Travis Nichols

Hello Again & Harriet & Comments

This seems like as good of a time as any to re-introduce myself as a Harriet citizen, so here I go:

Hi.  How’s it going?

First up on the to-do list?  Comments!

Let’s talk about the comments.

First of all, thanks to everyone for their suggestions and input over the past week in response to Cathy’s post, “A Few Harriet Statistics.” The response has been instructive in many ways, and we’re grateful to have had it here.

04.29.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (23)

Annie Finch

Occasioning Poetry

I was recently asked to write a poem for the inauguration of my university’s president, and I read it at the ceremony last weekend.  This gratifying experience got me thinking about the place of occasional poetry in our culture.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

04.29.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (33)

Camille Dungy

Poetry now

I’ve been posting quite a bit about the exciting work produced by some of our finest emerging poets, and I’ve also written about poems that are sonically engaging. So it may come as no surprise that I am pleased to announce that From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great arrived in my mailbox (and bookstore) this week.

04.29.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Jason Guriel

Harriet Goes to the Movies

Throughout the month of April, the National Post, a paper up here in Canada (or down here, if you live in Wasilla or something) has been conducting brief E-mail interviews with poets, for its books blog. I thought I would reproduce one of the quirkier questions here: “Novels are always being adapted into movies. What are some poems that deserve the Hollywood treatment?”

(My answer to this question, by the way, was: “Not Beowulf.”)

04.28.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (46)

Annie Finch

Helen Adam and Jack Spicer: Birds of the Fifties

Poetry of the 1950s has added some rare notes to its scale the last year or two thanks to two badly-needed editions , Kristin Prevallet’s A Helen Adam Reader (National Poetry Foundation) and Peter Gizzi/Kevin Killian’s My Vocabulary Did This to Me: Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan)

04.26.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (14)

Jason Guriel

Where Would You Like to Live?: A Reading of a Poem I Like, Plus a Question

Real estate is on a lot of minds these days, but it’s in them, too; isn’t the mind (read: the imagination) a kind of low-rent housing to which we can retreat, however briefly, when we’ve been startled by a sudden scattering of cockroaches or when life, in general, looks grim under its bare bulb? I write “low-rent” because the only price the imagination exacts is our attention to what’s going on around us, in the real world, which is not always very interesting. But why limit ourselves to our own imaginations when we can live comfortably in those of others? This is a question that was prompted by a recently reprinted Don Coles poem:

04.26.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (10)

Camille Dungy

What the Kids Are Reading These Days

Every week I introduce my students to a few poems I think speak to what they’ve tried to write themselves.  I do this hoping they’ll read more and, reading more, learn to write better and better.  Amen.  It being near the end of the semester, I’ve been interested in what resonated most.  As ever, the answers surprised me.

04.23.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)