Eileen Myles

POST ON THE POST

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.

08.24.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (164)

Rebecca Wolff

Sagacity is Bloggody

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,

08.10.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Rebecca Wolff

Getting Meta

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.

07.23.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Travis Nichols

Please Welcome Joel, Rebecca, and Tonya

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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We’re very pleased to have you here.  Welcome!

07.08.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)

Catherine Halley

A Few Harriet Statistics

How the Air Force Handles Blog Wars

Ten years ago, I ran a site for teenage girls with over 4 million registered users. We had at least a million teenage girls posting on our discussion boards, especially the poetry board. Every once in a while, we’d have to “bozo” one of the mean girl commenters, which meant she could keep on posting till she was blue in the face, but she was the only person who saw her posts.

For a minute there, when the Harriet comments section resembled a roller derby, we thought about bozo-ing a few of you. Instead, we thought we’d share a few Harriet statistics and pose a question.

Harriet accounts for about 3% of poetryfoundation.org traffic. Guess what gets the most traffic by a long shot? Love poetry. More on that in another post.

Here in our little Harriet pond, we had 39 blog posts in the month of March, which generated about 829 comments. About 30% of those comments where generated by just three people. We don’t have hard data for how many people are on Harriet each month, but it’s certainly more than three. Yet too often, it seems, the comments section devolves into a spitting contest between a small handful of people.

We’d love to hear what a conversation between a larger group of poetry lovers would sound like. To that end, we’re going to be experimenting with the format of the comments section in the coming weeks. In the meantime, if you have ideas for how to open up the discussion here, please feel free to share them.

04.24.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (161)