
Over the last few months, a curious parade of poetic artifacts has been arriving regularly in my mailbox: fifty chapbooks written by poets who are members of the Dusie Kollektiv, each produced by another poet in the Kollektiv. This remarkable force of poetic self-determination was started by the poet and editor of Dusie Press, Susana Gardner, and is now in its third year.
“Although the literal act of putting words on the page is a solitary activity, no writer is ever alone. There are always those mentors, those students, who engage in a communal effort of creation.”
–Lee Martin

(Prageeta Sharma, Patrick Rosal, Myung Mi Kim & Regie Cabico at the Kundiman workshop/retreat)
(I offer the following lexicon in good fun. Your additions are most welcome.)

I want to apologize for being out of touch lately. Blogs should press forward under even the worst of circumstances. But those of you who have been following my posts, all seven of them, have no doubt noticed that I’ve not yet learned how to compose a blog.


It’s been a particularly busy and exhausting week. As Thursday approached, I considered what I would write about here on Harriet. I am committed to the idea of discussing, every Thursday, what I am reading that is exciting me, and yet today that didn’t feel quite right. What I want to share, instead, are a few of the poems that keep me coming back to poetry even when I believe I might just be too tired to read more than three lines of anything my hands hold before my eyes.

“Britain in 2009 is not the same as Britain in 1959.” So says Boris Johnson, Tory mayor of London and snappy blogger. To prove his point, Johnson recently went off on how little poetry British students know by heart, and has made a modest proposal with hopes of rectifying the “Kulturkampf”:
So I say to my friends in the Tory high command, here is your policy. Never mind selective admission, which all parties are now too terrified to contemplate. Never mind all this smart stuff about creating “more good schools”. The way to create more good schools is to insist that the kids learn something good. I propose universal saying lessons in English poetry. I propose that this should involve learning two or three poems a term, off by heart. And if necessary let’s put the best declaimers on TV and get them judged by Simon Cowell.
In the midst of the energetic discussion around the recent “Listening to Poetry” post, I happened to come across the following extraordinary poem again. It was in a wonderful format, an illustrated anthology called Parallels: Artists/Poets published by MidMarch Arts Press, accompanied on the facing page by an abstract charcoal sketch by Claire Heimarck. I found myself staring face to face with the poem, and I couldn’t stop re-reading it —in part because, as far as I can tell, it belied everything I had been saying.

W.H.Auden and Marianne Moore

Should poets write poems that describe things (like, say, this silly-looking rooster) … or not?
It’s Tuesday and the monthly poem has just been posted. Anyone who’s been complaining about the absence of attention to poetry in general-interest publications, the next couple of days is your chance to support Robert Pinsky’s valiant endeavor to improve the situation. The poem this month is by Fulke Greville.

Thom Donovan
Bhanu Kapil
Fred Moten
Craig Santos Perez
Sina Queyras
Sotère Torregian
Cathy Halley
Michael Marcinkowski
Travis Nichols
Fred Sasaki
Don Share
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