Harriet

Katie Hartsock

A Glass Glass Factory

fourthresize2

Hi again, Harriet! By the way, I’m the media assistant here at the Poetry Foundation. I’ll be posting until the end of the summer, when I’ll leave to begin a PhD program in Comp Lit at Northwestern, where I’ll work on classical and contemporary poetry.

When I began taking poetry workshops in college and forming an inkling of what contemporary poetry was up to, one of the books that most excited me was Matthea Harvey’s Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form: not only because I loved its surreal lyric landscapes, but I was dazzled by its use of zeugma, a “yoking” (the Greek translation) of two words modified or governed by one word, although that governing word only makes logical sense with one of the two at a time. Picture a cart with oxen hitched up and pulling on both sides, and compare with how the lines break here, from the beginning of “Paint Your Steps Blue”: | CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

Kenneth Goldsmith

Flarf and Conceptual Writing in Poetry Magazine

flarf-con

An introduction to the 21st Century’s most controversial poetry movements.
From the July/August 2009 Issue of Poetry Magazine

by Kenneth Goldsmith

Start making sense. Disjunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the past one hundred years, has left the building. Subjectivity, emotion, the body, and desire, as expressed in whole units of plain English with normative syntax, has returned. But not in ways you would imagine . . .

READ THE REST HERE.

Annie Finch

Muse-Goddess: A Recessional

inanna1
For my last post as a Harriet blogger, I wanted to give a shout-out to what makes it work for me. I could say the earth, spirit, guidance, love, chi, or justice— | CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

Martin Earl

The Fish, II (following a recent post by Camille Dungy)

metsu21maidbroilingfish
Gabriel Metsu – “Maid Broiling Fish”, mid 17th century, Flemish

Gary Winogrand, one of America’s greatest street photographers, working in the tradition (or rather reworking the tradition) of Henri Cartier-Bresson, said that he was not interested in reality, per se, but what it looked like in a photograph. Camille’s passionate reading of a Bishop poem recently allowed me to make a connection I would have otherwise never made. Or at least that is what I assume, or I probably would have already made it. But, it was Camille’s picture of the poem, her version, what she highlighted and chose to include in the frame, how Bishop’s poem looked in her post that put me in mind of Padre António Vieira.

| CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

Annie Finch

A Post of Posts

I have only one day left on Harriet (though they have asked we who are leaving to keep posting occasionally, and I will look forward to that). I’ve been rationing posts, but I’ve nearly run out. There were a lot gestating. One about food poetry. One about finishing | CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

Eileen Myles

End of the Road

Just sent my last email blast. Why do we call it blast when unless everyone else has a great program that goes gush I am cutting and pasting little pods of names into rectangles and going blam blam blam more like pushing a lot of letters into a slot. When I peek at my incoming mail I see all those dead ones. Server no long has this address or delivery status notification delivery has failed. So it’s better not to look at your incoming mail till it’s over. Today the opera singer, Julie, got sick. So I was scrambling through old mails looking for singers from the opera I worked on several years ago. And I realized that someone amazing whose show just ended was probably planning to come and maybe he would rather be in it and he would. John Kelly said yes so rather than a soprano I have a mezzo and a man rather than a woman but a very special man rather than a very special woman so it’s all okay. I’m not even going to say that much about the kids today except that I very much want them both to come. Leslie Heredia and Arturo Campos. They are the kids. Every now and then I get a message from a poet and I think oh no will a poet call in sick now. But no it’s a poet who sent out a very handsome version of my first email blast and he’s checking in to see if it’s okay that he sent out one. I thank him. Everything I hear from everybody is okay, the poets are on and are walking boldly into the silence of tomorrow night with no difficulty. No one is afraid of the sound not sounding at all. Everyone is planning to come. I think we are a simple and unusual people. That’s a fact about who the tribe of the poets are. Though I’m assuming there will be much disagreement about that. What this simplicity is, or what the unusualness is all about. But it’s a kind of show business and I’m endlessly grateful though it hasn’t happened yet that the poets just show up.

