Harriet: News & Community

Asking how my criticism relates to my poetry is like asking how my obsessions relate to my compulsions. It’s a question I’m much too glad to answer. I like Jhumpa...

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...

Poetry magazine was founded 110 years ago this month, and in celebration of this milestone, we’re offering our readers lots of special content and freebies.

A peek “behind the scenes” at how you, reader of the Poem of the Day, get “World Egg Day,” “National Sea Serpent Day,” and your monthly U.F.O. sighting anniversary.  

When I set out to write about my mother’s azaleas—the baroque of their annual fuschias, the decadence of their overwrought efflorescence—the azaleas remained unsplendid and sullen. The azaleas refused—or did...

In my insistence on being the poet/essayist, I had managed to make myself the hero, to assume that I knew better than the poem. Perhaps this is in the western...

I had not been writing and, truthfully, I was contemplating abandoning poetry after decades of coming back to it time and time again.

In part two, I explored how lyric poetry transforms the reader by allowing the writer to be in conversation with the world, and how the soundtrack in my book speculation,...

The Poetry Foundation is pleased to announce the addition of five new members to its Board of Trustees: Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Deborah Gillespie, Marguerite Griffin, Andy Jacobs, and Parneshia Jones.