Well, yeah, it is sort of ridiculously ridiculous to rate from 1 – 12 a batch of books published over a wide range of years and in genres as varied as stories in translation, poetry, history, historical fiction, travel writing, biography, and autobiography. But it works for me! I have been posting these always-eclectic annual top books read lists for Madam Mayo blog since 2006. Aside from serving as a reading diary for myself, it is my gift to you, dear writerly reader: If you are not familiar with any given book on this list, should it appeal to you to try it, may you find it as wondrously enriching a read as I did.
(1) The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams By Jove and by Jupiter, whyever did I not read this sooner?! Every chapter a chocolate truffle, The Education of Henry Adams is a fundamental text for comprehending the culture and overall development of the United States.
P.S. Michael Lindgrin has more to say about ye tome, “this strange and beautiful journey of a book,” over at The Millions.
Reading Cather is a joy. Both of these Cather novels are well-deserved American literary classics. Over the past couple of years I have been turtling my way through Cather’s oeuvre. So far: The Professor’s House (top books read list for 2017) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (top books read list for 2018).
“You don’t need to take a book off the shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen.”
(4) Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell I read this novel only because my book club picked it– lucky me. It’s wickedly funny, and, curiously, and most elegantly, written in crots. (I was unaware of Connell’s work when I wrote one of my own early short stories, also in crots, also published in the Paris Review. Well, howdy there, Mr. C! If you were still alive it sure would be fun to talk to you about crots!)
P.S. See Gerald Shapiro’s profile of Evan S. Connell in Ploughshares.
(5)Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu by Ted Anton Yet another work I wish I had read years earlier. Culiano was the author of Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. His life ended early, and not well, alas. I never met Culiano but I was at University of Chicago for several years just before he arrived, so I knew the super-charged intellectual ambiance well– and I think Anton captures it quite accurately. Recently occultist John Michael Greer has been making noises about Culiano’s understanding of cacomagic, and this the unnamed subject of Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, which is what prompted me to finally pick up this biography, which had been long languishing in my “to read” pile. (If you’re a metaphysics nerd and cacomagic is what you’re interested in specifically, however, Anton’s biography, otherwise excellent, will disappoint.)
(6) Tie:
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West by Wallace Stegner Stegner is always a rare pleasure to read. I came away with immense admiration for John Wesley Powell’s many and visionary achievements. And the whole problem of water in the West thing!! Obvious as that may be, but I grew up in the West and it was not so obvious to me, nor to most people I knew at the time, and this book goes a long way towards explaining why. (Illuminating indeed to pair this work with a Cather novel… see above…)
A Desert Harvest by Bruce Berger This splendid anthology collects selected essays from Bruce Berger’s masterwork of a desert trilogy, The Telling Distance, Almost an Island, and There Was a River. P.S. Read my Q & A with Bruce Berger here.
The Western Paradox by Benard DeVoto Edited by David Brinkley and Patricia Nelson Limerick with a foreword by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Crunchy! (I still have all my teeth, though!)
(7) Tie:
Lone Star Mind by Ty Cashion Professor Cashion articulates the kooky contradictions and tectonic shifts in both popular and academic versions of Texas history. A landmark work in Texas historiography.
Giant: Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Edna Ferber, and the Making of a Legendary American Film by Don Graham I will be writing about this work at some length in my book on Far West Texas. At first glance, for the splashy photos of the stars on its cover, it might appear to be the usual intellectually nutritious-as-a-Ding Dong film history book. But no! Graham knew Texas like almost no one else, and for Texas, Giant, based on the novel by Edna Ferber, was a film of profound cultural importance.
(13) The Chrysalids by John Wyndham I’m not a fan of sci-fi novels; I read this one about post-nuclear apocalypse Canada only because my book club chose it. I found it to be a page-turner with splendid prose throughout (although I did some eyerolling at the end when it did get a little “inner most cave-y” and “Deus-ex-Machine-y”). I can appreciate why it remains in print, and beloved by many, more than six decades after it was first published in 1955.
