Harriet: News & Community

I start reading poetry books at their end, which is also what is before the book, proceed and precede blurred. By this I mean that as always, poetry fucks with...

I have often wondered whether being a translator might be the worst possible way to finance my writing addiction. Not only is the income earned through freelance translation highly unpredictable,...

§  Aphoristic form is deceitfully simple. It’s a prose-poetic form with an air of philosophic certainty, in which particularities are supposed to open onto universals, even though connecting them with...

Opening scene: A translator is in her office, talking on the phone. She is surrounded by piles of books and papers, in a haze of smoke from the cigarette she...

Poetry, in my post of last month, was rather like a personified being than a branch of language art. “Poetry made me do this,” I came close to saying, “poetry...

Sounds and resonances are liquid: they can be poured like wine, they can flood the soul, they can cross borders uncontained and unpoliced. As I drive between Tijuana and San...

I’m pleased and anxious to be writing on Translation and Poetry for Harriet. Pleased, because the theme unites two major preoccupations of mine, and anxious for the same reason, plus...

Often I wonder why anyone ever reads anything that’s not informative. Poetry is usually not cool animal facts, it rarely explains the economy to us, let alone how to replace...

Why is it that the encounter with a text, which stimulates what must be thinking—an alert fullness; the wary thrill of standing a little beyond oneself; emergent novelty; the threat...

A longtime mentor and friend, the poet and visual artist Truong Tran has gifted me many things, from guidance towards my first book (“Write the book as if you are...