Never been much for writing to music, though–since music is another attempt at language, it clashes with, and sometimes overwhelms, my words. But every year around Easter, prompted by my weepy annual ritual of watching the 1961 film “King of Kings,” I suddenly write a flurry of frighteningly religious stanzas, in which I repent and confess to everything short of electing George Bush for a second term. These purging poetics are inevitably accompanied and electrified by the movie’s holy, humongously dramatic theme song (it revs up just after the overture):

OK, so maybe it’s just a wildly overwrought, manipulative arrangement of musical notes that reminds me that I haven’t gone to church in awhile. But sometimes we all crave it, don’t we, something that makes us feel small and swept along, something that puts someone else in charge for a change, some weighted melody that gives us an excuse to cry and inspires sappy poems in which we forgive ourselves and everyone around us.

And we start over. Reminded of how profoundly a moment can move us, we start over.

Mary Karr reads on Tuesday, April 5 at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Rubloff Auditorium. She took a few minutes to talk about what she’s reading, what she’s read, and who she’d quote:

What line or poem do you find yourself sharing again and again?

Too many to count. My message to young writers always comes from Beckett: “Fail better.”

On your bookshelf but unread:

New book on Stalin (Bloodlands), rereading John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction.

Can you remember the first poem you read and really liked?

Winnie the Pooh, “Wherever I go there’s always Pooh…” and cummings “[in Just-].” Memorized “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” at age 12, but it’s faded and tattered as an old flag.

A cause you would attach your name to:

What cause would have me?

The picture that comes to mind when you hear the word “poetry”:

Zilch.

If forced to quote your own writing, what line or poem would you provide?

Oh God. I’d bob and weave like a boxer. Never happen.

Expression you greatly dislike:

Art for art’s sake. It was necessary when Gautier said it and through about 1950, now it’s an excuse for doily-making art that refuses to be necessary.

The longest amount of time you’ve gone without writing [creatively]?

15 months. I was very sick, told I had liver cancer.

Favorite public figure:

Jesus.

Favorite literary device:

Metaphor.

When I think of Chicago, I think of…

Studs Turkel buying me lunch at a great steakhouse. How we’d first sat in the sound booth playing Janis Joplin, who’s from my neighborhood. And he was so loud at lunch a guy came by after and said, “Nice have lunch with you, Studs.” It was  a record-breaking 109 degrees that day. I also think of the fine stories by Stuart Dybek in The Coast of Chicago, and of a great conversation Stuart and I had till 3am there once with my then student Adam Levin about Cormac McCarthy.

What line or poem do you find yourself sharing again and again?

Room, my friends…to roam

-from “Zangezi” by Velemir Khlebnikov.

On your bookshelf but unread:

The Warm Animals by Mike Tyler.

Can you remember the first poem you read and really liked?

“The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad” by Wallace Stevens.

A cause you would attach your name to:

The end of Facebook.

The picture that comes to mind when you hear the word “poetry”:

A crystallized fur puppy whose mouth conjures fire while listening ice.

If forced to quote your own writing, what line or poem would you provide?

What mantle of man matter might make man…matter?
“Oh Water Man”

Closely followed by:

I am professional
“Motor Priest”

Expression you greatly dislike:

What does poetry mean to you?

The longest amount of time you’ve gone without writing [creatively]?

6 months.

Favorite public figure:

David Bowie.

Favorite literary device:

The line break.

When I think of Chicago, I think of ___________.

Those two towers by the river on a winter day.

On Harriet back in 2007, Kenneth Goldsmith called Kurt Schwitters’ “Ursonate” “the greatest sound poem of the 20th century” and posted nine audio versions by sound artists. Turns out “Ursonate” has been inspiring animators and new media artists as well. Here are eight text-based visual interpretations ranging from Golan Levin and Jaap Blonk’s live typographical performance at Ars Electronica to stop-motion animation.

Ursonate / Ursonography Excerpts (2005), Golan Levin and Jaap Blonk

Ursonate Kurt Schwitters Original, danpunk99

stop motion of die sonate in urlauten (kurt schwitters), paquotte

Ursonate, alexandrecontat

Ursonate di Kurt Schwitters, elimont84

ursonate, introvertevent

Primiti Too Taa, hellishbeauty

Die Ursonate in Wellen (ein Ausschnitt), sushimixer

For the month of November, Harriet is proud to host Paul Martínez Pompa on the @harriet_poetry Twitter feed. Paul joins the growing list of Harriet Twitterati—D.A. Powell, Heather Christle, Kiki Petrosino, and Michael Earl Craig—some of whom have gone on to make the form their own (looking at you, @powell_DA!). More about Paul:

Paul Martínez Pompa earned degrees from the University of Chicago and Indiana University, where he served as a poetry editor for Indiana Review. His chapbook, Pepper Spray, was published by Momotombo Press in 2006. In 2007, his poetry and prose appeared in two anthologies: The Wind Shifts, New Latino Poetry and Telling Tongues, A Latin@ Anthology on Language Experience. His first, full-length book My Kill Adore Him, won the 2008 Andres Montoya Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2009. He lives in Chicago.

Read up @harriet_poetry.

“Hello people, I’m cracking my twitter knuckles, feeling like astronaut… like hockey goalie with mouth guard loose, must fix mouth guard…”

And here’s a video of him at his day job shoeing horses:

And here’s his poem “Winter”:

Winter
by Michael Earl Craig

A kind of Danish cow
long thought to be extinct
lumbers slowly from a fog-soaked forest.
Past the statue of two men shaking hands on horseback.
Into the trainyard with its newly
brunette-colored coal cars.
It is late, lamps light the trainyard.
One of the trainmen sees the cow and has a thought
like a small grey infant sinking
ever so slowly in the icy harbor.
The cow continues out the other side of the trainyard.
The trainman shudders at the thought.
The trainman’s cat Stamina crunches walnuts in her cat dish.

Now, nearly thirty years later,
ladies and gentlemen it is my great pleasure
to introduce to you that very same cow.
(The cow is led out onto the stage by a young boy dressed as a farmer.)

And here’s his bio:

Michael Earl Craig is the author of three collections of poetry: Thin Kimono (Wave Books, 2010), Yes, Master (Fence Books, 2006) and Can You Relax in My House (Fence Books, 2002). He received a BA in English Literature from the University of Montana, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Massachusetts. His poems have been published in various print and online journals, including Provincetown Arts, The Iowa Review, The Believer, HoboEye, Octopus Magazine, Fence, jubilat, and Denver Quarterly, as well as anthologized in Isn’t It Romantic: 100 Love Poems (Verse Press, 2004) and Poems About Horses (Everyman’s Library Pocket Series, 2009). He lives in Livingston, Montana, where is a Certified Journeyman Farrier, shoeing horses for a living.

