BASKETBALL MEDITATION September 18, 2008: Finding contemplative time in which the poem might find me, has been an issue my entire adulthood. Meditative and writing opportunities have come usually at the cost of sleep—given my ever-frantic urban lifestyle. But in the late 80s, I returned to the basketball of my high-school days—foul shot practice in the mornings or afternoons, [...] by Wanda Coleman

What is and is not Garcia Lorca September 18, 2008: The family of poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca says they will not stop authorities from opening the poet’s grave, despite previous protests. Garcia Lorca is believed to have been buried in a common grave near Granada, along with two bullfighters and a school teacher who were part of his company in the Spanish Civil War. Relatives of [...] by Travis Nichols

OVERCOHERENT September 18, 2008: Let V be a mixed characteristic complete discrete valuation ring, k its residual field, P a proper smooth formal scheme over V, P its special fiber, T a divisor of P, U:=Psetminus T, Y a smooth closed subscheme of U. We prove that the category of overconvergent F-isocrystals on Y is equivalent to the category of overcoherent F-isocrystals on Y. [...] by Olena Kalytiak Davis

THE PRIESTHOOD OF PROCESS September 17, 2008: What makes me “like” the work of a poet who may oppose my real-world beliefs? Does our love of language unite us in some unconsidered/unconscious way? How? Is poetry itself an indicator of a distinct kind or level of intelligence across demographics? Does the process of creating poetry unite all poets? These questions are rooted in my [...] by Wanda Coleman

16 de Septiembre: Curas y Gritos September 16, 2008: (more...) by Javier Huerta

John Keats’s Self-Caricature September 15, 2008: Let there be no more talk of major and minor. We have had enough of the Great in the Great Odes. Ours is a Naughty Keats. How many more articles must we read on the importance and significance of Great Keats? The whole of the critical tradition on Beautiful Keats can be reduced to this brilliant insight, “He is with Shakespeare.” Very well, we [...] by Javier Huerta

Slovene Invasion September 14, 2008: The Slovenes are coming! Five of them, anyway: Tone Škrjanec, Tomaž Šalamun, Gregor Podlogar, Ana Pepelnik, and Primož Čučnik. This could be big trouble (see their bio notes). Catch you unprepared? That's just what they want! Better click Continue Reading This Entry below. Tomaž Šalamun at Brown University, 2007 (more...) by Forrest Gander

Shove It! September 14, 2008: On December 3, 1937, Attila József, age 32, scissored his right sleeve, lay down, draped his arm across a rail and stared at the train arriving on time to kill him. It was his second attempt, the first pointless and disappointing because someone else had been wheeled over up the tracks. József knew his train schedule. He also wrote: To shove [...] by Linh Dinh

I am so bored with words September 14, 2008: Those who understand what went on inside a tunnel in Switzerland last Wednesday have been struggling to explain it to the rest of us. The picture above is of what physicists believe the thing they are searching for might behave like if it does in fact exist. While the world might think it doesn’t need poetry, it sure needs metaphor. The trouble [...] by Lavinia Greenlaw

Match Point September 14, 2008: David Foster Wallace by Nick Maniatis Fiction doesn’t come up much here on Harriet, but I’m guessing most Harriet readers look at it now and then. That’s a bad segue to the sad news that David Foster Wallace killed himself on Friday. His wife discovered his hanged body. Ugh. Wallace didn’t write poems, as far as I know, but he wrote some [...] by Nick Twemlow