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Earnings Report
In the comment stream related to a piquant entry on his blog, William Michaelian made this observation: “By and large, it seems we earn a readership that mirrors our own strengths and shortcomings.” Turn that one over a few times! There’s wisdom in it. I added a reaction to the comment stream there, and thought it might be worth expanding a bit here. What I thought is that the reverse may be true as well—that the writers we value mirror our own strengths and shortcomings.Read More
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Veterans Day
Not a war or anti-war poem, but one that argues for a habit of mind that could make war less likely. A Ritual To Read To Each Otherby William Stafford If you don’t know the kind of person I amand I don’t know the kind of person you area pattern that others made may prevail in the worldand following the wrong god home we may miss our star. For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,a shrug that lets the fragile sequence breaksending with shouts the horrible errors of childhoodstorming out to play through the broken dyke.Read More
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Whose Side Are You On?
I side with those, like the Irish poet Sinéad Morrissey, who prefer Collecteds to Selecteds. (See my earlier post for Morrissey’s poem on the subject.) But what if there’s no Collected? Such beasts are typically posthumous affairs and take years to assemble, which seems to be the case for William Stafford. But one of the pleasures to be had from a Collected edition—instances of early poems written during a poet’s formative years—are at least available now in Stafford’s case.Read More
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Silly Man II
Ron Silliman’s latest musing on trivia dressed up as poetry uses the idea of narrative to add William Stafford to his enemies list, the so-called “School of Quietude.” Silliman attacks Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark” as a “high point of American kitsch” that “uses plot to set up the arch-silliness” of the poem’s penultimate line, which according to Silliman is “a perfect instance of feigned & posed seriousness & just possibly the single most pompous line ever written.” Okay. He dislikes Stafford’s poem, as any reader is entitled to do.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. 