He mentioned that writing on Twitter was the last thing he’d ever want to do, and for that reason he’s going to go ahead and do it.

And now, we’d like to lay out what’s in store for Harriet.

Asked to describe how poetry has changed over the past ten years, Ron Silliman wrote on our site that the ongoing revolution in communications technology has upended the power dynamics of the community as well as the way poets interact.  “Poets blogging,” Silliman wrote, “is just a symptom.”

Over the past four years we’ve been privileged be a part of this revolution.  From the early long-form journals on Harriet to the group blog, the style and format have evolved to match the moment, and we’re grateful for everyone who has participated, posters and commenters alike.

Recently, though, we’ve noticed that the symptoms of this revolution have changed.  The blog as a form has begun to be overtaken by social media like Twitter and Facebook.  News of the poetry world now travels fastest and furthest through Twitter (as the thousands of followers of @poetryfound, @poetrymagazine, and @poetrynews can attest), with the information often picked up from news aggregator sites rather than discursive blogs.

Also, anyone involved in the more dynamic discussions of poetry, poetics, or politics in the past year knows that more and more of the most vibrant interactions have been found on Facebook.  We saw this happening last month as our National Poetry Month posts traveled far and wide through various status updates, wall postings, and links.  Setting aside the troubling issues of privacy and coterie this brings up, it would be foolish to deny it as a fact of the revolution.  As Craig Santos Perez recently joked, “it’s true, facebook killed the blogger star.”  And while that’s obviously not completely true (check out our new blogroll for evidence to the contrary), we feel that the new terrain calls for a new Harriet.

Starting this week, then, Harriet will transition into a space we hope will better serve the various poetry communities we’ve come to know over the past four years.  This new version of Harriet will feature on the main page a daily news feed with links and excerpts from other outlets around the world.  We hope to point to the vibrant discussions happening online, as well as vital literary journalism, essays, and criticism. In addition to this news aggregation, we will spotlight poetry communities and events.  These features, which will appear under the name “Open Door,” will use multimedia journalism to showcase unique interactions between poets and poetry readers around the world.  Look for “Open Door” features on the The Interrupture performances in Seattle, poetry night in Iraq, and circle dancing in Iceland in the coming months.  Click on the side bar link for a more in-depth description of this new feature.

In addition to news and these Open Door features, Harriet will begin a new life on Twitter.  Each month a new poet will take over the Harriet Twitter feed and provide daily posts about his or her life, work, and interests.  Sign up to follow this month’s writer, D.A. Powell, at @harriet_poetry.

The posts and discussions of the past will all remain archived on the site, but in this new stage Harriet itself will no longer feature comments.  This isn’t a decision we’ve come to lightly, but it has become clear over the past few months that it is time for Harriet to move on from this discussion model.  The space was designed to be forward thinking and experimental, and so we look forward to continuing along that path.  We’re grateful for everyone who has participated over the past few years, and we hope that the energy and thought that went into the best comments can be put into the wide range of other available and worthy outlets in the poetry world.

We’re excited to follow Harriet on this new adventure, and we hope you are too.  Together we believe we can continue to highlight the new voices Harriet Monroe set out to find when she began Poetry back in 1912.

Sincerely,

Catherine Halley and Travis Nichols

With Harriet’s comment stream turned off, the blog’s producers encouraged us to dialogue as much as possible with each other’s posts. The results have occurred both directly and indirectly. For instance, I’m grateful to have encountered the poems by B. D. Trail that Linh recently posted. Among other things, they inadvertently connect with a previous post I made in which I talked about plans I’ve had to write about the Vietnamese American visual artist Dinh Q. Lê alongside my family’s own relation to the Vietnam War. And of course there’s been lots of back and forth over “Conceptual Writing.”

Meanwhile, oil is washing into Louisiana’s extensive wetlands, Arizona passed a heinous anti-immigration law, and literary programs in Los Angeles are on the verge of losing their funding. I published a (Warning: self-promotional link ahead!) book a few years ago that had as major themes cross-culturalism and hybridity (thank you, Craig Santos Perez, for your post discussing the long tradition of hybrid literary styles used by minority/non-white writers). My book stressed that even cultural forms seen as “pure” or exclusive usually mix different sources and influences. For instance, part of an essay in the book discussed the roots of Depression-era, white Appalachian folk music in African and African American musical traditions.

That book was written between 1998 and 2002 when globalization and the web were peaking during their first big deregulated stage (way to go, Clinton administration), and there was an accompanying theoretical-critical discourse that piggybacked on these developments (Empire, anyone?). There was also direct resistance, and if I ever get to be a really old person, and children say to me, “Wow, you were alive when the personal computer and web were invented” (the way we now say to really old people, “Wow, you were alive when the car and television were invented”), I’ll also be sure to say, “Yeah, and I’m grateful for having been alive during the Battle in Seattle.”

My point is that where I used to believe in dialoguing across what’s shared, I think the challenge now (post-9/11 is an all-too-obvious historical marker) is dialoguing across differences. For myself, Harriet this month has been a microcosm for this. How do we honor difference without it turning into indifference? How do we (and even that “we” is problematic)—as writers, human beings, citizens—speak with each other in a way that finds commonalities in differences and differences in commonalities without an accompanying cultural and political atomization (or worse)?

I recently discovered a quote in Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography that seems relevant here: “An emphasis on the dimension of being governed allows a rethinking of the political sphere as a space between the governed, whose political duty is first and foremost a duty toward one another, rather than toward the ruling power.” Sure, there are HUGE inequities in the poetry world. The posts to Harriet this month have made this clear (importantly). Yet at the same time, the ultimately horizontally networked nature of various poetry worlds (and many other cultural communities as well) is an example of the alternatively structured social system posited by Azoulay that contrasts with more vertically oriented structures of political power and domination.

At least that’s my hope.

I say this not as an enemy of Conceptual Writing, by the way. Back when I was trying to get an MFA in the cornfield flatlands just beyond the shadows of Toledo, Ohio in the late 1980s, an angry Thomas Merton biographer refused to allow me into the second year workshops and wanted me expelled from the program for my “conceptual writing” project (I use lower case because, as we now know, Conceptual Writing is a movement of the 21^st century and the future, not the late 1980s). After I threatened to bring in the ACLU during a meeting in the program director’s office, I was allowed to finish my second year of MFA via “correspondence courses” instead of attending the required workshops – Juliana Spahr once joked that perhaps I should be cited as one of the creators of the low-residency program. So, for an entire year, I wrote letters to Ted Enslin and John Taggart and John Cage, among others, and this correspondence counted as my workshop credits in lieu of the actual MFA poetry workshops, which I was barred from attending by the angry Merton biographer who was hosting them.

