Featured Blogger
By A. Van Jordan
Ed Roberson is a master poet. Let’s get that out of the way up front. In his early 80s, he’s 13 books in, and he continues to go strong; if he writes another 13 books...
Harriet: News & Community
A literary blog about poetry and related news
Showing 1-20 of 1,207 blog posts
- Featured BloggerBy Vi Khi NaoAbout five or six months ago, I sought a book suggestion from my father. He handed me a Vietnamese edition of Pearl S. Buck’s Trang, which had a distinctive red cover. The original...
- Featured BloggerBy A. Van JordanIn February of 1997, I exchanged letters with the poet and scholar Agha Shahid Ali. He was my teacher and “supervisor,” at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson...
- Featured BloggerBy Vi Khi NaoEditor’s Note: This is the second installment in a three-part essay. Read Part I here. I want to note the intriguing similarity between the Vietnamese word “nhà thơ”...
- Featured BloggerBy A. Van JordanSaturday… late morning, damn-near noon, and I’m thinking about influences, role models, and what I admire in the work they do. As I get older, I’ve come to admire discipline...
- Featured BloggerBy Vi Khi NaoThere are two epochic impulses (in song and poetic compositions) that classically and elliptically shape, silhouette, and direct the inventive vector of my creative ...
- Featured BloggerBy Safia ElhilloI was in Sudan this past February, on a boat in Sabaloga, cutting through the Nile and the early morning mist, blissfully unaware of the war that would take so much ...
- Featured BloggerBy Aisha Sasha JohnI am funny. Sometimes I am funny. Sometimes parts of my poems are funny. I understand this as a function of God’s love for me: a gift, this instinct, an appetite for...
- Featured BloggerBy Chen ChenGood humor is hot, and funny people are often incredibly hot. I think this is something the poet Justin Chin understood. Consider his poem “Lick My Butt,” one of the...
- Featured BloggerBy Andrea CohenLate July, on a hilltop in Umbria. I’ve carried a desk from one room to another in this 12th century tower to think about humor and poetry. And instead, I sit at the...
- Featured BloggerBy Aisha Sasha JohnIn May I got to experience poet and legend Ariana Reines read in person for the first time. Ariana is very alive. The story she told to introduce her poems was very ...
- Featured BloggerBy Chen ChenNearly everything I know about football can be summed up in two profoundly funny and funnily profound poems by Mary Ruefle “Elegy for a Game” and “Super Bowl.” Though...
- Featured BloggerBy Andrea CohenMy father used to read to me at bedtime when I was a kid. One of my favorite books was Louis Untermeyer’s anthology, The Golden Treasury of Poetry, with Blake, Dickinson, Whitman...
- Featured BloggerBy Aisha Sasha JohnThe first time I went to New York, or maybe the second, I read for the Segue series in the Zinc Bar: low stage, red velvet curtains—a windowless sexual basement, a jazz...
- Featured BloggerBy Chen Chen“Oh, he’s getting deported,” said my mother with a big, bright smile, right as my father was leaving the house to meet with an immigration lawyer. For years I’ve ruminated...
- Featured BloggerBy Andrea CohenYou haven’t seen Blazing Saddles until you’ve seen it in the hospice where your mother is spending her last three weeks, and she keeps saying, wait, it gets funnier. Madeleine...
- Featured BloggerBy Allison Adelle Hedge CokeEditor's Note: This is the final installment in a three-part essay. Read Part II here. Here we have something for you folks, we hope You enjoy it as we enter our social...
- Featured BloggerBy Alexandra Lytton RegaladoEditor’s Note: This is the third installment in a three-part essay. Read Part II here After the pandemic, I understood surrender. It was February 2020, my father had...
- Featured BloggerBy Nilufar KarimiEditor’s Note: This is the third installment in a three-part essay. Read Part II here Parts I and II of “Murmurations” focused on the colonial violence of metaphorizing...
- Featured BloggerBy Alexandra Lytton RegaladoEditor's Note: This is the second installment in a three-part essay. Read Part I here. I’m stuck in the elevator of a storage facility with four movers, and, when an...
