Nuyorican, Nuyorexican April 9, 2011: I spent the last few days at the Latino Literary Imagination Conference at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, among a community of humanities scholars who have been steps ahead of what the 2010 census revealed: that Latinos are the largest minority in the United States, that soon we will be the majority. Latino intellectuals and artists [...] by Rigoberto González

What Does a Black Poem Look Like? April 9, 2011: The speculations of contemporary thinkers on the future of humankind tend to fail and often seem silly in retrospect. Only those with the power, position and money to design that future (on hugely political, scientific and economic scales) can predict it, because they control and influence the change in and the passage of the four governmental [...] by Wanda Coleman

Literary Activism and Practicing Generosity April 6, 2011: Thank you Rigoberto González for the shout out, and for your recent post! I would also love to say a few things about "po-biz" work, riffing off that post. One of the last times I saw Rigoberto was at CantoMundo in Albuquerque. Though I’m not a Latino poet, I’d tagged along with my husband Oscar Bermeo, who was one of the program’s [...] by Barbara Jane Reyes

Can I wait until tomorrow to know this? April 4, 2011: Shiho Fukada / International Herald Tribune "The love of form is the acceptance of mortality." - Charles Simic Once again it is April, the month poetry creeps out of its hole and into the public arena with somewhat more insistence than it does during the other eleven months. It gets in the news. It even becomes news. But, in spite of what [...] by Martin Earl

Live in your own time. April 4, 2011: Rachel Zucker asks, “Is it more important to you that your poems be timeless or timely and why?” Even as I suspected this question of positing a false dichotomy, my mind couldn’t help but slice it into two dichotomous halves. One half I contemplated in political terms (maybe partly inspired by Mark Nowak’s piece). I am in a book [...] by Kathleen Rooney

A poetics of exile April 4, 2011: This is my third time blogging for Harriet, which partially brings to mind the phrase, “Welcome home.” And yet I’ve always been perplexed by what actually constitutes home. To remain on the verge of arrival is just a different way of saying liminal. I was having a conversation this morning with a yoga teacher friend who said she best [...] by Alan Gilbert

“Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of…”: On Wisconsin, Michigan, and the most famous question in the USA April 3, 2011: About a decade ago when I was researching Ronald Reagan for my verse play about the 40th President of the United States firing striking PATCO workers (“Capitalization”), I discovered that the Reagan administration had – like the great cut & paste poets and artists of history and of today – Apple X’d and Apple V’d perhaps the most [...] by Mark Nowak

Why, Hello Again! Fancy a Poem? April 2, 2011: Ah, Harriet. How much I missed thee. Though I must confess I hesitated, partly because I don’t blog, tweet, Facebook, or whatever the kids are doing these days, simply because I value my privacy. Not that I know how much privacy I have anymore. I’m still shocked when my brother, who lives in Mexico, tells me over Skype that my [...] by Rigoberto González

Can “counterpoetry” win the war in Afghanistan? March 28, 2011: PBS NewsHour correspondent Jeffrey Brown talks to Thomas Johnson, director of the Program for Culture and Conflicts Studies at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, about the role of poetry in galvanizing support for the Taliban and what it should teach US forces. Johnson recently co-authored two studies in which he found that "'the Taliban blow us [...] by Poetry News

Reading Liu Xiaobo in South Africa March 24, 2011: BOOK Southern Africa has posted videos from a reading last week organized by South African PEN and Poetry International Web South Africa. Part of a protest reading that took place in 33 countries around the world, South African writers shared their own prison writing alongside English and Afrikaans translations of Liu's "Charter 08" and "You [...] by Poetry News