P.S. I can also warmly recommend the books by authors featured in my monthly Q & As.
One of the blogs I’ve been following for a good long time is poet Joseph Hutchison’s The Perpetual Bird. We have never met in person but I feel as if we have; moreover, we have friends in common, among them, poet, essayist and translator Patricia Dubrava– and if my memory serves, it was her blog, Holding the Light, that first sent me to The Perpetual Bird. Here on my desk I have Hutchison’s collection of his works of several decades,The World As Is. From publisher NYQ Books’ catalog copy:
“In The World As Is Colorado Poet Laureate Joseph Hutchison gives voice to pain and passion, sorrow and joy, longing and exhalation. His poems seem to result from a wrestling with angels–the angels of transformation we all must confront to survive what Robert Penn Warren called ‘this century, and moment, of mania.'”
From The World As Is (originally in The Rain at Midnight), posted here by permission of the author.
THE BLUE by Joseph Hutchison
In memory of Michael Nigg, April 28, 1969 – September 8, 1995
The dream refused me his face. There was only Mike, turned away; damp tendrils of hair curled out from under the ribbed, rolled brim of a knit ski cap. He’s hiding
the wound, I thought, and my heart shrank. Then Mike began to talk— to me, it seemed, though gazing off at a distant, sunstruck stand of aspen that blazed against a ragged wall
of pines. His voice flowed like sweet smoke, or amber Irish whiskey; or better: a brook littered with colors torn out of autumn. The syllables swept by on the surface of his voice—
so many, so swift, I couldn’t catch their meanings … yet struggled not to interrupt, not to ask or plead— as though distress would be exactly the wrong emotion. Then a wind
gusted into the aspen grove, turned its yellows to a blizzard of sparks. When the first breath of it touched us, Mike fell silent. Then he stood. I felt the dream letting go, and called,
“Don’t!” Mike flung out his arms, shouted an answer … and each word shimmered like a hammered bell. (Too soon the dream would take back all but their resonance.) The wind
surged. Then Mike leaned into it, slipped away like a wavering flame. And all at once I noticed the sky: its sheer, light-scoured immensity; the lavish tenderness of its blue.
C.M. MAYO: You have been the Poet Laureate of Colorado from 2014. What does that mean, and what does that involve? (And how do you look back on that experience now?)
JOSEPH HUTCHISON: As I write this, I’m nearing the end of my Laureate term. It’s officially a 4-year term but mine was extended by a year to bring the selection of the next Laureate in line with Colorado’s political calendar. The PL is chosen by the Governor, and the organizations that administer the program—Colorado Humanities and Colorado Creative Industries—wanted to be sure the new Governor would have that opportunity.
Being selected was a great honor, of course, especially because it was John Hickenlooper who made the choice. He’s a real reader, an English major who started out with the aim of becoming a writer but decided early on that it wasn’t for him. Writing creatively, after all, is more of a calling than an occupation for most of us. If you’re not obsessed, what would be the point?
The best aspect of serving as the state Laureate has been traveling around the state and meeting lots of poets and poetry readers in communities large and small. I was born in Denver, which sits on the eastern plains at the foot of what we call “the Front Range”: 300 miles of the Rocky Mountains stretching from southeastern Wyoming to more-or-less the New Mexico border. Nearly the poets I knew coming up were in this region. So it’s been an exhilarating experience to find so many excellent poets within and on the western side of the Front Range. There is a poetic renaissance going on across Colorado, at the community level, and I’ve gotten to witness it close up. That’s been the main privilege.
I’ve also helped to shape the Poets section of the online Colorado Encyclopedia, which I’d never have been able to do without the PL cachet. The project is looking for more funding at the moment, but in the long run I’m sure it will serve as a resource for teachers around the state. I’ve always thought that the way poetry is taught often ruins it for young readers. It’s seldom taught the way fiction is taught—as a source of knowledge with deep roots in the human psyche; instead, it’s used as an instrument to teach about techniques: meter, rhyme, metaphor, symbolism … blah blah blah. No wonder so many people recoil from poetry once they’re out of school!