In addition to writing voluminous letters during my second MFA year, I participated in a poets-in-the-schools program in that small Ohio town, teaching creative and uncreative writing to third and fourth graders who otherwise had little exposure to poetry. We did exercises from Kenneth Koch’s Rose, Where Did You Get That Red and Conceptual Writing (oops, conceptual writing) projects based on the work of Jackson Mac Low. We made elementary school versions of Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks poems. And ever since then, subgenres of poetry (be they Conceptual, documentary, new or neo-formalist, whatever) have been significantly less important to me than poetry’s social function, i.e., what role poetry plays, or might play, in this world.

Just this week I was fortunate to host a visit from fellow Harrieteer Patricia Smith here on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. I invited her to read at the Rose O’Neill Literary House where I now work as well as to lead the final session in the inaugural writers-in-the-schools program that I initiated my first year here (in collaboration with the local public school system). Patricia magnificently drew words and rhymes from about 50 high schoolers for whom contemporary poetry—any poetry, to be honest—is something to which, in the words of the school’s principal and teachers, they have had almost zero exposure.

If we believe even half of what we’ve all been saying about poetry (and yes, Conceptual Writing, too, a-ethical as it claims to be) here at Harriet during National Poetry Month, there seems to me an urgent need—made more urgent by the politics of massive cuts to governments arts funding during the current economic crisis and the Draconian policies of NCLB (No Child Left Behind)—for everything that poetry claims for itself to be leveraged more fully and more regularly as a social form and in a social process. More of us in schools. More of us in elementary and middle and pre-college classrooms. More of us in after school programs. More of us in public libraries. More of us collaborating with social institutions.  More of us, maybe, like Craig Santos Perez in Guahan; more of us, maybe, like Kevin Coval in “Louder than a Bomb”.

In the end, I worry what poetry sans the larger social might eventually lead to (i.e., if a poem falls in a forest and there’s only poets in the audience to hear it, does it make a sound)?  And I urge everyone to listen to the masterpieces of no one talking—if you’re a Conceptual Writer, it can be John Cage’s 4’33″, if you’re not, listen to section 18 of Patricia Smith’s “34” (which comes in at about the thirty-six minute mark in the link/podcast). Inside those silences is everything we need, poets.

Inside those silences is need.

*

And thanks to the plural you, silenced commentators, for listening to us all month, too. We await your revolutionary and vocal return on May Day (i.e., International Workers Day), a fitting shout-out to the termination of National Poetry Month.

Instead, I’m going to post a few Machinima poems (not of my own creation) over the coming days. I was thinking of contextualizing these, even perhaps writing about Machinima to explain what it is to the uninitiated, but that would be tedious and incomplete and beside the point. You can Google it to your heart’s content. For now, here’s a wonderful, earnest mash-up of Halo, Gary Jules, and Langston Hughes.

Suicide’s Note

The shortcut-that-is-not-a-shortcut is, obviously, poetry: that deceptively brief lyric that you can’t get to the end of the meaning of—not in brisk fashion, at least. And so, like Daisy, I’m immune to the satisfactions of a poetry book’s implicit story “arc.” I do, at times, read poetry books from front to back, but so slowly that the arc just breaks up anyway. I’m busy with the small thrills; and pocketing some shells.

There is only so much a blog can take, an audience, a frame for your proper day. Is this, has this been, for anyone who wants it, a frame, a salve, a whole day? For the reviews, the activations, the stories, the journals, the multi-medic huzzahs, the clear views, the cloudy tendrils that connect us all to each other? What happens if we don’t fly anymore, grounded prehistoric terrapins. Our journey back to ships again, if the waters hold out? Slow down, is what will happen buddy…slow…down!

Orbit sage, omnipresent calliope, jesters in funeral gear, poets poets poets. What will happen to the words when a smoke of contradictions release debate as healthy ash, and our only travel is fiberwire…forcing an internet implosion, an undercurrent of hidden language redefining the human condition? Will hackers control poetry, viral bit-charms in html code? Everything on micro-chip, hyper-text will replace books because books will take too long to ship…astoundingly simplistic? Where do we put all this knowledge, all this tremendous flow of faith and carnage? Forget about family, the answer, too private and paleontific…what do I do with my daily commute once I have nowhere to go? The birds and bums that invigorate my steps? The small crimes that stand out when the big ones are so natural?

I’m not screaming for help here, am I? That happened already, a long time ago…in the words, the work…that’s where it happens, right? Where raw sensibility gets dressed in glyphics. Where secrets take on long tales imagined as language and line breaks. See, I’m not asking you about the asking, just asking the teller to be quiet, so I can hear the response…maybe affect the structure of my output. Take a look at what’s inside, using nature as a guide, to just…let go. Wait, here’s a chance to save someone…

…excuse me ladies and gentlemen, sorry to interrupt your ride, not looking for a hand-out but a leg-up, here on this side of the grass again, on your way home, ladies and g’s, please enjoy my version of mj’s out of my life, some redemption for your ears, please show ya love, anything, a quarter even a penny, you may not think a penny, but anything ladies &…

little orb. terror snort. spooner devil. tempter port. thistle brush. invasion wing. leader. wing leader. And my boy, asleep on the living room couch, with a tape recording of my voice telling him stories. And my love, asleep on our bed, with a recurring dream of us when we were flying. Why now, to feel active in the walk? To stir up the filtering capacity of a huge gathering, a nation of writers, collected under one roof for four days. Celebrating the work that does the work, the architects of change.

The molecules align for the gulp. The air doesn’t warn anymore, just says I’m here, are you? Show me how your day moves you, moves through you. Takes so much to get through a day, to put words to something approaching thought. What you must be going through, earth. Your process aligned with mine. What poem to tell when the ground won’t stop?

Over the past four years Harriet has been privileged to host a wide range of writers and thinkers on the group blog, from slam poets to sober academics to wandering translators and essayists.  A motley crew at times, but one we like to think has been representative of the national poetry scene.  What better way, then, to celebrate this year’s National Poetry Month than to have all the poets from all over the country (and, as it turns out, the world) who have made Harriet what it is over the years to come back to the space and post again?  There is no better way, so that’s what we’ve done.  We’ve invited all the bloggers back for April, and it’s a party.

Starting April 1, Harriet underwent a transformation—for one, there are now more writers in a shorter amount of time than we’ve ever had, but also, for the month of April, we are hosting these poets without comments.

This is an experiment, one we’re excited to be on as we look for ways to move the online space forward.  In lieu of comments, we’ve been happy to see the discussion between writers continue to happen in the posts themselves.  As before, the writers are free to post on whatever poetry-related topic they’d like.

