The first chickadees have returned from their alpine summer range in the High Peaks to our foorhills. For the last several days I’ve been watching one of them, who sits on the powerline that runs from the road to the house, flitting methodically between this steady perch & the small blue berries of the dogwood that grows outside my study window. He’s such a tough little bugger.
Monthly Archives: October 2008
Two Collages
Joseph Hutchinson Recalls Discovering Hayden Carruth
I found Carruth’s For You & From Snow and Rock, From Chaos in a used book store in Seattle in 1974 & read & reread it while sitting in the projection booth of the Apple Theater on Boren Street showing dirty movies to the down & out. I had recognized his name because I head the anthology he had edited, The Voice that is Great Within Us, but no one had ever talked about him in any poetry class I’d ever taken & I’d taken a few. In many ways, Carruth’s work educated me as a poet. It remains central & indispensable to me.
Hutchinson says much of what I would say about Carruth. I was surprised to see that we had both come from Blake’s poems to our modern master. Also, it has been Carruth’s existentialism that hs kept me coming back to him. People look at you funny — I know — if you tell them you’re an existentialist, but that’s what I am. Carruth’s humanity & that his poetry emerged fiercely from love have struck me all over again as I have read through the volume of longer poems over the last few months.
Language and the Truth
I’m sort of old-fashioned in that I tell my creative writing students that they have a responsibility to the truth of their own experience and that the way they use language reveals the extent to which they have taken that responsibility seriously. Listening to Sarah Palin reminds me of nothing so much as listening to an unprepared & incurious freshman discussing the reading for the day. After listening to Palin for a while, I feel stupider than when I began. In recent days I have found that immediately after listening to Palin, reading a big chunk of Beckett or Chekov is the best antidote. See also: The poetry of Sarah Palin — not since rumsfeld have we had such a master.
Veep Debate
Just watched the debate. Sarah Palin is the Readers digest Condensed version of a vice-presidential candidate. She leaves out all the hard words.