May 2015
I was born in Denver, Colorado, on the westernmost edge of the Great Plains, and I’ve always responded to and aspired to a quality in poetry that I can only call “clarity.” Not that I’m interested in clarity at the expense of honest complexity; after all, light is not always benign: it blinds as often as it reveals, as anyone who’s grown up in my part of the world would know. That duality fascinates me and continues to shape my work. I’ve published 15 collections of poems over the years, most recently Marked Men, Thread of the Real, and The Earth-Boat, and in September 2014 Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper appointed me to a four-year term as Colorado Poet Laureate. I teach for the University of Denver’s University College, where I also direct two graduate degree programs, and live with my wife Melody in the foothills southwest of Denver.
A t W i l l a m e t t e N a t i o n a l C e m e t e r y
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— for my father —
The symmetry of this cemetery— even in death the warriors strictly formationed, at supine attention. Grey granite plaques flat in the drenched grass. At first I thought, You deserve something upright—something marble, the faint rose of just-dawn over the tarnished waves you sailed in what others called “The Good War.” You cared nothing for monuments, though; never (as I remember) used the word heroic for anything you or anyone did back then. It was just unjust necessity that earned you this plot, this plaque, this little flag stuck in the sod a few days each year. Is that why you chose this place? Preferring to have your name carved on flat grey stone, anchored in a slope of neatly mown grass—preferring to any standing slab the monumentally self-effacing whisper of this rainy late-May mist. |
©2015 Joseph Hutchison