Harriet: News & Community

The funny thing is that had I gotten a better A Level grade for History than I did for English I would probably not be a poet. Everyone, including me,...

On the BBC World Service early this morning there was a cluster of talkers, apparently of some note (I don’t remember who they were—it was four-fifty in the morning, Two...

Peter O'Leary sent this note today: "The truly terrific Chicago poet Ralph J. Mills, Jr. passed away over the weekend. Here's a link to his obituary in the Tribune today. And...

How did Yours Truly become a synonym for I? Yours Truly did not go on vacation. Yours Truly is the last blogger standing on Harriet during these dog days of...

Courtesy of the website wood s lot, I found this site by the trenchant name The Business of Emotions. "Americans now buy their emotions and experience them as they consume...

A few months ago I tried to quit the blog. I emailed the po foundation honchos and my fellow bloggers to say I didn’t think I had it in me...

Kwame's post (below) got me thinking about, of all things, motherhood. Because he brings up our cultural identities as something both constructed (a narrative) and a given (we can't choose...

Warning: There is poetry somewhere in this blog, but you are going to have to dig deep to find it… The things I am reading and the things I am writing...

Peter Gizzi's The Outernationale is magnificent. It gives me what I need from poetry -- a reminder to feel alive -- even as it addresses a bleak civic landscape....

...and I'm exhausted. But I'm sitting in front of my laptop, bleary-eyed, listening to a muted Lightnin' Hopkins and staring at the 17th line of a poem that I've been...