So, please to enjoy Harriet‘s National Poetry Month bloggers Camille Dungy, Barbara Jane Reyes, Brian Turner, Amber Tamblyn, Ange Mlinko, A.E. Stallings, Annie Finch, Daisy Fried, Anselm Berrigan, Kwame Dawes, Mark Nowak, Jeffrey McDaniel, Major Jackson, Lavinia Greenlaw, Edwin Torres, Rigoberto González, Melissa Friedling, Patricia Smith, Rachel Zucker, Gillian Conoley, Alan Gilbert, Rebecca Wolff, Emily Warn, Kenneth Goldsmith, Wanda Coleman, Nick Twemlow, Christian Bok, Javier Huerta, Ada Limon, Linh Dinh, and many more!

-Catherine Halley and Travis Nichols

I’ll be honest—after 12 days of poetry conferences, festivals and speaking engagements, though all fulfilling in themselves, I’m poetry-ed out. I have no urge to write, read or discuss poetry. That’s a good sign, I guess, that I’m ready to get back to my distinctly unpoetic life (doesn’t Keats says that a poet is the most unpoetic thing imaginable?) of making school lunches, changing diapers, getting down on the floor on my hands and knees and looking for microscopic pieces of Playmobil (“No, not that one. The blue pirate hat. With the feather.”) It all ended on good note—last night I was at the Sarah Lawrence poetry festival, wonderfully and efficiently run by students, down at the end of a crowded dinner table with two other Harriet posters, Jeff McDaniel and Brian Turner, talking over noisy and cheerful conversation, poetry jokes and gossip. How cool is that? Still, I’m definitely ready to look up from the page for a while at the world around me.

In a way, the volcanic eruption, its disruption and interruption of travel, is a global version of that—everyone compelled for a moment to consider the splendor and terror of nature, and how things we think are in our hands, are not.

It’s hard not to think of volcanoes without thinking of Craig Arnold, who went missing a year ago—I want to say almost to the day– in late April as he climbed a volcano on an obscure island in Japan. He was working on a book about volcanoes, and was writing a blog called “volcano pilgrim.” Wouldn’t he have been thrilled by this titanic spectacle, this reminder the planet is still fiery and alive and unpredictable under our feet?

The past three years have been difficult  for my poetic generation. Several excellent poets—poets accomplished in their craft, steeped in tradition, but also more exciting and rough around the edges than “craft” and “tradition” tend to connote–born within a year or two of myself, have died, two by their own hand (Sarah Hannah and, more recently, Rachel Wetzsteon). (And only slightly older, Reginald Shepherd, whom I never met but was honored to be coblogger with briefly during my blogging stint here, and who died of cancer in 2008.) 

I’m returning from AWP where I was on a panel mourning the death and celebrating the life of Craig Arnold, who, though hardly a suicide—rather, the opposite, if that makes any sense—embraced life by flirting with danger. Last year in Chicago, I was at AWP on a panel arranged by Craig; he picked me up at the airport, and after 20-some hours of Dante-ish travel, I have never seen so welcome a smiling face. Six weeks later, he literally dropped off the edge of the world. In my pagan afterlife, I hope he will be there when I step off the boat, greeting me with the same broad grin.

Whereas travelling to the US, we were hard on the heels of dawn over the Atlantic, gaining on time, I will now be plunging headlong into the oncoming night, skirting a cloud of pumice and ash and glass, thinking of the friends I leave behind here and of the future—after all, what are one’s children?–I am hurtling towards, flying into blind.

****

P.S.  I’m editing in to say–here I am in Athens.  We would usually cross the Atlantic up around Iceland and then head south once we got to the UK, but we were able, this time around, to cross directly over and go through Europe via Portugal.   We landed in Athens, where the flight crew was worried they would be stranded and stuck as the ash drifts east and south.  How lucky that I was flying far enough south and had a direct flight!  Many on the plane, though, were trying to get to somewhere else–one family was trying to work its way to the UK via trains.

So I’m now thinking of the stranded–Ange Mlinko trying to get home to her kids and blogging about poetry and exile.  (Ange, your beautiful new book was waiting for me here!)  And as I left Brian Turner at the Sarah Lawrence poetry festival he had learned his flight to Ireland was cancelled.   I know what it is like when your heart is already somewhere else, timezones ahead or behind, and your body is grounded.  Safe travels!

So I’ve fallen behind in my life (stranded, in stasis, a guest in my parents’ home) and I’ve fallen behind in my conversation on Harriet. As a devoted reader of Lavinia Greenlaw’s poetry (wherever I can find it — we need more of her work on these shores!), I am delighted to have inspired this post, and will respond to it further. I also have to respond to Praxilla’s cucumbers.

Irony heaped on irony: I was exiled from my home in the U.S. in the midst of the economic meltdown, so went to live, against my will, in Beirut; I needed to do some April readings for my new book so I came to stay in my parents’ home for a few days; now I can’t leave my parents’ home, though my children are waiting for me in our not-real-home, in Beirut, which is essentially the only place on earth I want to be right now.

I can barely write a coherent sentence, much less a coherent post. But this is what I was going to say before I got stranded:

One of the advantages of being in the U.S. right now is that I can walk into a bookstore and pick up the issue of The Nation where this article appears, since it’s not available online. Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry is—well, something stronger than an ongoing interest of mine, but doesn’t quite qualify as an area of expertise.

There is a dialectic of wandering and homeland at the heart of Arabic poetry. The poets Jordan Davis evokes at the beginning of his article on Darwish were nomadic Bedouin, who would open their famous poems with invocations of lost love at the site of old encampments. These sites were just temporary dwellings, but erotic memories infused them with significance.

In the Levant, several cities boast of being possible candidates for “the longest continuously inhabited city in the world.” The scholar of Arabic poetry, Suzanne Pinckney, wrote in her book The Mute Immortals Speak of the ancient Arab story of “the bursting of the dam at Ma’rib.” “With the dispersal of its people, the Himyarite kingdom became a byword for a failed polity, the moral of their story preserved in the idiom tafarraqu aydiya Saba, ‘they scattered in all directions.’ … It is not surprising, then, that in Islamic terms, the heavenly garden is termed dar al-qarar, the permanent abode, and the Ka’bah at Mecca (and its heavenly counterpart) given the epithet al-bayt al-ma’mur, the (continuously) inhabited dwelling.”

A successful polis makes life more livable for its inhabitants, who in turn sustain the life of the polis. Scattering and exile constitute failure.

Still, some of the most exciting poetry in world history was written by people who were essentially homeless. This homelessness augmented the value of poetry for them—a poem was a “thing” they could essentially carry around in their heads, weighing nothing, and unable to be stolen or lost in transit. Conversely, even a temporary campsite has the heaviness of “home” if what took place there burned itself into the brain forever.

