Harriet: News & Community

This morning I begged the beautiful and brilliant poet Catherine Barnett (author of Into Spheres Such Perfect Holes Are Pierced) to meet me in the lobby of the elementary school...

Kwame, I never said that nor do I believe it. Instead, I quoted Brian Eno as saying, "Art is everything we don't need to do," in which Eno was addressing...

Lucille Clifton’s poetry is a gift. There is no question in my mind about this. Yet when I think of Lucille Clifton, I realize that I think of the two...

When you do as many readings as I do, in venues from crumbling speakeasies to Japanese stadiums; when you stand in front of countless classrooms trying to inspire the younguns...

Without the academy, as I poet I don't exist. I have almost no readership (thinkership) outside the academy. This is not a choice of mine: it's is a condition that...

When I was in my senior year of college, I was dating the granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and I found myself wanting to address their execution in a...

I’ve been thinking a lot about my mom recently. Maybe it’s all the Mother’s Day hoopla or maybe it’s because I cannot consider the question of why I enjoy...

My mother is more than 70 years old. She is not sickly or forgetful or frail, but she is strange. Annie Pearl Smith was part of the great early 1950s migration...

At Paper Thin Walls, Poetry Foundation writer Brandon Stosuy on Lexie Mountain Boys: "The act skirts a line between spastic theater and avant-savant sound poetry slam (dancing)—sometimes it works, other times...

In an earlier post of a few days ago ("Political Poetry"), I spoke of political poetry and I asked folks to share some of the political poems that they admire...