Harriet: News & Community

In 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 College,...

Editor’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” for poet and “nhà thờ”...

Saturday… 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,...

There are two epochic impulses (in song and poetic compositions) that classically and elliptically shape, silhouette, and direct the inventive vector of my creative and (literary) life. The pre-war music,...

I 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...

I 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...

Good 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 hottest and funniest poems...

Late 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...

In 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...

Nearly 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 neither explicitly mentions it, these poems...