Teaching Etel Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse February 10, 2010: What can I do? One must begin somewhere. Begin what? The only thing in the world worth beginning: The End of the world of course. --from Aimé Césaire’s “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land” (trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith) (more...) by Thom Donovan

“The only reason there is for living is to love” February 10, 2010: [audio:http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Valentines-Day.mp3] by Sotère Torregian

Aggression and Community: [exit notes] [snake puke] [discuss] February 10, 2010: 1.  Discuss. 2.  No. 3.  The sentence is a dark alley.  You know what happens in dark alleys. 4.  Something's not right. 5.  Discuss. 6. No. 7.  What kind of person gets to the corridor then stops?  On the verge of research, a question, an interview.  Takes notes on the architecture, the crenallate of red roofs [...] by Bhanu Kapil

Tranvestisizing, Post-Total Translation, & a Parable February 10, 2010: * johannes goransson, in a recent blogpost, wrote: "Translation transvestisizes the "original."" * have you ever heard the parable "The Translating Twins"? twin sisters separated at birth, adopted, major in literature & italian (let's say) at dif universities. they both translate the same italian poet--who had not yet been translated [...] by Craig Santos Perez

ON Contemporary Practice Volume 2 February 9, 2010: For anyone out in the Bay Area tomorrow night, coeditors Michael Cross and Kyle Schlesinger, and a critical mass of Bay Area contributors will launch ON Contemporary Practice 2 at Moe’s Books in Berkeley. (more...) by Thom Donovan

How Poetry Came About February 9, 2010: [audio:http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/How-Poetry-Came-About-FINAL.mp3] by Sotère Torregian

A Rambling Post on Common Readers, Classes and the Noise of Poetry February 9, 2010: 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. (more...) by Sina Queyras

B 3.1 February 8, 2010: 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 [...] by Fred Moten

Community, Awaiting Moderation, & Why I Heart Truong Tran February 8, 2010: 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 [...] by Craig Santos Perez

BURN THIS February 7, 2010: 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 [...] by Bhanu Kapil