Harriet

Archive for November, 2009

Anselm Berrigan

Reading habits, part I

Have been repeatedly making failed attempts at charting my reading habits in order to detect patterns and write about those patterns on this here blog with the hope that writing about the patterns will change them. What I’m finding is they change if I give any consciousness to their identification.

John S. O'Connor

A/Musing: On Creativity

Part I.

She entered with a flourish – a leather suit, staccato stilettos, and a hand-held computer device with which she may have been commanding the International Space Station. No time for bullshit.

Edwin Torres

Here away from there…

my likely set of eyes, hovering flotsam over gene pool. just checking on my connection. whether that needs some juice or maybe a bit of interference.

Anselm Berrigan

Tales of Evil Kitty

The Museum of Modern Art here in Nu Yawk has a small exhibit on Manhattan’s downtown music scene during the late seventies and early eighties up at the moment, and I found myself strolling through it with various family members last week.  

Abigail Deutsch

lost poets and found poetry in washington, d.c.

Credit: Thomas Sayers Ellis

(Photo Credit: Thomas Sayers Ellis)

I’m good at getting lost. A few years ago, living in a French town so small even its residents had barely heard of it, I lost my way at least once a week. I was also known to lose the bakery, the drugstore, the school where I was teaching, and my colleagues at that school. Streets rayed out from the town center like the arms of a starfish–a crippled starfish whose limbs twisted and gnarled.

Walking in Washington, D.C.—the site of the Poetry Foundation’s new online tour—several weeks ago, I found myself transfixed by street names. Not because I was lost, though I was, but because those names follow particular patterns. First they run from A through Z (A Street, B Street, etc.). Then they run A-Z again, but with bisyllabic words (Euclid, Fairmont, Girard, Harvard). Then they run A-Z yet again, but with trisyllabic words (Allison, Buchanan, Crittenden, Decatur). Any street might change names farther west or east — but the changed name must obey the same rules determining the original one (so Allison turns into Albemarle, both trisyllabic words starting with “A”).

Melissa Friedling

Miller

Amber Tamblyn

How a murderer sleeps.

Marin County, California.

My sister lives in Fairfax California and my Father was there visiting her and her kids. I was in San Francisco for a poetry show, but decided to stay at the same hotel with my dad outside of the city so I could visit with the whole family as well.  Dad got us two rooms at the Marriott Villas, which is a fancy term for decent coffee and $11 impotent bacon plates.   At 8a.m. the morning after my show, my eyes shot open and I couldn’t go back to sleep.  I checked my phone and saw a text from my dad who was staying 2 floors below me.

“I know it’s early but I can’t go back to sleep.  Wanna go for a walk?”  He asked.

John S. O'Connor

Singing the Blues

I love blues music — singing the blues, listening to the blues. That’s why I was so excited to get a call from my friend Pierre Lacocque, a wicked blues harp player and the band leader of Mississippi Heat. Pierre asked me to work on lyrics for the band’s new album — and I couldn’t pass up the chance.

Anselm Berrigan

“She is mirage I feverishly address as specific”

Spent some time in a clinic today, the waiting turning into an interesting duration (every time I encounter the word duration I think of Kenneth Koch staring off into space during an interview saying, “everything lasts a certain period of time….that’s very odd”)

Edwin Torres

Señor Smith to you.

Write what you know. But I don’t know! The floor creaks when I walk up the steps, even when I’m not there. I am facing a national personality triage. The nation is not america but poesie, the personality is not body but name.

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IN THIS ISSUE: March 2010

Poetry Magazine

A selection of new work from Dorothea Grossman; new poems by Lavinia Greenlaw, David Yezzi, A.E. Stallings, Gerald Stern, and Dan Gerber; translations of Carlo Betocchi, and Mahmoud Darwish; an Editorial on Ruth Lilly; an exchange between Ilya Kaminsky and Adam Kirsch; an essay by Chen Li; and a review by Daisy Fried.

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