Anyway, I’m hoping the Encylopedia will help teachers connect with the poets in their own community and bring them and their work into their classes. I was 22 and in college before I saw a living poet—it happened to be Robert Bly; until then I’d been dabbling with poetry, but after that experience, after I witnessed what poetry could be, I was hooked. My fondest hope that my appearances around the state may have helped some fledgling poet discover that deeper commitment, and maybe encourage people in some community or other to honor that poet’s work when it surfaces in their midst.
C.M. MAYO: One of the things that struck me in your bio is that, although you teach in a university, you describe yourself as a community poet “using language that is at once direct and layered.” Can you talk a little about some of the poets you have taught and/or read who are not part of the academic world?
JOSEPH HUTCHISON: A quick sketch of my writing life. I started writing poetry in high school, continued in college, went on to an MFA. After grad school I floundered—too credentialed to teach in Denver area public schools (teacher glut), under-credentialed to teach full time in a college (no yen for a PhD). Wanted to be a working writer but could write only poetry, which as everyone knows pays nada. Worked in a college bookstore for a several years, buying used text books and later university press and mass market paperbacks. Got invited to apply for a writing job in a bank marketing department (7 years), then a real estate network (3 years), then a software company (2 years), then went out on my own for 2 years, then created a “boutique” marketing company with my wife which sustained us, more or less, for 22 years. All along I was writing and publishing poetry, giving readings, conducting workshops—and teaching off and on as an adjunct. It was only in 2014, just after I had turned 64, that I entered the Academy full time to direct a program in which I had taught as an adjunct once or twice a year for more than a decade.
My point is that I never been an “academic” poet and never written what I think of as academic poetry. To be honest, I’m not sure what academic poetry is, though—like pornography—I feel like I know it when I see it! Essentially, I think of it as poetry written for graduate students, which speaks to the concerns of graduate students: their fascination with “schools” and the recondite reaches of aesthetic theory. In The Satire Lounge I wrote a poem lampooning this kind of stuff, and not just for fun.
The fact that the audience for poetry seems to be growing is a testament to the resurgence of poets who reach beyond schools and theories to address readers where they live. The poets of Merwin’s generation did this—think of Levertov and Rich, Kinnell and Wright and Bly*—and I think we’re seeing a return (with differences, of course) to this kind of poetry.
I have so many poets in mind that it’s probably best just to list some of them, including a few from my own generation: Ted Kooser, Louise Glück, Kay Ryan, Li-Young Lee, Bill Knott, Yusef Komunyakaa, Mark Irwin, Jared Smith, Carl Phillips, Ada Limón, Terence Hayes, Wayne Miller, Ilya Kaminsky, Tracy K. Smith, Wendy Videlock, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer….
This is kind of silly, now that I think of it. These are just some of my personal favorites. And who knows if they’d all get along if put in the same room together!
C.M. MAYO: How might you describe the ideal reader for your poems and, in particular, for your collection of new and selected poems 1972-2015, The World As Is?
JOSEPH HUTCHISON: Someone capable of being moved emotionally and intellectually by language that aims to express those moments with the inner world and the outer world meet.
C.M. MAYO: Can you talk about which poets have been the most important influences for you as a poet and writer—and which ones you are reading now?
JOSEPH HUTCHISON: Honestly, my earliest poetic influences were Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Joni Mitchell—I took up guitar but discovered I had little talent for it.
On the more formal side, I would have to say, in poetry and in no particular order: T. S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, William Blake, Robert Browning, Robert Bly, W. S. Merwin (both his own poems and his translations), Galway Kinnell, Denise Levertov, James Wright, Theodore Roethke, Rilke, Tranströmer, Neruda, Paz, Miłosz, Cavafy, Seferis, Zbigniew Herbert, Zagajewski, Szymborska.
In literature broadly speaking: Hemingway, Fowles, Márquez, Dürrenmatt, Cortázar (the short stories), Raymond Carver, Joseph Campbell, David Loy.
C.M. MAYO: What is the best, most important piece of advice you would give to a poet who is just starting to look to publish in magazines and perhaps publish a first book?
