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Poetry Put Its Hands Up, But Kenny Goldsmith Shot It Anyway
File Under: You Couldn’t Make Up Something This Stupid…. This past weekend, at a conference called Interrupt 3 at Brown University, poet Kenneth Goldsmith read Michael Brown’s St. Louis County autopsy report as a poem. Goldsmith is known for his conceptual, “uncreative writing” practices, which involve working exclusively with preexisting texts — altering them, remixing them, appropriating and repurposing them without credit to the original sources. This was the substance of his performance on Friday night in Providence: he read a remixed and slightly altered version of the official autopsy report for Brown, the teenager killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, last summer.Read More
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Me and Julio Down by the Playa
Julio Cortázar Per my annual habit of reading Spanish masters in México, I’m indulging in another Archipelago Books offering of Julio Cortázar, his early-but-posthumously-published Diary of Andrés Fava. The translation by Anne McLean is smooth, witty, obscure where it needs to be, and altogether delightful.Read More
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China Doorknobs
Anthony Madrid is by far the most rewarding-to-read blogger on Harriet these days. One feels like each of his posts is a full bucket pulled up from a pouring brook: the taste is good and complex and one can’t forget that the brook is flowing on as one reads—that the bucketful is merely a sample. In this post, Madrid offers a wonderful quote from H. L. Mencken; I only wish he’d documented where it came from: The old-time poet did not bother with theories.Read More
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
