I’ll be frank: I got inter­ested in the Poetry Foundation’s Har­riet blog right around the time that Har­riet got inter­ested in Chicago Review, but since then it’s become clear that the blog is the hap­pi­est new prod­uct to come out of the infa­mous Lilly millions.

Har­riet is basi­cally an Op-​Ed page for poetry, with all the atten­dant charms and frus­tra­tions of that insti­tu­tion, includ­ing bizarre pro­nounce­ments (Major Jackson’s New Athe­ni­ans Man­i­festo, Chris­t­ian Bök’s plan to spawn a lit­eral poetry plague), auto­cathar­tic provo­ca­tions (A.E. Stallings’s brief for New For­mal­ism, Bök’s chal­lenge to the enemy of his genius), and year-​end lists (e.g. by Major Jack­son and the PoFound staff).

What makes Har­riet’s suc­cess so intrigu­ing is that despite impor­tant pre­cur­sors like the back pages of Sulfur and Silliman’s blog, it was never obvi­ous that poets needed their own Op-​Ed page—private let­ters and public reviews seemed to cover the field. And yet Har­riet seems to be work­ing. Just check those com­ment boxes: there’s Ben Fried­lan­der, Joshua Clover, and many others weigh­ing in weekly.

Har­riet has fast become the most inter­est­ing thing at the Poetry Foun­da­tion web­site, but you shouldn’t let that stop you from check­ing out two arti­cles by Peter O’Leary that they’ve now posted else­where on the site. The first is a review of W.S. DiP­iero that appeared in the Novem­ber Poetry. The second is an essay on Robert Duncan’s poem, “Often I am Per­mit­ted to Return to a Meadow.” Also, today on Har­riet Michael Marcinkowski named Peter’s Depth The­ol­ogy as his pick for 2007. It’s a great choice: check it out.