JOSEPH HUTCHISON: Consider your own reading passions among your contemporaries and the generation just prior. Pick maybe 10 whose aesthetic ballpark you feel you’re playing in yourself. Then look at their Acknowledgments pages and see where they’ve published. Track down those publications and see if they make sense for you. Then submit.Submit over and over. When a batch of poems bounces back (this willhappen), read them over, make any changes that have become obvious in their time on the road, then send the batch out again. Do this over and over and journal publication will almost certainly come your way.
I have no good advice for book publication. I despise contests, though I’ve entered them a few times and had a manuscript picked up only once. My other books have come about via query letters or by invitation from a publisher who saw my work in a journal or anthology.
I do recommend that you create a blog. I believe I would never have become PL without The Perpetual Bird, the blog I started in 2008. Since becoming PL, I haven’t kept up with it the way I should, and it’s one of the things I look forward to getting back to!
From The World As Is (originally in House of Mirrors), posted here by permission of the author.
CITY LIMITS by Joseph Hutchison
For Melody
You’re like wildwood at the edge of a city. And I’m the city: steam, sirens, a jumble of lit and unlit windows in the night.
You’re the land as it must have been and will be—before me, after me. It’s your natural openness I want to enfold me. But then you’d become city; or you’d hide away your wildness to save it.
So I stay within limits—city limits, heart limits. Although, under everything, I have felt unlimited Earth Unlimited you
“I do recommend that you create a blog. I believe I would never have become PL [Poet Laureate] without The Perpetual Bird, the blog I started in 2008.”
C.M. MAYO: If a reader who knew nothing of your work were to read only one poem of yours, which would you suggest, and why?
JOSEPH HUTCHISON: This is a tough one! I have personal favorites but have no idea what any given reader might think of them. Off the top of my head, I’d suggest “Touch,” from The World As Is. It’s a sestina, the only successful one I’ve ever written, and speaks on multiple levels to the political and cultural moment we’re in and have been in for a good two decades, if not longer. It’s one that audiences at readings always respond to, which is one indication that it may be worth reading on the page.
C.M. MAYO: You have been a consistently and remarkably productive poet and writer for many years. How has the Digital Revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
JOSEPH HUTCHISON: I wouldn’t say I’ve been consistently productive. I don’t have a writing routine, but when a poem does rear its Hyacinthine head, I become obsessive—preoccupied, distracted—and I pretty much stop answering emails. I have my blog set up so that my posts automatically flow through to a few social media sites, but I don’t generally visit those sites myself, even less so now that I’ve turned off notifications. Unfortunately, I follow numerous sites for political and poetical news, so that when a poem’s finished, I have to wade through days of unread articles. Overall, I’d say that I don’t feel much of a stake in social media, which is generally antisocial and trivializing. I don’t consider it a writerly medium.
“I don’t feel much of a stake in social media, which is generally antisocial and trivializing. I don’t consider it a writerly medium.”
From The World As Is (originally in The Earth-Boat), posted here by permission of the author.
GUANÁBANA by Joseph Hutchison
After Hurricane Gilbert, this place was only shredded jungle. Now it’s Jesús and Lídia’s casa,
built by him, by hand, weekends and vacations, the way my father built our first house. Years
we’ve watched the house expand, two rooms to three, to four, to five. The yard, just a patch of gouged
sand and shattered palmettos once, is covered now in trimmed grass, bordered by blushing frangipani
and pepper plants—jalapeños, habaneros—and this slender tree Jesús planted three years back,
a stick with tentative leaves then out of a Yuban coffee can, but now thirty feet high, its branches laden
with guanábana—dark green pear-shaped fruit with spiky skin and snowy flesh, with seeds
like obsidian tears. Jesús carves out a bite and offers it on the flat of his big knife’s blade:
the texture’s melonish, the taste wild and sweet—like the lives we build after hurricanes.
C.M. MAYO: And another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?
