Emily Warn

Harriet Flarf

This post is partly what it’s like being one of Harriet’s ventriloquists. It splices text from Harriet bloggers, commenters, and anonymous robots who deposit semi-truck loads of SPAM for us to delete. Bloggers and commenters from whom I’ve pilfered include Kenneth Goldsmith, Reginald Shepherd, A.E. Stallings, Ange Mlinko, Javier Huerta, and Bill Knott. (By citing them, this is definitely flarf and not conceptual poetics.) I “composed” it for this year’s MLA offsite poetry reading, which was held Sunday night in San Francisco where more than 60 (usually) masked poets read for two minutes each.

Our task is to mind the machine.
Hi Guys! Today I was surfing the Internet
just as everyday. I checked my Facebook profile,

12.30.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Emily Warn

Some Favorite Books of 2008

A few of these books were published last year, and there are definitely others that we’d like to point out to readers, but for the sake of brevity, we limited our picks. We hope you’ll fill in the gaps in the comment stream.

POETRY FOUNDATION STAFF PICKS

CHRISTIAN WIMAN
Creatures of a Day
Reginald Gibbons
Louisiana State Univeristy Press
ISBN: 0807133183

Creatures of a Day was a finalist for the National Book Award, deservedly so. There are some poems in this book that have become a permanent part of my consciousness. I remember reading “Sleepless in the Cold Dark” in manuscript and thinking that, though you could feel the antecedents (Williams mostly), something here was new. The poem is flat-out beautiful, and it accomplishes its effects with such small, sharp precisions of syntax and linebreaks that you hardly feel your heart breaking until it’s already happened.
Twigs and Knucklebones
Sarah Lindsay
Copper Canyon Press

Sarah Lindsay’s new book is unusual among books of contemporary poetry for several reasons. It’s almost completely devoid of the first person pronoun, for one thing. Most of Lindsay’s poems are historical or (as in the stunning sequence “The Kingdom of Nab”) pseudo-historical. One of the most memorable poems in the book is a strange, moving piece called “Elegy for the Quagga.” A Quagga was a zebra-like creature which was hunted to extinction in the late nineteenth century. Lindsay links this extinction with the eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia, and by the time you finish this poem you realize you’re never going to hear this sound that is the poem’s subject — and yet you’re now dying to. The poem ends “a kind of horse, less picture-esque than a Dodo, still we mourn what we mourn, even if when it sank to its irreplaceable knees, when its unique throat closed behind a sigh, no dust rose to redden a whole year’s sunsets, no one unwittingly busy two thousand miles away jumped at the sound, no ashes rained on ships in the merciless sea.”

12.19.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (11)

Emily Warn

Hayden Carruth (1921-2008)

I join with all the staff and board at the Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine in expressing my profound sorrow at the death of Hayden Carruth, who died last night at his home in Munnsville, New York. His contribution to American poetry and to the life of this country was extraordinary.
Graves
by Hayden Carruth
Both of us had been close
to Joel, and at Joel’s death
my friend had gone to the wake
and the memorial service
and more recently he had
visited Joel’s grave, there
at the back of the grassy
cemetery among the trees,
“a quiet, gentle place,” he said,
“befitting Joel.” And I said,
“What’s the point of going
to look at graves?” I went
into one of my celebrated
tirades. “People go to look
at the grave of Keats or Hart
Crane, they go traveling just to
do it, what a waste of time.
What do they find there? Hell,
I wouldn’t go look at the grave of
Shakespeare if it was just
down the street. I wouldn’t
look at—” And I stopped. I
was about to say the grave of God
until I realized I’m looking at it
all the time….
Hayden Carruth was the author of more than thirty books of poetry and winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Carruth was editor of Poetry magazine from 1949-1950. His last collection of work was Toward the Distant Islands, published by Copper Canyon Press.

09.30.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (10)

Emily Warn

Reginald Shepherd (1963-2008)

Reginald Shepherd died earlier this evening.
We will miss you, Reginald.
Reginald Shepherd’s Blog
Reginald Shepherd’s Harriet page
You, Therefore
For Robert Philen
You are like me, you will die too, but not today:
you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:
if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been
set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost
radio, may never be an oil painting or
Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are
a concordance of person, number, voice,
and place, strawberries spread through your name
as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me
of some spring, the waters as cool and clear
(late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind),
which is where you occur in grassy moonlight:
and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium
or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star
in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving
from its earthwards journeys, here where there is
no snow (I dreamed the snow was you,
when there was snow), you are my right,
have come to be my night (your body takes on
the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep
becomes you): and you fall from the sky
with several flowers, words spill from your mouth
in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees
and seas have flown away, I call it
loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you,
a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all,
and free of any eden we can name
Reprinted from Fata Morgana by Reginald Shepherd, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Copyright © 2007 by Reginald Shepherd.

09.11.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (65)

Emily Warn

Man Reading Yeats at Wrigley Field

Don Share wrote in response to Michael Robbins:
And then B. [Walter Benjamin] says, commenting on the “ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator….”
Here’s a spectator absorbed by art…

08.14.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (10)

Emily Warn

Talking in Public

A housekeeping post: We realized that unless we highlighted how commenting works on Harriet, she could morph from this….

into this…

07.15.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Emily Warn

Christian Conceptual Poetry: Divine Authorship or Appropriation?

Several Christian poets invented conceptual poetry long before Kenny G. All four claim to have composed–with the help of divine inspiration–a popular Christian poem called “Footprints” and all “have memories of the precise moment when they dreamed up these lines.” Rachel Aviv first reported on this “accidental plagiarism” here.
Carl Jung first coined the term “Cryptomnesia” to describe this phenomenon. In a 1905 paper by that name he argues, according to Aviv, “that it’s impossible to know for certain which ideas are one’s own. ‘Our unconsciousness . . . swarms with strange intruders,’ he writes. He accuses Nietzsche of unwittingly copying another’s work, and urges all writers to sift through their memories and locate the origin of every idea before putting it to paper: ” ‘Ask each thought: Do I know you, or are you new?’
Last week the Washington Post, citing Aviv’s story, reported that the authors are now suing one another.

06.11.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Emily Warn

Hellos, Goodbyes, and a Hiatus

In case you missed Daisy Fried’s sign off from Harriet, it’s here, at the bottom of one of her wonderful dispatches from Paris. We’re going to miss her quips and critiques, and her exploits with Maisie and Jim. Do you know anyone else who has read Tristam Shandy out loud? Invented the new American classic Moby Dickinson? Or spoken about capitalism crumbling and offered a recipe for foie gras in one post?
Our newer bloggers are also ranging far….

05.19.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Emily Warn

Hellos and Goodbyes

Our planned cycling of Harriet impersonators is causing some pangs. One regular reader Mary Meriam writes: “I understand Alicia’s [A.E. Stallings] days are numbered with you, Harriet. What a pity!” We couldn’t agree more.
Though we fashioned Harriet to change personalities every three to four months, facing the switchover is difficult. How will we distract ourselves from family or work without….

01.22.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)