It’s the middle of Poetry Month, so I think we’re obligated to send some love to the poets and their books. This was always one of my favorite posts when I did Harriet back in the day: it’s not exactly like getting singled out from the general audience on The Price is Right, but hey, people of the profession with few monetary rewards are grateful nonetheless. I’ll be doing a few of them before my time expires.

But I do want to rant a bit here and say that we shouldn’t subscribe to the notion of the freebie for everthing or that poverty is part of our game. That only leads to a type of abuse. Case in point: when newspapers were cutting costs, one newspaper in particular, which for years had been paying a notable poet to write a weekly column on poetry, determined that “poets would do this for free!” So the column was cancelled and now poets introduce their own poems. Is there no dignity in poetry?

It’s rare for me nowadays to do a reading or presentation gratis. It’s not that I think my creative work is worth any money, but I sure as hell know my time is. When organizers approach me with the opening phrase “We’re on a limited budget” or “We really don’t have much funding” I grow wary. These are not the most persuasive arguments. What I’m really hearing is that I’m worth as little as they can afford. If they had more money they’d probably not be asking me. I think it’s more endearing when organizers are upfront and say, “We can’t offer an honorarium but we will make sure you have a warm audience” or “We can’t pay you but we will sell your books!” It’s called an exchange: and it doesn’t have to be monetary.

Since my time is more limited than ever, I pick and choose carefully. When I turn an offer down I do so graciously and I follow-up by recommending other readers. And sometimes, if the organization or institution is doing great work for the community, I say I’ll do it for no pay. It’s not charity; it’s acknowledgment.

The only time I get annoyed is when I turn an offer down and then the organizer fires back with a guilt trip that appeals to my ethnic sensibilities: “But we have a large Latino community that’s hungry for writers of color.” All the more reason to pay me–or bite me. Would this tactic ever be used on white writers? It would sound rather funny and awkward. Also, it affirms the suspicion that we writers of color are asked to read because we’re writers of color, not because we’re good poets or performers

I mean, it’s bad enough that this misrepresentation is finding itself into poems. Where did I hear that? Oh, yes, there was a white boy poet who wrote and read a poem at AWP that made reference to people benefitting from their “caramel-colored skin” and “short skirts.” But we’re supposed to think it was funny and ironic and tongue-in-cheek. Har har fucking har har. Asshole.

Anyway, this afternoon I’m off to attend a ceremony honoring high school students in Newark who participated and placed in our annual High School Writing Contest. It’s a wonderful festivity with proud parents in the front row and giddy teenage writers at the podium, most of them reading in public for the first time. It’s a nice reminder that writing thrives in communities that don’t stroke egos and sanction stupidity like the aforementioned incident. Who knows what seeds will be planted at this event? Who knows what artists will blossom from these first steps?

Actually, I think it was a very good group we were in all round—I certainly found the conversations stimulating and conducted with good-will and respect.  But maybe being the two women—and the two mother-poets—had something to do with our continuing our conversations off the blog.  And maybe being from opposite sides of the poetry “spectrum” added too—we could compare notes on our respective “scenes.”

I was able to meet Ange in New York late in our Harriet tenure for a coffee, and then later we roomed together at AWP.  (We were both on a panel organized by Craig Arnold…  more on this later.)  Then, when Ange moved to Beirut this year, I was excited to have a mother-poet-literary-friend in the neighborhood, so to speak.

In January, Ange was actually able to visit me here in Greece, and we (plus my four-month old baby girl) spent four days on a Greek island in the dead of winter. 

Trust me, a Greek island in the dead of winter is no Mama Mia experience—it can be cold and rainy and windy, ferry service is erratic if not interrupted, tavernas are closed, save maybe one for the locals.  We had to go to the pharmacy at one point for contact lens solution, and discovered the pharmacist performing minor dental surgery on a local Albanian worker.  (To go to a real doctor or dentist entails getting a boat to the next, larger island.) 

But we had a great time hanging out, building fires in the fireplace, cooking and eating, taking long walks, drinking an organic box wine called “Pausilypos” (a word straight out of Euripides, I think), which means “sorrow-cease” or “woe-stopper,” pushing the baby the 7 or eight kilometers to other side of the island.  (For which feat, apparently, we acquired some notoriety among the locals.)  Conversations were about anything from the difficulty of writing while caring for small children to po-biz gossip.  At one point we exchanged long passages of a book of free-verse we had both memorized:  Go, dog.  Go!

Literary friendships–real, live, in-person friendship (as opposed to Facebook “friend”-ship), where you store up the laughter and silence of real meetings, in sound-of-voice conversations–are nourishing and replenishing.  It can be easy to forget this in an era of energy- and time-draining social “networking.”

“Writing is never wasted. I tell my students this, urging them to throw away a draft and start again…difficult to do, to trust. I have variously taken drafts and burned them, tore them into tiny shreds, let them go…the old drafts become the texture and resonances in the new.”  — Lemon Hound/Harriet comment stream. (Sina Queyras.)

“Anyway. I got the books in the post yesterday. I felt nothing looking at the book. Nothing. The books look beautiful. But I felt empty. Like these books were a refuse of my past, and them being printed and packaged and made into commodity objects is totally separate from why I created the work. I am looking forward to having new readers, that dialogue. But I looked at the books and I thought of matchsticks, yes that’s what I thought of, matchsticks. Maybe because the books are paper. And I thought of burning them, like Artaud writing about poems, meant to be read once and then burned.” — Frances Farmer Is My Sister. (Kate Zambreno.)

“Bhanu, the red, letting it soak back in (still thinking of Pamela Lu’s de-red-ing), I think of your earlier statement about killing the character in your project, but now with this idea of the rose, your impossibility of destruction, I am reminded of how, in physics, matter cannot be eliminated, just changed.” — Harriet comment stream. (Amy Catanzano.)

“The notebook is non-reproductive. You could say it is a mutation that is never seen and only becomes available, in a more formed condition, in the book. But the book depends upon the notebook.  What’s in the notebook.  In fact, the larger the non-reproductive store of a population is, then the more rapidly its outer limit, that dotted line, evolves. So for species, if you have a large number of mutations that don’t become built structures, that never emerge, that’s good.” – - E-mail.  (Andrea Spain.)

