Harriet

Sotère Torregian

How Poetry Came About

Bookmark and Share

Sina Queyras

A Rambling Post on Common Readers, Classes and the Noise of Poetry

I haven’t read poetry in years, an old friend said recently. I was shocked. We came to poetry together, traded our first real attempts. Why, I wanted to know. What happened? I can no longer hear it, she said, all the arguing about poetry has killed it for me. It’s no longer alive in my mind.

Bookmark and Share

Fred Moten

B 3.1

What makes translation interesting and valuable and productive (of knowledge, of the the new thing, of pleasure) is its necessary failure. It succeeds insofar as it is deviant and deviance, in any case, is what the resistance of the “original” (which is always based on something) imposes upon it. There are a million different ways to celebrate this and none of them require being mean. This is a belated thanks to Thom, whose post on translation and the accompanying thread I just arrived at via Craig’s last post, but which, it turns out, I’ve been responding to, sympathetically, all along.

Bookmark and Share

Craig Santos Perez

Community, Awaiting Moderation, & Why I Heart Truong Tran

in some ways, many of the posts from the current cohort of Harriet bloggers is about community: reading series, the commons, literary magazines, criticism, ethnic and gender organizations, humans and nature, academia. even Harriet itself is a kind of community blog.

as i mentioned in a previous comment field, there is always a dark side to community formation, always an exclusion, always the haunting of what a particular community will not embrace.

this dark side is rearing its ugly head again…

Bookmark and Share

Bhanu Kapil

BURN THIS

I threw the book into a dark garden and let it, all that winter, rot; retrieving it before the weather turned, to transcribe what was legible.  Though I considered burning it, I threw the notebook, instead, into the bin.  (Then, feeling guilty, plucked it out and put it in the recycling instead.)  Some notes on retrieval, on the circulatory and evolutionary intensity of “scraps“; of the notebook next to the book: the book that fails:

Bookmark and Share

Fred Moten

B 5

At circle time on Thursday, Lorenzo declared that when he makes smores for Julian (which I wasn’t aware that he’d ever done) he makes them with bricks, sticks and snow.

Bookmark and Share

Fred Moten

B 4

A lot of it is just trying to figure out how to say something. How to read. Not how to offer a reading, or even an interpretation, but a performance of a text, in the face of its unintelligibility, as if one were forced/privileged to access some other world where representation and unrepresentability were beside the point (so that the response to the terrors and chances of history were not about calculation, not bound to replicate, even in a blunted and ethically responsible way, the horrors of speculation), where new materialities of imagination were already on the other side of the logic of equivalence.

Bookmark and Share

Fred Moten

B 3

Dear Evie,

Remember when we read together in November, and afterwards you asked me about a particular poem of mine, and seemed to wonder why my reading of it didn’t acknowledge or account for the spacing of/in the poem as it is on the page? I figured that question was a statement and that you were right. Philip’s theater is this spatial disuption or fragmentation of the sentence and/or the word, where every fragmentation is also an augmentation, bespeaking multiplicity.

Bookmark and Share

Fred Moten

Backlog 2

The commitment to repair is how a refusal to represent terror redoubles the logic of representation. The refusal of our ongoing afterlife can only ever replicate a worn-out grammar. The event remains, in the depths. The event-remains are deep and we stand before them, to express them, as their expression.

Bookmark and Share

Fred Moten

Backlog

I didn’t stop logging, I just stopped posting. I think I got waterlogged from not being able not to try to get too deep. I got into some kind of double trouble from blowing bubbles, I guess. Anyway, here’s some more stuff, along the lines I promised, though I might want to make another promise now. The other thing is that this is driven by the chance to see some of Hong-An Truong’s film and installation work and from reading Gerald Barrax’s poetry and from a friend sending me the catalog from the Xenakis exhibit at the Drawing Center in New York. I just wanted to mention these not in order to provide the key to what I’ve been trying to write but just to commend them all to you because they are beautiful! As is Beth at the Jordan Lake School of the Arts, refuge for the new X-Men, where the superkids go to play. OK: back to my misbegotten ideas on poetics, in approximately 300 word installments.

Bookmark and Share

Other Recent Posts

Sina Queyras: Contemplation is Mourning: Tim Lilburn
Sotère Torregian: This English Language
Thom Donovan: CA Conrad's and Frank Sherlock's The City Real and Imagined
Bhanu Kapil: Dung and Glitter
Kenneth Goldsmith: UbuWeb Top Ten for Feb by Christian Wiman
Sotère Torregian: Salute to the Bloggers
Thom Donovan: Proceeding Translation: Brandon Brown & David Larsen
Sotère Torregian: Music and Memory
Craig Santos Perez: O the Mid-life Horror! O the Humanities!
Sina Queyras: What is wilderness and what is it doing in poetry?
Sotère Torregian: Joe Ceravolo
Craig Santos Perez: Do You Want to Win Free Books?
Sina Queyras: On the Where of Reading
Bhanu Kapil: Notes on Mutation
Thom Donovan: Bruce Boone Weekend
Travis Nichols: "The only thing I'd really like to be."
Bhanu Kapil: “So sonic intensity is tantamount to submerged embodied historiography.”
Craig Santos Perez: Gender, (Race), & Poetry (Part 2): Numbers & Unnumbered Trouble
Thom Donovan: Commoning part II
Sotère Torregian: Days and Nights

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Thom Donovan
Bhanu Kapil
Fred Moten
Craig Santos Perez
Sina Queyras
Sotère Torregian

STAFF WRITERS

Cathy Halley
Michael Marcinkowski
Travis Nichols
Fred Sasaki
Don Share

About Harriet

RECENT COMMENTS

  • @ johannes: yay i'm glad you commented! this is actually the second time i quoted ... MORE »
    csperez | 02.09.10
  • thanks you for commenting, john. i am serious about the strike, but it seems most ... MORE »
    csperez | 02.09.10
  • thx for your comment bscg. i think that openness is a wonderful quality in a ... MORE »
    csperez | 02.09.10
  • unless it's cold outside, of course. as i just wrote to rachel, i will write ... MORE »
    csperez | 02.09.10
  • @ rachel: glad to hear your voice here! i will respond substantially to the translation ... MORE »
    csperez | 02.09.10

B 3.1 (11)
A Rambling Post on Common Readers, Classes... (2)
Contemplation is Mourning: Tim Lilburn (12)
“The only thing I’d really like... (10)
BURN THIS (23)

RECENT POSTS

MONTHLY ARCHIVE

CATEGORY ARCHIVE

PREVIOUS WRITERS

Subscribe to the RSS feed.
What is RSS?

IN THIS ISSUE: February 2010

Poetry Magazine

A selection of new work from Robert Hass; new poems by Martha Zweig, Joshua Mehigan, Robert Vandermolen, Patty Seyburn, Robert Bly, Bob Hicok, Spencer Reece, Eleanor Wilner, and Kay Ryan; a translation of a Durs Grünbein essay by Michael Hofmann; and reviews by Fiona Sampson.

Chicago Poetry Tour

CHICAGO EVENTS

Poetry on Stage: Lysistrata

Poetry on Stage: Lysistrata Sun, February 21st, 7:30 PM
Mon, February 22nd, 7:30 PM
Victory Gardens Studio
2433 North Lincoln Avenue
(773) 871-3000
Tickets $20; $10 for students

MORE EVENTS »