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My Time of the Month April 21, 2011: Today I was walking in Trader Joe’s and one of the women who works there smiled at me, and I realized it was that time of the month again. Let me explain. Every month or two, I go to a barbershop and have my hair and beard buzzed down to a stubble with an electric razor. Then I pretty much let it grow wildly for a month or two, until my beard [...]
The Untimeliness of the Xenotext April 10, 2011: Rachel Zucker asks us to consider whether or not we might prefer our poems to be either timeless or timelier. Historically, avant-garde poets have often called into question any reliable standard of value for excellence, leaving the field open to a permissive, if not nihilistic, attitude, in which no poetry seems adequate to any time, be it [...]
The future of poetry: Rapid 3D prototyping! February 14, 2011: We've seen video poetry all across YouTube, JavaScript navigations of Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, and even a few Prezi poems, so what does the next advancement in technology mean for poets? ALA TechSource explores what the terrain might look like if libraries adopted 3D printing and fabrication technology. This would be a natural [...]
Essays for Robert von Hallberg February 1, 2011: Poetry magazine recently received this welcome dispatch from Chicago Review, with links to PDFs of knockouts from their latest number. From CR editor, V. Joshua Adams: Readers of Harriet may be interested in two essays on contemporary poetry from the latest issue of Chicago Review (55:3—4). In "Apocalypticism: A Way Forward for Poetry," [...]
Is Dante the father of modern physics? January 18, 2011: If modern physics got its start in the Scientific Revolution, and the Scientific Revolution sprung from Newton's ideas, and Newton's ideas marinated in Gallileo's theories, and Gallileo's theories generated from Dante's Inferno, then, yep, Dante is the father of modern physics. Also the father of modern physics? Kevin Bacon. The Boston Globe [...]
The emotional hang-ups of Google’s poetry translation software January 17, 2011: Google researcher Dmitriy Genzel talks to NPR's All Things Considered about the advancements in training artificial intelligence to recognize, translate, and maintain the characteristics of poetry. Last week, IBM pitted its computer Watson-- programmed to understand human speech-- against Jeopardy! champions and carried the day (or at least the [...]
The short-winded poetry of Windsite January 4, 2011: If you've been sitting on a brilliant idea for a user-generated experiential meteorology web project, Windsite just beat you to it. Dedicated to merging the immediacy of the internet with the human experience of wind, it attempts to counteract the reduction of life to pieces of data. Along with this simplification, comes the numerical measuring [...]
If poetry’s in your genes, put some genes in your poetry December 29, 2010: Have all of the 580,000 locations in your genome been itching to go to the Personalized World Medicine Conference? 23andme, the company that maps your DNA when you mail them a box of saliva, is hosting a poetry contest to get you there. Chances are good that if you're passionate enough about genetic medicine to want to attend, you won't have any [...]
Why writers won’t surrender to the electronic paper trail December 22, 2010: Besides reading James Somers' essay in The Atlantic, you can play back and review the entire process of writing it here. Long before word processors overwrote each step on the way to a final product, T.S. Eliot's meticulous "versioning" of "The Waste Land" allowed scholars to peer into the writer's process when all of the drafts, notes, and [...]
National Science Foundation experiments with Poet Pops December 9, 2010: On KUER, Utah Poet Laureate (and former Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute director) Katharine Coles reports from Antarctica, where she is currently based as part of the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. The program, designed "to enable serious writings and works of art that exemplify the Antarctic heritage of [...]