Then I met Jarvis Fosdick at the cafe.  Jarvis is someone I can text with the words PANTHER MARTINI? and he’ll text back YES.  Jarvis makes quilts; we became friends when it turned out he had Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge‘s “Concordance” in his car.  We both had it in our cars.  In Colorado, you need a car. I hope this does not sound too boring if you are reading this in a city.  I once had a lover who texted me: NATURE KILLS AND SEPARATES.  A text I still have.  Jarvis said: “How do the words get to the page?“  We were talking about fire and water as purgative mediums.  About the painting, pre-quilt, that nobody sees, embedded beneath the layers of silver oil; the notebook – -a diagonal line across the page: its casual and brutal NO.  Jarvis said: “If you destroy the words, if they are never seen, what calls them back?” Luckily, Jarvis scrawled some rapid notes towards the end of our coffee (easily substituted for a drink) and so, apparently (according to his little yellow notebook), I replied:

“The page is an attractant.  It’s sticky.  For those of us who love theory, we get it, that the dirt and glitter of the border appears in these books in another form.  Displaced.  Projected.  So that we’re writing back to the page from these flecks.  This is not retrieval in a duration. It is entirely spatial.  So that part of it is aperture, stance…and part of it is an occult practice.  You have to prepare the page.  You have to empty it out or darken it.  And the book you write will not, perhaps, be verdant. This is not that book.  It is not “a book for you,” for example.”

……………..

The thing about theory sounds insane out of context.  Let’s just ignore that, if at all possible, and go with these questions instead:

1.How do the words get to the page?  2. What attracts them?  3. What did you burn? 4. What did you give to the river?  5. What book do you have in your car, rucksack, kitchen, suitcase, etc, in case of emergencies?  6.Where’s the aperture?  7. What regenerated?  8. What survived the fire?

: (Th.Donov. on Fr. Moten): “Translate to color.”  In the comment stream.  And looped up, like a baby.  Though if I had another baby, which would depend, quite frankly, upon meeting  a competent and ecstatic South-Asian medical professional in the next thirty days: I might put it down (the baby not a suitor) on a sheepskin rug to roll around a bit.  More than I did.

Though perhaps I’ll begin there, when I could not write. Nursing, I’d glance up at the window to the woods that pressed close around our house.  That Spring, the trees shed a thick gold powder from their thin cones.  I’d track this drift.  Once, I looked up and the whole pane was filled with a blur of wings, thirty or more  birds vibrating against the glass.  Migrating finches.  A solid color.  Yellow.

I guess, tonight, eight years later, I’ve just got these two things, which are less than notes, and if I can, as I write, I’ll convert them to questions.  For you:

1.a. Transgenerationally, what happens to the marks on a body, the marks a body received in the time or era that preceded this one?  I’ve been thinking about that silver color; how a pooling scar is in some sense genetic.  Becomes the quality of the body that passes between bodies.  Its ambience.

b. Poetry, like brainspotting/eye movement technologies, releases — in one version of a North American genre — an embedded stream of images.  These images leave the body in a session, in a sequence: which is neither witnessed nor reorganized in speech.  Stories, for example, are not repeated to another person who then recounts them, to make sure.  Make sure of what?

2.a. Color is/as a race mark.  I think of a country* as red, and diaspora as: well, perhaps you see it in your own mind at the instant I do.  That oil spill.  That wine stain.  That ink.  The acrylic paint tilting out of its container. Tracking color to its most distal fleck, questions of surveillance, carnal lithography or — love : arrived.  Not love.  Something else.  Similarly, I saw that saturation was a precursor to vibration: a red “dot,” which was not a dot, it was a body: breaking up.

b. I studied, from the psychiatric research of Dinesh Bhugra and Kamaldeep Bhui, on migration and mental illness, the strict, unexpected relationship between consistent, low-level racism (its tonal qualities, an almost imperceptible eye-roll when the Asian or Caribbean [origin] person/[British person] walks [walked] into the store) and psychosis. I tried to write an account.  My account failed.  Instead, I began to consider color, and the image, too, in a different way.  The long poem as a place, for example, to reverse the shards of ochre clay so that they re-formed an urn.

……….

“I want a book that heals as much as it separates.” — Cixous.

But the book breaks, as it always does, because it can’t be written.  What might a healing narrative look like?  And does this complicate an experimental aim, the desire to leave a place and never return?

We’re lucky to have them here for the start of the new year and the new decade.

Please check out their full bios after the jump and join us in wishing them a warm welcome.

Sotère Torregian is an American poet, born in Newark, New Jersey on June 25, 1941. He attended Rutgers University, and taught briefly at the Free University of New York and Stanford University, where he helped establish the Afro-American studies program in 1969. In the mid-1960s he was associated with the “New York School” of poets. At that time he proposed a kind of American “orthodox Surrealism” (following the dictates of André Breton), based on “reinterpretations of surrealist stands on Revolutionary perspectives in art, poetry, and theology.” He presently resides in Stockton, California.

Sina Queyras grew up on the road in western Canada and she has since lived in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, New York, Philadelphia and Calgary where she was Markin Flanagan Writer in Residence. She is the author most recently of Unleashed (BookThug), a selection of posts from the first four years of her blog. Her previous collection of poetry, Expressway (Coach House 2009) was nominated for a Governor General’s Award and a selection from that book won Gold in the National Magazine Awards. Lemon Hound (Coach House 2006) won a Lambda Award and the Pat Lowther Award. In 2005 she edited Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets, for Persea Books. She is contributing editor at Drunken Boat where she has curated folios on Conceptual Writing and Visual Poetry. She has taught creative writing at Rutgers, Haverford and Concordia University in Montreal where she currently resides.

Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guahan (Guam), is the co-founder of Achiote Press (www.achiotepress.com) and author of the poetry book from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008). He received an MFA from the University of San Francisco and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He blogs at craigsantosperez.wordpress.com.

Thom Donovan lives in New York City where he edits Wild Horses of Fire weblog (whof.blogspot.com) and coedits ON Contemporary Practice with Michael Cross and Kyle Schlesinger. He is a participant in the Nonsite Collective and a curator for the SEGUE reading series (NYC). He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University at Buffalo and teaches at Bard College, Baruch College, and School of Visual Arts. For an overview of his current projects and links to his poetry and criticism see Wild Horses of Fire.

Fred Moten lives in Durham, North Carolina, where he teaches English and African and African American Studies at Duke University. He is author of Arkansas (Pressed Wafer), In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press), I ran from it but was still in it. (Cusp Books), Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works) and B Jenkins (Duke University Press).

Bhanu Kapil lives in Colorado where she teaches writing and thinking at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, as well as Goddard College’s low-residency MFA. She has written three full-length works of poetry/prose: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works), and humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press)..

As we’ve noted before, the blog is an on-going experiment, and we’re constantly looking for ways to improve the experience.  To that end, we’re replacing the like/dislike function in the comments section with a “report this comment” button.  Moving forward, if you find a comment to be off-topic or abusive, please use the “report” button and the Harriet staff will be duly notified.  The general comments policy remains the same.

