Shakespeare, was not, in fact, the author of the plays and poems. (See a select bibliography at the end of this post.) Then, about a decade ago, I discovered that a movie about the real author—Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford—was in the works.Read More
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Whitman in Conversation
I recently read Walt Whitman Speaks: His Final Thoughts on Life, Writing, Spirituality, and the Promise of America. As the editor, Brenda Wineapple, writes in her introduction that Whitman’s friend Horace Traubel visited Walt Whitman nearly every day in the poet’s two-story row house at 328 Mickle Street, Camden, New Jersey, beginning in March 1888, when Whitman was 69. As a bank clerk, Traubel was proficient in shorthand.Read More
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On Carol Bass’s Ripple Effect
Order directly from the publisher or from Amazon. I am blown away. Flummoxed. Exalted! There is a new brilliantaceous star atop my publishing tree this Christmas, thanks to editor, artist, and poet Carol Bass.Read More
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Poetry Voice Interview with Moi (and Other Goodies)
When Uche Ogbuji sent me the links to his and Kierstin Bridger‘s latest Poetry Voice podcast (Episode 9 of their series), I have to admit feeling a bit leery about listening to it because it includes an interview the dynamic duo did with me after a reading at BookBar, which featured Kierstin herself and Beth Paulson. Since I default to blather when in conversation, I worried that the interview would be embarrassing in one way or another: inarticulate, crammed with inaccuracies, etc.Read More
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Walt Whitman, Novelist
Readers who picked up The New York Times on March 13, 1852, might have seen a small advertisement on Page 3 for a serial tale set to begin the next day in a rival newspaper. “A RICH REVELATION,” the ad began, teasing a rollicking story touching on “the Manners and Morals of Boarding Houses, some Scenes from Church History, Operations in Wall-st.,” and “graphic Sketches of Men and Women” (presented, fear not, with “explanations necessary to properly understand what it is all about”). It was a less than tantalizing brew, perhaps.Read More
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Wassailing with Walt
ORDER SIGNED COPIES BY DECEMBER 15and receive free U.S.Read More
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WaPo Intern Pokes Poetry, Concludes It Is No Longer Living
On her aptly titled ComPost blog, Harvard grad and erstwhile pundit/humorist Alexandra Petri uses Richard Blanco as a footstool (much as Marlowe‘s Tamburlaine did the Emperor of the Turks) and from that elevation declaims her negative opinion of American poetry.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. 
