Harriet: News & Community

I am funny. Sometimes I am funny. Sometimes parts of my poems are funny. I understand this as a function of God’s love for me: a gift, this instinct, an...

Good humor is hot, and funny people are often incredibly hot. I think this is something the poet Justin Chin understood. Consider his poem “Lick My Butt,” one of the hottest and funniest poems...

Late July, on a hilltop in Umbria. I’ve carried a desk from one room to another in this 12th century tower to think about humor and poetry. And instead, I sit...

In May I got to experience poet and legend Ariana Reines read in person for the first time. Ariana is very alive. The story she told to introduce her poems...

Nearly everything I know about football can be summed up in two profoundly funny and funnily profound poems by Mary Ruefle “Elegy for a Game” and “Super Bowl.” Though neither explicitly mentions it, these poems...

My father used to read to me at bedtime when I was a kid. One of my favorite books was Louis Untermeyer’s anthology, The Golden Treasury of Poetry, with Blake, Dickinson,...

The first time I went to New York, or maybe the second, I read for the Segue series in the Zinc Bar: low stage, red velvet curtains—a windowless sexual basement,...

“Oh, he’s getting deported,” said my mother with a big, bright smile, right as my father was leaving the house to meet with an immigration lawyer. For years I’ve ruminated...

You haven’t seen Blazing Saddles until you’ve seen it in the hospice where your mother is spending her last three weeks, and she keeps saying, wait, it gets funnier.  Madeleine Kahn, Cleavon Little,...