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James Wright: A Life in Poetry
I just finished Jonathan Blunk‘s powerfully moving biography, James Wright: A Life in Poetry. It is everything a great biography should be: a delicate balance between passing time and the abiding genius that seems to irrupt from a region outside of time. Given his family background, Wright was a person who should never have fallen in love with language, but thanks to some sensitive and insightful early teachers, he did, and so we have the opportunity when we read him to fall in love with it in poem after poem.Read More
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Ted Kooser: A Sampler
It’s been my privilege to be a steady if not close friend of Ted Kooser for many years, ever since he first accepted some of my work for publication in his sorely missed journal The New Salt Creek Reader. I’ve eagerly snapped up each of his books and think of him now as more of a companion than a writer. I think that’s because he makes me, a thousands more like me, feel that he’s speaking to me—not to a bust of Shakespeare or a 3-D printing/sculpture of Ashbery, but to me as a fellow human being.Read More
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David Giannini: An Interview (Part Two)
[Today’s post concludes my interview with David Giannini. Jump back to Part One for a brief introduction and a substantial bio-/bibliography of the poet.] * * * TPB: Given your inclination toward the poetic sequence and the mixing of verse and prose, do you see yourself as part of the Modernist project? Not to apply labels or anything. Just curious about how you see yourself within “the tribe” that Eliot spoke of….Read More
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David Giannini: An Interview (Part One)
I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting David Giannini face to face. We “met” a couple or three years back via this blog, when he emailed me a comment about some post or other, and I replied Our emails have continued to this day, sometimes in flurries, sometimes sporadically. From the beginning I was impressed by his intelligence, his wit, his commitment to poetry, and his generosity of spirit. As I’ve read his books one after another, I’ve also been impressed by his accomplishment.Read More
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Stupid Stupid Shakespeare
Remember the children’s books about a family named the Stupids? Evidently one of their descendants has landed a blogging gig at Harriet—a fellow we’ve met before: K. Silem Mohammad. His latest post is hard to beat for sheer stupidity. The irony, of course, is that our blogger resorts to actual compositional writing in order to praise a book called Words of Love for being “beyond the usual condition of appropriational recycledness”—a book, that is, of surpassing stupidity.Read More
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Adios, Evan S. Connell
Evan S. Connell The death of Evan S. Connell hasn’t received much comment. The obituaries I’ve read (such as here, here and here) all seem to be drawn from an ur-version of obscure provenance. It’s easy to recite the outward details of a writer’s life, of course—birth and death dates, years of publication, special successes and awards. But at the center of all the facts stands the work, as rich as any produced in the past 60 years, and a man who never cared to write a tell-all or even comment much on his work.Read More
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Friday Notebook 10.28.11
I’m turning over the first of my notebook entries today to a rant—a brief one—in response to this article by Stephen Marche. The author uses Roland Emmerich‘s film “Anonymous” (which I haven’t seen) to attack what is known as the Oxfordian view of Shakespeare: in a nutshell, the notion that the plays were written not by the man from Stratford but by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. I have written about this here before, so my views on the matter are clear.Read More
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Doubt About Will
Two traditionalist Perpetual Birders (yes, Chris and Conrad, this means you) have posted thoughtful comments on my previous post about the Shakespeare authorship controversy. Everyone with an interest in the subject should follow their links and compare the extent and quality of their evidence with the evidence for Edward de Vere (the 17th Earl of Oxford) as the true author the works we know as Shakespeare’s (links here). In the meantime, here’s a statement in favor of something quite simple: doubt.Read More
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Vowels and Consonants and Breath (Oh My)
Rishidev Chaudhuri takes a revealing “Ramble Through Vowels and Consonants,” and his discoveries are worth every poet’s time to read. I’m especially taken with the observation that vowels are formed by shaping airflow, while consonants are formed by restricting or interrupting airflow. These physical actions have emotional dimensions; I don’t mean rigid correspondences, but somewhat fluid relationships. We don’t grieve in consonants (Lear: “No, no, no, no! Come on, let’s go to prison”), and we don’t express anger in vowels (Malcolm to Macduff: “Let grief / Convert to anger; blunt not the heart, enrage it”).Read More
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Nothing Is Truer than Truth (UPDATE)
Regarding my earlier post regarding the documentary film-in-progress on the subject of the real person who wrote under the pseudonym of “Shakespeare” … I just received this happy news: “Shakespeare” and Edward de Vere Dear friends: As a postscript to the last email Bulletin, I would like to extend a note of thanks to the 84 donors (and counting!) to the “Shakespeare” By Another Name-inspired documentary (Shakespeare in Venice: Nothing Is Truer Than Truth). As of 12:20 p.m.Read More
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2018, has published 17 books, including a translation of flash fictions by Mexican author Miguel Lupián, and co-edited two anthologies. He lives in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. He teaches at the University of Denver's University College, where he currently directs two programs: Arts & Culture and Global Affairs. 
