Harriet: News & Community

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg concluded his 9/11 speech with a line from Matthew Shenoda's poem, "Donkey Carts and Desolation:" "Ingenuity is the notion of building/On a foundation made from...

Brenda Shaughnessy chews up language and spits it out—in a good way.  At least, that's Jazzy Danziger's take on Shaughnessy’s poem “Epithalament”  (a perversion of “epithalamium," the lyric ode written for...

In the Guardian, William Boyd plays poetry tourist, tracking Elizabeth Bishop's movements through Brazil. In gemlike paragraphs, he provides observations about her adventures, characteristics, clothing. This article is the first...

Rebecca Ginsberg, Buba, wife of Pincus, laundry-man..." Allen Ginsberg; Courtesy of Gary S. DavisAllen Ginsberg was also, it develops, a photographer. Quite a good one. If you live in the...

Lorin Stein, the new editor of the Paris Review, had promised "secret guest contributors" would read at his first issue launch this Saturday. Harriet the Spy could not wait to...

Nigerian poet, professor and editor Ismail Bala Garba talks all things poetry, including why a good poem can be about a mundane subject, the problem with self-publishing, and why he's still letting...

Over at the Huffington Post, Anis Shivani asked several poets about the state of American poetry. Is it overrated, underrated, overstuffed, undernourished, overwritten, or undercooked? More particularly, he wonders:...

Robert Pinsky shares his poetic preferences with the Boston Globe in this to-the-point rapid-fire interview. Pinsky has a penchant for classic old-school poets, and admits he'd bring "Homer, Horace, Shakespeare,...

A Diwata is a nymph or fairy-like creature within Philippine mythology. It is also the title of Barbara Jane Reyes' latest collection of poetry —what Rigoberto González calls a "mythological...

The Southern Critics: An Anthology, edited by Glenn C. Arbery, provides ample space for literary Southern voices to sprawl. One section is devoted entirely to poetry criticism soaked in Southern...