Harriet: News & Community

This late in the day, the panel topic seems too close in nature to the first two. Isn’t it revealing that three out of the four panels dealt with some...

James Tate: Does a poet ever strive for obscurity? I can’t think of one. Kay Ryan: Who needs more? [laughter] Carl DennisPhillips: No one is deliberately writing so no one would understand...

I was second-guessing including this entry/ anecdote on Elizabeth Bishop, but Alicia’s entry inspired me to go ahead and do it. Imagine, when I first came across Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,”...

Denise Riley isn't for everyone. It's easy to recommend-- though it has very little to do with poems-- her first book, a historical study which asks why Britain cancelled in...

I started re-reading Keruac's On the Road during our travels, not so much because we are on the road (travelling in a rented car to hotels with a three-year old...

The aubade is a poem about lovers parting in sorrow at dawn, and it’s a form dating back to the Elizabethan era, though I suspect this universal act of separation...

“Emily Dickinson was one of the three most intelligent people who ever took up writing poetry.” I’m pretty sure that’s an exact quote. It was Galway Kinnell talking. Like Simic before...

Should I bring my laptop,” Ange asked. “Sure,” I shot back in email, wondering if it was a Mac or PC? We, like you, first meet Harriet's bloggers on...

At the suggestion of my editor Emily, I attended the Academy of American Poets’ Poets Forum at Marymount College on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. With no traffic, it’s an hour’s...

One of my favorite poets, Randall Jarrell, liked libraries more than most of us do or could: he sometimes implied he had spent his whole childhood in them, and wrote...