Harriet: News & Community

Part of the appeal of poetry as criticism, which I discussed in my last post, is the idea of a poem that can explain itself, with no intervention needed from...

The Waste Land’s afterlife was a self-fulfilling prophecy strategically crafted by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, two writers who sought to meaningfully connect with what they thought of as the...

I was a poet long before I even knew what a critic was. Children may be taught, as I was, to read poems and to write their own, but nobody...

At New York Review of Books, Edward Mendelson writes about a moment when W.H. Auden and editors at Random House argued extensively about whether or not to give a platform to...

In communities of poets, one can sometimes perceive a faint hum of grumbling ambivalence about the fact that many of us fell in love with, were made smart about, and...

My lover asks for a bedtime poem, and, as with anything she requests when we’re in bed, I’m more than willing to comply. This irregular ritual of ours offers an...

Water assumes the shape of its container. Water that overspills its container immediately assumes the shape of the universe. Meaning also assumes the shape of its (semiotic) container. But to fulfill...

I can’t be the only one who’s looked at Duchamp’s “Fountain” and thought what beautiful things toilets are. The sinuous, vaguely anthropomorphic shape; the porcelain’s serene shine; the holes in...

Evan Kindley writes about Ezra Pound and the insanity defense in relation to Daniel Swift's recent book, The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound. To provide some background, Kindley begins,...

At Fresh Air, Maureen Corrigan meditates on Ezra Pound's controversial status in the literary canon and his relevance within recent debates regarding artistic merit and bad behavior by men. Her...