tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363592192009-11-14T17:39:33.399-07:00Ruminations, intimations, protestations, proclamationsJoseph Hutchisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05678841372682695630noreply@blogger.comBlogger447125perpetualbirdhttp://feedburner.google.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36359219.post-53245907363639283042009-11-14T14:00:00.007-07:002009-11-14T17:39:33.410-07:002009-11-14T17:39:33.410-07:00

By email Annie Wyndham (see her blog here) sent me this link—another instance of serendipity, this time spinning out from my previous post about Talking Gourd South. Asemic writing! Who knew...? Henri Michaux, Narration (excerpt), 1927 UPDATE: Don't miss the link in William Michaelian's comment below. The typically invisible connections keep on surfacing! Are we getting glimpses of a

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Al Filreis recently posted a quotation from George Hartley's book Textual Politics and the Language Poets. He also posted a link to a larger excerpt from that book, which is one of the most illuminating pieces I've seen on the subject. In the excerpt, Hartley explains that Language poets are united by their "rejection of the dominant model for poetic production and reception today—the so-called

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Please Join Us for Talking Gourd South First Annual Winter Gourd || February 18 – 25, 2010 At Simple Choice Farm in San Miguel de Allende, GTO, Mexico Hosted by Poets Art Goodtimes and Judyth Hill Talking Gourd is a Bardic, Eco-Arts, nomadic Community begun 25 years ago  in the mountains of Telluride, Colorado, to honor the teaching of  Dolores La Chapelle, Deep ecologist, Activist and doyenne

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In the Fall 2009 issue of American Poet, I came across an ad for Donald Revell's new collection The Bitter Withy. The ad quotes TIME magazine's praise of Don: "It takes guts to write more poems about peace, war, God and children." Now, I admire Don's poetry but have to wonder about the times we live in when TIME can call it gutsy to write about such topics. I would argue it's gutless not to write

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A couple of weeks ago I was visiting family in Eugene, Oregon, a small city with several excellent used book stores. In my favorite store, Tsunami Books, I picked up Linda Hamalian's A Life of Kenneth Rexroth for a mere six bucks. The picture she paints of Rexroth isn't pretty—a tale of paranoia, sexist behavior, personal violence, egotism; serial infidelity on the one hand and pie-eyed

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Joseph Duermer has a thoughtful Plumbline School post that draws on a quotation from Gaston Bachelard. It hit me with the force of revelation, though there's nothing new in its core idea—that "the true poem awakens the unconquerable desire to reread." What this means, of course, is that poetry in this country doesn't suffer from a lack of readers but a lack of re-readers. And why? Maybe it has to

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Here's a fascinating radio interview with poet Dave Mason on transforming his verse novel Ludlow into an opera. Enjoy!

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Herewith the reason I finally had to learn how to pronounce "Wittgenstein" (see my previous post). THOUGHT POLICE                    for Murray Moulding As the critic drove, caught up in unpacking a scrap of verse (did it, in fact, allude to Wittgenstein?), he missed the light's turn and so never caught sight of the city bus hustling to its next stop. Now the jaunty firemen jabber as they scrape

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As someone who once told his high school college counselor that he wanted to major in English because, in part, "I've always been good at 'a sage,'" (by which I meant "usage"), I'm alerting those with a similar pronunciational affliction to the existence of a new and expanding resource: a site called inogolo.com. It was here that I recently discovered exactly how to pronounce Ludwig Wittgenstein

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Anselm Berrigan has two Harriet posts (here and here) that present a letter from his late stepfather, the British poet and novelist Douglas Oliver. The letter nutshells Oliver's analysis of the profound relationship between prosody and voicing in poetry and how that relationship affects each reader's understanding of a given poem. I had attempted to get at something like this many years ago in

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Thanks to Aleks at New Times Arrived for posting this amazing video.

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Kenny Goldsmith takes on Al Filreis here. No contest. Note that Goldsmith makes each of his students buy a paper from a term paper mill and "present it as their final project as if they wrote it themselves." Is that post-avant, avant—or just stupid? In the end, Al throws the match and praises Goldsmith for "rigorous uncreativity." Now there's desperation....