Camille Dungy

Not finished yet

Harvey Milk Plaza, San Francisco, 6/28/09  (photo: C. Dungy)

Harvey Milk Plaza, San Francisco, 6/28/09 (photo: C. Dungy)

The street sweepers have passed, and the crowd control fences have been carried away.  Pride, for some, is over and done.  But for many, the persistent resistance that Pride weekend celebrates still thrives.  Thank goodness. In honor of Pride and, moreover, in honor of the spirit of resistance and persistence of the Stonewall rebellion and the movements it spawned, (and also in a sort of answer to a question Catherine Halley posed some time ago), I’m going to share a few poems by a small sample of writers from the West Coast LBGT community.

| CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

Eileen Myles

The Kids and a request

My posts will pretty much be about the collection of silence till Tuesday. We started off with a hope for forty kids from PS 4 & The Poetry Club but it was maybe thirty or high twenties originally. I’m not used to being around that many kids but the energy was totally infectious in the Burroughs sense. It was their language, but ALL of it. The sounds, the | CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

Annie Finch

A Toast for the Fathers

royfinch1
Roy Finch at Sarah Lawrence College, mid 1960’s

Father’s day came and went, and I’ve been wanting to say something about my dad, and all my poetic fathers, | CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

Annie Finch

Four Ears: the Curse of the Metrical Code

Last year I happened to be sitting next to the young poet Jericho Brown at a reading in Los Angeles. Jericho noticed me counting on my fingers and scribbling down some marks on a piece of paper. He nearly leaped out of his seat | CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

Other Recent Posts

Eileen Myles: GENDER HIKE
Travis Nichols: The Man in the Mirror
Annie Finch: Marxist Hexameter: Genevieve Taggard in a Heroic Measure--now with audio!
Catherine Halley: Poem I Love: "You, Therefore" by Reginald Shepherd
Don Share: The line's for real
Camille Dungy: The Fish
Annie Finch: Why I Am a Woman Poet
Travis Nichols: 2009: The Halfway-Point Reading Report
Eileen Myles: calling all poets
Catherine Halley: Found on Flickr: Poetry, Texas
Annie Finch: Overheard at the West Chester Poetry Conference
Annie Finch: An Evening with Forugh: Iranian Poetry Night
Travis Nichols: "To slaughter us / why did you need to invite us / to such an elegant party?"
Martin Earl: Poets and Painters
Katie Hartsock: Happy Birthday, Gwendolyn Brooks!
Annie Finch: Romantic Re-volutions
Eileen Myles: Gay Sunshine
Travis Nichols: Poetry Done Right
Camille Dungy: No Pause for Breath
Catherine Halley: Poem, Category, Relationships, Gay

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Camille T. Dungy
Martin Earl
Annie Finch
Eileen Myles

STAFF WRITERS

Cathy Halley
Katie Hartsock
Michael Marcinkowski
Travis Nichols
Fred Sasaki
Don Share

RECENT COMMENTS

  • A case of my bad. The town is called Sapho, not Sappho. Terreson MORE »
    Terreson | 07.03.09
  • "Other critics see the orthography of Dickinson’s poems as efforts to inscribe sexual difference through ... MORE »
    Richard Epstein | 07.03.09
  • We could have an argument in which we each agree with the other while raising ... MORE »
    John Oliver Simon | 07.03.09
  • Camille Dungy, this may be a bit off-topic. But the Sappho poem brings the ... MORE »
    Terreson | 07.03.09
  • There are so many things going on on this thread of such importance I'm afraid ... MORE »
    Christopher Woodman | 07.03.09

Marxist Hexameter: Genevieve Taggard in a... (52)
Flarf and Conceptual Writing in Poetry Magazine (14)
A Toast for the Fathers (10)
The Nude Formalism (8)
Poets and Painters (136)

RECENT POSTS

MONTHLY ARCHIVE

CATEGORY ARCHIVE

PREVIOUS WRITERS

Subscribe to the RSS feed.
What is RSS?

IN THIS ISSUE: July/August 2009

Poetry Magazine

Poems by Hoagland, Hirschfield, Simic, Beasley, Levine, Dlugos, Boss, Hicok, Merwin, Goldbarth and others; a portfolio of Flarf and Conceptual Writing; Revell on Creeley, Pollitt on Bishop, Koethe on the New York School; unpublished Yvor Winters letters; poetry comics by Gary Sullivan

Listen & Explore — Take the Chicago Poetry Tour
Poetry Tool

OR SEARCH

CHICAGO EVENTS

The Science of Obscurity:
An Official Printers’ Ball Lead-up Event!

Fri, July 10th, 7:00 pm
Jupiter Outpost
1139 West Fulton Market
Free admission

MORE EVENTS »