Posts by author
Dinah Fay
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Tip of the Hat to Colbert
Among the many tributes to the nine-year run of The Colbert Report, which aired its final episode last week, comes Vulture’s tip of the hat on behalf of “book nerds.” The Colbert Report interviewed two authors a week, on average,…
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Buy Bishop’s North Haven
If you happen to know a poet with $130,000 burning a hole through his or her pocket, alert them at once: Elizabeth Bishop’s home in Nova Scotia is up for sale. Although Bishop lived there for only a few years,…
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Blake’s Book of Job
In addition to his place in the canon as a seminal Romantic poet, William Blake was an accomplished visual artist. In a write-up for Hyperallergic, Allison Meier shares the fruits of her visit to see Blake’s 21-panel series of engravings…
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Behind the Scenes with Beckett
In a piece for the Times’s Sunday Book Review, Paul Muldoon leads a fascinating and warm-hearted expedition through the letters and poems of Samuel Beckett, new volumes of which will become available in the coming months. One could argue that…
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Duchamp, [Redacting], and Readymades
The latest release from Gauss PDF, Marcel Duchamp’s The [Creative] Act, turns the Dada mastermind’s short lecture into a madlib-like text, rife with lacunae for reader participation and the sort of “No Image Available” error messages that indicate image errors…
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Official Bards for the Bay State
All but six US states have official Poet Laureates; the Massachusetts House of Representatives is poised to cut that number down to five. Although many individual cities appoint poets to these literary ambassador positions, the larger Commonwealth has never passed…
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Genealogy of Hobbits and Hiawatha
Through his research for an article for the journal Tolkien Studies, John Garth believes he has discovered a surprising source text for several episodes from Middle Earth: Longfellow’s trochaic epic, “The Song of Hiawatha.” The dragon Smaug has long been…
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Remembering Poet Claudia Emerson
The poetry community has been mourning what seems like an exceptional number of losses in the past few months; the New York Times remembrance of Claudia Emerson marks yet another. Emerson won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2005 collection The…
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Rehabbing Poets’ Broken Records
New audio preservation technology just opened a treasure trove at Harvard: thousands of recordings of influential poets reading their work, once feared too deteriorated to salvage, are now being recovered. As WBUR reports, the IRENE program takes high-res 3D photographs…
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A Girl’s Guide to Activism
A seven-year-old in California scored a big win for the little guy (or, in this case, the little girl) by convincing Abdo Publishing to stop marketing their Biggest, Baddest Book of Bugs exclusively to boys. Young reader Parker Dains took…
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Prose on the Prose Poem in Poetry
In the December issue of Poetry Magazine, reprinted on the Harriet Blog, Molly Peacock shares an extended meditation on the prose poem. Before troubling the easy dichotomies often ascribed to the parent genre, Peacock lays them out: “Poetry seeks to…
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The Year of Vaping
The Oxford Dictionaries “Word of the Year” has been announced, and young people around the world will be called upon to explain the word “vape”—and its significance as part of cultural shifts surrounding marijuana and tobacco—to their older relatives in…