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I've tried off and on for years to enjoy Alice Notley's poetry. (It comes highly recommended by poets I admire—Rae Armantrout, Andrei Codrescu, Anne Waldman and others. I've tried to find it interesting on a basic level and I've looked for reasons to think it profound. In fact, I snapped up a copy of her Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2005 in the hope that an extensive but

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I've lifted a few quotables by Ezra Pound from Donald Hall's Paris Review interview with him, published in 1962 but linked a few days back by Al Filreis: [In response to Hall's question about how Pound would plan a new canto. "Do you follow a special course of reading for each one?"] One isn't necessarily reading. One is working on the life vouchsafed, I should think. I don't know about method.

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I was out of town and coming down with H1N1 when Annie Wyndham alerted me to the appearance of my poem "Mortality" on her new poetry blog, Salamander Cove (scroll down to her 10/29 post), so I failed to note her kindness in placing it there among so many other find poems. Thanks, Annie!

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Two new pieces of mine, a poem and a prose poem, appear in the beautifully designed second issue of Cerise Press (see here and here). Thanks so much to the editors—Fiona, Sally and Karen—for letting me appear in such fine company.

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Please don't miss this delicious response by Vassilis Zambaras to my previous post.

Joseph Hutchisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05678841372682695630noreply@blogger.com0http://perpetualbird.blogspot.com/2009/10/school-of-queeritude-if-you-have-to-ask.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36359219.post-36247358753011924612009-10-29T09:07:00.005-06:002009-10-30T09:49:38.944-06:002009-10-30T09:49:38.944-06:00

If you've ever wondered what goes on in one of Kenny Goldsmith's classes, here's a glimpse.* This is what passes for profundity among the avant-garde, and evidently Goldsmith is successfully conning his students into his quasi-mystical faith in "the artistic significance and process of transcription." I see the attraction. Transcription is so much less demanding than creation. _______________ *

Joseph Hutchisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05678841372682695630noreply@blogger.com3http://perpetualbird.blogspot.com/2009/10/going-to-school-with-kenny-g.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36359219.post-41492846959253565282009-10-21T15:00:00.001-06:002009-10-28T11:24:17.067-06:002009-10-28T11:24:17.067-06:00

"There is an anonymous level of all lives where we are nothing but narrative." — A. S. Byatt

Joseph Hutchisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05678841372682695630noreply@blogger.com0http://perpetualbird.blogspot.com/2009/10/anon.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36359219.post-62731280776285197822009-10-21T10:30:00.000-06:002009-10-21T10:30:00.616-06:002009-10-21T10:30:00.616-06:00

There are many strong poems in the Fall 2009 issue of Poetry Northwest (New Series, Issue 8)—excellent new work by Talvikki Ansel, Christian Wiman, and D.A. Powell—with only one really dreadful clinker (William Logan's "Blues," a cringe-worthy black-face performance). But one poem in particular drew me back and back through its lines: "One Love," by Kenneth Fields. It so bowled me over that I

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My friend and fellow poet Jim Keller (not this, much better known, Jim Keller) introduced me to this beautiful talk by Benjamin Zander—just one of many amazing presentations and programs on Ted, a site devoted to "ideas worth spreading." Zander's ideas concern classical music, but much of what he says—especially his insight into the connection between the structures of music and the emotional

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Writers Studio is pleased to present Thursday Evening Workshops and a Reading on October 29, 2009, with two esteemed Colorado writers, Poet Jared Smith and Poet/Playwright/Writer Rita Brady Kiefer.
 The events take place on the Arapahoe Community College campus in the Half Moon event center in the Main ACC Building. Workshops begin at 5:30 p.m., and readings begin at 7:30 p.m. Please note that

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Thanks to Lynn Behrendt for posting my first contribution to the Annandale Dream Gazette. The Gazette, a "poets' blog of dreams," is one of the most fascinating projects on the Web. Take a trip down the list of Dreamers and you'll find an impressive variety of dreamers and frequency of dreams—with William Michaelian entering the Guinness Book of Dream Records with 52 contributions.

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I stole the idea for this from the indefatigable John Latta and offer my own version of it here because I thought his set-up was too offhand.A traveler who prides himself on making "local discoveries" is touring Australia and happens to stop for breakfast in a dusty Queensland backwater by the name of Murcie. The café is small but crowded—a good omen, he tells himself—so he takes a stool at the

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This time-lapse video of Seamus Berkeley creating a portrait of Ashley might teach poets a good deal about the writing process.Seamus and I were involved in a project that surfaced last October at The Rane Gallery in Taos (see the second event mentioned here). The event was called "Interwoven Illuminations," and it involved poets writing in response to works of art, with artists in turn creating

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