We appreciate your patience, and we look forward to a new year of fruitful discussion in 2010.

But before we get to the new year, let’s look back once more at the remarkable year that was.  Below, you’ll find the Top 10 most-viewed posts of the past year, along with the Top 10 most-viewed articles of the past year.  As you’ll see, we covered a lot of ground together.  Thank you.

Sincerely,
Catherine Halley and Travis Nichols


The Most-Viewed Posts on Harriet in 2009:

#1) “Craig Arnold” by Don Share

#2) “Plath As A Major Poet” by Annie Finch

#3) “Political Economy” by Eileen Myles

#4) “It’s Always a Bad Time for Poetry” by Kenneth Goldsmith

#5) “‘Poets Really They’re the Laziest Supidest People I Know’” by Kenneth Goldsmith

#6) “Hayden Carruth 1921-2008″ by Joel Brouwer

#7) “I Hate Poetry” by Eileen Myles

#8) “The Inaugural Poem” by Travis Nichols

#9) “Real Life” by Don Share

#10) “Post on the Post” by Eileen Myles


The Most-Viewed Articles in 2009:

#1) “Flarf is Dionysus. Conceptual Writing is Apollo.” by Kenneth Goldsmith

#2) “Show Your Work!” by Matthew Zapruder

#3) “Para Rumbiar” by Fernando Perez

#4) “Sex, Drugs, and Thom Gunn” by Tom Sleigh

#5) “Beat America” by Aram Saroyan

#6) “Keats in Space” by Molly Young

#7) “Only Connect” by Tao Lin

#8) “I Blame Blogs” by Allison Glock

#9) “The Hero and the Gunslinger” by Aram Saroyan

#10) “From a Notebook that Never Was” by Fernando Pessoa

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.

I had a blast working with Pierre on lyrics for the band’s last disc, Hattiesburg Blues (briefly #1 on the blues charts!). Part of what made the experience so much fun was the blues form — that insistent echo of repeating lines. Here’s an excerpt from Gone So Long:

I can hear the train
running down the track.
I can hear the train
running down the track.
Working any harder
Would give me a heart attack.

I also loved the story the songs tell (the unabashed narrative drive behind the songs). Here’s a glimpse from Forgot You Had a Home:

I tried to change you, but
You paid me no mind
You choose your job
Over family time
You forgot you had a home.
All you’ve got is a one track mind.

The title pretty much gives the story away in this one, but I like how this lyric updates the blues convention of a wandering man: here his eyes look only to work, not to another woman.

When Pierre writes music he has specific singers in mind. It’s cool — and challenging — to write from the perspective of other characters (in this case as a wronged woman), and even other singers (some singers like room at the end of phrases so they can create vocal “fills”; others like a cleaner line).

The new album is not yet titled, but the tracks have all been laid down. The CD should be ready in January.

Embedded mid-level to centurion’s height, one pupil, ever-seeing…nay the seers. Worming through rush hour. People…what a heave! Says the underground spray-maker while stenciling a baseball logo on a subway map. How much, son? Fifteen, pops…but this one’s got pinstripes in neon, like that gat on the moon. Snap, yo excuse me. Cell phone camera…graphic coloratura…perfect reproduction on a screen the size of twee. That’s nice, get one with ma man here. Grabs his new customer…like long-lost buds. Here ya go bro, two crazy enwhyceers. Click. Thanks man, later. Returns to biz-role. Now where was we. This one or this one. That one. Below the rumble, flickety rickster teems in survival mode. Seen many, I tell him, but this…one of a kind, beautiful. Thanks son. Thought you were, and I was. That’s right, pops. Not much younger though. Don’t tell. Later friend. Peace. Folded map in my pocket, dream catcher…stenciled in torrents (dies festus).

But I’ve got too many fires burning at one time. I’m not alone in my desire to do something old. Said pupil, levitating the anterior fontanel. When will you tell me, o Head Shrink Booty Dip? And I am scattered in the introduction of fire to hose, sir…replacing soak for light. How did you get that nit, son? Status burn, sir. Pegasus layered in entrails. Daylight on a camouflage shoe. Hoofed male-thing grunts and wants an answer. Neigh, fruity. Or to the now-release—the leave of power that finds the living animal (the truly alive) in the frame of its new. I am now venturing into the identity screw—the plug-up done in by erasure.

To sprecht-baum in the echo of a previous post…who goes fishing without a line once tethered by the catch? Tranny Schinkel (how’d ya do!). To become the coming prey aligned with quasar, serve meal for master while scrubbing hands fervently. Don’t off this, dare send incomplete surrento, del oso!  And yo, how was you gonna pay before leaving, sir. And what’s that you doing for the people, sir. And how many instants give you time, sir. And why can’t you sit with me when I’m riding on the same truck, sir. And how come the first car won’t open on my platform, sir. And when did all that grey make you safe, sir.

And who are you in the glow of the screen. Said pupil, hiding from can’t-get-a-handle-on-diamond-shaped-a-hole. No sleep, pops? Kinetic imperfections arouse inferior reflections. Lookit me, trying to get sommadat hope-closure on a brimstone. Or some ancient evenings sold below the living room, with the kitchen under the loft-bed and a curtain separating dinner from sleep. Comes the blond jet, jingo pucker. Said pupil telegrams occipital…love here, gaseous facsimile of Juno. How about one last taunt, bud? Okay. Serious? I’m sayin’...and grunt-maker bellows limbless fate. Gone, in a star’s shot. Mime bops on b-box d-lite. Irreparable witness…to base quote on litmus.

What now seems especially useful out of that experience was catching that the range of subjects in those chronicles was fairly wide, and the types of detail that Ashbery honed in on and thereby felt capable of articulating (that may sound like a simple statement, but I’ve found in my own attempts at review writing that the things one notices and the things one can get at effectively in the writing don’t always meet) were typically placed in terms of an experience of the work as opposed to an assessment. There also appeared to be a very fluid dynamic of juxtaposition running across the writing and seeing simultaneously. All of this was helpful in giving me a sense of a mind at work, one that had an especially porous barrier between diction and perception, and I took that into my reading of the poetry and found I could sustain a deeper level of attention to the choices being made syllable by syllable.

This past summer I had the good fortune of being present for an informal talk by the writer Renee Gladman that in part covered her own process of getting from the constellation that is mind into the linear progression that is a sentence. At one point she posed a question that I took to be usable in a number of internal and external conversations: “what are the conditions that make this writer relate to language in this particular way?” It’s a fabulous question, as I see it anyway, in no small part because it’s meant to allow for a gradual recognition of a mind at work without trampling on the sensibilities of writer or reader. The question also allows for open speculation as to what those “conditions” might be, which means, I think, that another body of knowledge does not have to be necessary to begin formulating an answer. The idea is to get back into the writing and re-center one’s attention on the dynamic present between mind and language.