JOSEPH HUTCHISON: I still work on paper. I write by hand, with different pens (ballpoint or felt tip, in various colors, depending on my mood), scribbling in notebooks—I sometimes have trouble reading my own writing—and get a poem pretty far along before I type it into Word; even then, I print out each draft and scribble in the margins, draw arrows, question marks, exclamation points, notes-to-self (“Look this up,” “Feels like a quote,” “Weak…,” “Expand…,” etc.): a physical dialogue with the page. I have tried off and on to write on screen but have never succeeded. I read every line aloud as I’m revising (I do this with most prose, too), which is why I end up revising in different locations: I move to wherever my muttering won’t bother my wife. So yes, paper is necessary. When I think of a great poet like A. R. Ammons composing on a typewriter, I confess to feeling baffled.
C.M. MAYO: You have recently brought out a very unusual book, the bilingual Ojos del Crow / Eyes of the Cuervo. Can you talk about this a bit, and what prompted you to write it?
JOSEPH HUTCHISON: This is a bit of a long story.
To celebrate our first wedding anniversary, my wife Melody and I went to a beautiful, small seaside resort on the Caribbean coast of Yucatán called Capitán Lafitte, situated between Puerto Morelos and Playa del Carmen. We fell in love with it and started going back every year around our anniversary.
A few years into that routine, our business ran into some problems and we figured we’d have to forgo our annual trip. But Melody came up with the idea of doing a yoga retreat, which she called Yoga Fiesta. This venture essentially paid for our vacation.
When Capitán was severely damaged two years in a row, the owners sold the property, but one of them bought a less damaged hotel a couple of kilometers south, restored it, and opened up the following year as Petit Lafitte. All of our friends from Capitán came back to work at Petit, and Melody moved Yoga Fiesta there as well. (This April will be the 15thannual Yoga Fiesta!) Anyway, the two Lafittes have been inspirational for me, in terms of the natural beauty of that coast, the richness of Mayan culture, and the many friendships that we’ve enjoyed there.
Over the years, I’ve written many poems about the place and the people, and in 2012 a wonderful small press called Folded Word published a selection of these Mexico poems in a book called The Earth-Boat.
A few years later, Patricia Herminia, a former student and good friend of mine, who had been living in San Miguel de Allende and working as a professional translator, moved back to Colorado. She’d seen a copy of The Earth-Boat and wanted to translate the poems into Spanish. I revised a few of the poems and added a few more from my stash, then Patricia and I spent several months off and on bringing them over into Spanish. Another friend, the fine artist Sabina Espinet, provided some evocative illustrations, and Eyes of the Cuervo / Ojos del Crow was born. I consider it an homage to a region that is struggling to maintain its beauty and integrity against a tidal wave North American money.
C.M. MAYO: What’s next for you as a poet and writer?
JOSEPH HUTCHISON: Over the years, as I pulled together poems for various books, I often found that I had to set aside poems that felt worthy but just didn’t fit into the arc of a particular collection. So I’ve “rescued” some of those older poems and am working to see what kind of book they make. So far, so good.
I’m also working on adapting some of my teaching materials into a small book on writing poetry. It’s always seemed to me that we try to use the vocabulary of criticism to talk about the creative process, but the terms are inadequate. Critics analyze (from the Greek root meaning “a breaking up, a loosening, releasing”), while poets synthesize (from the Greek root meaning “put together, combine”). These processes are opposed to one another, and it makes no sense to me that we should approach the creative process using the tools and concepts of criticism. On the other hand, who needs another book of this kind?
*
C.M. MAYO: I recently posted on a visit to the home/ museum of Swiss German writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt [the post is here; scroll down to the end for the part about Dürrenmatt], which was prompted by Hutchison’s recommendation, so I asked him:
Which one of Dürrenmatt’s works would you recommend an English-language reader to start with?
JOSEPH HUTCHISON: I suggest The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion, which are published together as The Inspector Barlach Mysteries. Dürrenmatt’s novels are addictive, frightening and comic by turns, as are his plays. His essays on art, literature, philosophy, politics, and the theater make exhilarating reading, too!
