April 2016
Joseph Hutchison
poetjhwriter@icloud.com
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 16 collections of poems over the years, most recently The Satire Lounge, The Earth-Boat, Marked Men, and Thread of the Real. My new book, The World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015, will be released by NYQ Books on October 1, 2016. In September 2014 Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper appointed me to a four-year term as Colorado Poet Laureate, and I teach for the University of Denver’s University College, where I direct a master's level program in Arts & Culture that includes a Creative Writing concentration. I have two children, Susannah and Brian, and live with my wife, Iyengar yoga instructor Melody Madonna, in the foothills southwest of Denver.


To Poets Who Whine about the Inadequacy of Language


If you distrust words
so much, why not
shut up? Why waste
the sacrificed flesh
of trees, or strew your
anemic traces across
our computer screens
(each pixel lit by burning
400-million-year-old
ferns and trilobites,
or butchering big rivers
with the blades of turbines)?
You’d deplete the earth
to trumpet your faithlessness? 
Why not simply learn
to paint, or play the flute,
or bow in bewitched
silence over a whirling
potter’s wheel?
Words don’t serve
because you won’t serve
them. So: Get thee hence!
And don’t let the sacred
door of the dictionary
hit you in the ass.

-from The Satire Lounge




Tinnitus


haiku writing dream:
cowflop swarmed by green-silk flies— 
seventeen of them

-from The Satire Lounge



The Poetry Wreck
                            “Not with a bang but a whimper.”
                                                                 —Old Possum

Against the delirious entropy of poetical isms,
against gigglers, Googlers, the merely backassward,
against the fatuous and the offhanded, the curled
lip delivering Sneer Poetry like standup— 
what do you propose? More Bar-Room Ballads?
More humidor sonnets? More fishnet villanelles?
Verse that warbles or rings like cathedral bells?
Get serious. Wise up! Poetry’s in the ditch.
The pulsing ambulance? Nobody cares enough
to call one—leaving you trussed, suspended
by the seat belt, contemplating your shattered
windshield, your cranked knees, your blood
like any animal’s spattered across the dash.
Your whimper’s whiskey-laced; the gentle GPS
keeps telling you you’ve reached your destination.





Schadenfreude


Stumbling on a
word misspelled
in an otherwise
fine line of verse

nestled in a new
book by a poet
I’ve admired more
than forty years,

I find myself
resisting—barely— 
the urge to jot a note
about the flaw— 

in the kindest
tones possible,
as a steadfast
friend,

of course.
©2016 Joseph Hutchison