Annie Finch

An Evening with Forugh: Iranian Poetry Night

Forugh Farrokhzād

Travis’s post and recent events call me to describe something I’ve been wanting to post about for a while. One of the most moving evenings I’ve had as an American poet occurred in Farsi.

06.18.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (25)

Annie Finch

Sadness and Peepers

I’m in my tent. I woke up hearing peepers and a big bullfrog. I can’t believe there is wireless in this campground. It’s a KOA in Woodstock, New York. I’m here with my

06.06.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (36)

Annie Finch

Women’s Work: The Poetic Justice Forum

My poetry trip to the U.K. this winter was marked, among many wonderful experiences, by something more sobering: a string of stories poured out to me by women poets about gender imbalance and discrimination in prizes and book and journal publishing at the top levels of the British poetry world. While I am a natural idealist and would prefer

06.05.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (92)

Annie Finch

Plath as a Major Poet: A Thread from WOM-PO

A topic raised recently on the wom-po (discussion of women’s poetry) listserv caught my eye, and I got permission from the poster, Christine Hamm, to raise her question here on Harriet:  “Why is there so much resistance to seeing Sylvia Plath as a major poet”?

04.02.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (306)

Martin Earl

One Big Self: Finding The Noble Vernacular (C.D. Wright / Deborah Luster)

Much of what passes for poetry these days is written by talented pretenders, or pretending talents. They are the products of a system which turns out poets as ably as medieval Italian city-states turned out artisans: legions of well-trained technicians who made careers out of duplicating the brush strokes of their masters. Their task was to insure that production levels were maintained in the ateliers of the day and that the decorative needs of the aristocracy were met. Public buildings, houses and city squares were adorned with works that, in most cases, served to reinforce the status quo by raising the excellent poses and good deeds of a landed and arrogant ruling class to emblematic exaggerations and symbolic heights. Sometimes, by its refusal to stray from the status quo, both in terms of the various formalisms of the day and the subjects (or mere aural content in some cases) that it indefatigably reiterates, contemporary poetry seems to provide this same service, essentially a decorative function, for the dwindling literate classes of our times.

04.02.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (10)