Barbara’s comment-response to Terreson’s question as to her own ideas and way about poetry – that her choices of subject in her blog posts are reflective of her overall interests and commitments to and within writing, if I’m hearing her right – has me recalling my first foray into reading John Ashbery’s art writings collected in Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987 some years ago,
How to relate the everyday to poetry while in the act of being the poem. Working my way underneath this city I love, I latch onto a dragon’s back circumnavigating the subway system during the week.
Fall is here, which means ponderous Hollywood movies, funky potpourri, [W]ild [T]urkey, and of course, new bloggers on Harriet!
Today, we say our goodbyes to Joel Brouwer, Rebecca Wolff, and Eileen Myles. They’ve done a wonderful job here on the blog, and we hope they’ll come back from time to time to share a thought or two. From everyone here, let me offer a hearty thanks for your dedication and service. Huzzah!
I know. It is sad. But all is not lost! We still have Barbara Jane Reyes, Abigail Deutsch, and Tonya Foster to help transition us to this new season. And! We have five new great bloggers starting, well, right now, today:
Harriet’s the second blog I’ve posted on. The last one was about art which could include poetry and I did it for a year.
I suppose all possible puns/infusions/scrap-heaping has already been done with the word “blog” but I still find it amusing to try to work it into every post. This one is totally inscrutable. Anyone who guesses what I’m going for wins . . . a free subscription to Fence. That’s what I have to offer, it seems.
I’ve been reveling in the freaky cold August, watching my tomato plants suffer the potato famine,

she has some kind of viral cataracts in her eyes
Here let this image of my new gray kitten, Myshka (”little mouse”) stand eternally (and here let the internet stand for eternity) in for my realization that I am not suited for blogging. I’ve realized this before, on my own blog over at Fence. I started that blog more than a year ago, and thought it would be so great to have a space in which to relate all the things I thought about on my long drive to my office. Now, I thought, now I see what this blogging thing is all about. It’s about speaking TO THE WORLD! A whole other kind of engagement, never before possible. But my blog has really slogged–it’s there, we use it more as an announcement board type thing–as it seemed to turn out that really I’d rather keep my random thoughts to myself. My speech has a lot more reverb, it turns out, when it’s bouncing around in my skull-cage.
As we salute Annie and Martin and Camille for their service here on Harriet (salutes!), we welcome Joel Brouwer, Tonya Foster, and Rebecca Wolff (hugs!). The former three will, we hope, continue to post from time to time, but the the full-time conversation is now in the hands of Joel, Rebecca, Tonya, and Eileen Myles. Praise be!
A little background on your new friends:
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Rebecca Wolff is the author of three books of poems, most recently, The King (W. W. Norton, 2009), and is the founding editor and publisher of Fence and Fence Books. She is a program fellow at the New York State Writers Institute and lives in Athens, New York with her family-of-choice.
Tonya Foster is the author of poetry, fiction, and essays that have been published in a variety of journals including Callaloo, The Hat, and Western Humanities Review. She is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Belladonna Press) and co-editor of Third Mind: Creative Writing Through Visual Art. She is currently completing a cross-genre piece on New Orleans, and Monkey Talk, an inter-genre piece about race, paranoia, and surveillance. A recipient of a Ford Foundation Fellowship, a Magnet Fellowship, and a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, she is a currently a PhD candidate in the Graduate Center’s English Department at CUNY.
Joel Brouwer is the author of three books of poems: Exactly What Happened (Purdue, 1999), Centuries (Four Way Books, 2003), and And So (Four Way Books, 2009). He has held fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in AGNI, Boston Review, Chelsea, Crazyhorse, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Parnassus, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Progressive, Tin House, Washington Post Book World, and other publications. He lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and teaches at the University of Alabama.
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07.16.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (77)