It’s also an easier question to ask of somebody else’s work, as opposed to your own, though I suspect any kind of answer you’d get out of placing yourself under that microscope would be useful so long as you had your story right (if that’s possible). One real difficulty might be having to account for your own idiosyncrasies that are not part of some moment of programming, if you’re even aware of them (or your programming, for that matter).  Some writers have a way with upending questions meant to be searching and “fair”. I remember hearing the poet and translator Vyt Bakaitis respond to a question at a q-and-a as to whether he dreamed in English or Lithuanian by pausing for a moment, then saying, “I don’t know that I dream or think in language.” He was very serious, and I’ve been “in love” with that sentence even since.

The mass of suits and perfume crammed through corridors burrowed beneath concrete reminders, swimming the juice-pulse through the city’s membrane. Underneath all that motion, the subway vibrating all those spirits up through rock and metal. Creeley’s “Chasing the Bird”: ‘The sun sets unevenly and the people / go to bed. / The night has a thousand eyes. / The clouds are low, overhead. / Every night it is a little bit / more difficult, a little / harder. My mind / to me a mangle is.‘ My daily commute from the green of the Hudson Valley to the grey of Manhattan skyscrapers, accented during harvest time.

Our garden which began with such promise this Spring gradually suffered neglect over the summer. My wife and I, still getting our ‘green’ on after moving up here from the city, are learning a solar definition of time…at odds with the city definition I grew up with. After so many years walking to work, from the East Village to Soho, my separation anxiety from the city has settled into a complex groove, a sort of misplaced territory that has become the travel itself. The hope of permanence beyond the change…highlighted by the prospect of land, soil, earth in my fingernails. We have this huge fenced-in garden, inherited from the previous owners, which had a variety of veggies planted in the Spring, doing okay…until the exhaustion of weeding (clever tricksters how they assume shapes of neighboring plants, the easier to pass right over them) and watering proved overwhelming. And there was Tim, the lawn guy, with his giant machine mowing down the overgrown rupture for us. And there we were yesterday, looking at this dried-out wound, resolved to its conclusion, remembering that potatoes had been planted in the center. A spark of hope. Sun came out, as if saying, ‘go for it.’ The three of us, digging through the potato patch, unearthing spud after spud. Russian Fingerlings, Yukon Golds, Red Pontiacs, 80 potatoes in total…fantastic! What farmers we were…below the surface anyway. And then the crows.

Hundreds of them, a murder of crows. They’ve been gathering over the last month, in the trees and land in front of the house, just a few here and there. Until yesterday, before the potato episode, I looked out front in the morning and was shocked to see hundreds of them. A gang, I thought, before murder. I immediately recalled Ted Hughes’ book, Crow, and its alchemical allegories. One of the first books of poetry in my lunch bag thanks to Steve Cannon, who ran The Stoop workshops with Bob Holman before the Friday Night Slams at the Nuyorican…those workshops were my salve, a guiding light from stage to page. I’d forgotten about the poems in that book, how phantasmic the protaganist seemed. Battling the sun back ‘when  crow was white’ emerging defeated and black, yet managing ‘up there, where white is black and black is white, I won.’ A chilling declaration of will over being.

I worried that our home had attracted such a large number, investigated online to make sure their myth aligned with mine. One of, if not the smartest of all birds, deemed the Trickster in folk tales, signifying change. The keeper of sacred laws, able to bend the laws of the physical universe, asking you to “shapeshift” your current reality into one of your dreams. Heady stuff. So I guess they weren’t so bad, but the Hitchcock reality got me spooked. I went outside and flapped my arms a bit, just to scare them away. The intelligence of a six-foot scarecrow in a red hoodie, chasing the bird, doing my job to protect family, up here during harvest time.

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:

Anselm Berrigan‘s poetry collections include Zero Star Hotel,  Some Notes on My Programming (Edge Books 2002, 2006) and the most recent Free Cell (City Lights, 2009). The poetry editor of The Brooklyn Rail, co-editor with Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (California, 2005), and former director of St. Mark’s Poetry Project, Berrigan teaches at the Pratt Institute and Wesleyan, and directs the summer writing program at the Milton Avery Graduate School.

Amber Tamblyn, born and raised in Venice California,  has been a writer and actress since the age of 9.  In 2005, she published her debut poetry book, Free Stallion (Simon&Schuster).   She is the executive producer of  “The Drums Inside Your Chest”, an annual poetry concert event in Los Angeles   She is the co-founder of the non-profit, Write Now Poetry Society, which works to identify, inspire, record, and publish great poets, support poetry communities, produce poetry shows, increase poetry audiences and strengthen poetry organizations.  Her second book of poetry and prose, Bang Ditto (Manic D. Press) was released this Fall.  She currently lives in New York City.

Edwin Torres is the author of several books and chapbooks, including The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language, The All Union Day of the Shock Worker, Fractured Humorous, Lung Poetry and forthcoming from Nightboat Books, In The Function Of External Circumstances. He started creating text and performance work in 1988 under the banner “I.E. Interactive Eclecticism,” an invented ‘movement’ whose purposefully broad term gave his one-man variety shows a forum. In 1990, he discovered poetry at The Nuyorican Poets Cafe and The St. Marks Poetry Project. He has since collaborated with a wide range of artists, creating performances that mingle poetry with vocal/physical improvisation, visual theater, music and sound. His CD, Holy Kid (which ‘straddles a position somewhere between Finnegans Wake and I Love Lucy’-Kenneth Goldsmith) was part of The Whitney Museum’s exhibition, The American Century Pt. II. He’s received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Foundation For Contemporary Performance Art, The Poets Fund and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. His current invention, “Noricua” (mid-wifed with the Bronx-based artist collective Spanic Attack), is a noh-boricua inspired non-movement seeped in non-ideology.

Melissa Friedling is a film and video maker.  Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in festivals, galleries, and museums.   She is the recipient of a Fulbright Award and artist’s grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and the New York State Council for the Arts (NYSCA).   Her writing on film, art, and culture has also appeared in various publications, most recently as a regular reviews contributor to Flash Art International.  She currently teaches at The New School University and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

John S. O’Connor is an instructor at New Trier Township High School in Winnetka, Illinois.  He is the author of Wordplaygrounds: Reading, Writing and Performing Poetry and Room Full of Chairs, a book of haiku.  He has worked with the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, Penn State University, Holy Cross School in Brooklyn, and was director of the Hyde Park adult literacy program, Blue Gargoyle.

Howdy, folks.  Welcome to Harriet!