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.

The new Chicago Review—click here to buy the issue—includes a suite of arti­cles that dis­cuss gender rep­re­sen­ta­tion in poetry pub­lish­ing. The arti­cles include “Numbers Trouble” by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young and a response by Jen­nifer Ashton, as well as a short note on gender rep­re­sen­ta­tion in lit­er­ary mag­a­zines that I wrote with Joshua Kotin. (UPDATE: The arti­cles are now avail­able as PDFs at the CR web­site.) “Numbers Trouble” is a response to an ear­lier arti­cle by Ashton pub­lished in Amer­i­can Lit­er­ary His­tory and enti­tled “Our Bodies, Our Poems.” Ashton’s arti­cle was itself a response, at least in part, to Spahr and Young’s “Foulipo,” which was per­formed at the 2005 noulipo con­fer­ence in Los Angeles.

The Poetry Foundation’s Har­riet blog pub­lished a spate of posts yes­ter­day dis­cussing the arti­cles. Har­riet editor Emily Warn intro­duces the posts and offers her own take on the ques­tions raised. Har­riet blog­gers Ange Mlinko and A.E. Stallings also com­ment. (Update, 12/3/07: Stephen Burt has con­tributed a response at Har­riet as well. Update, 12/5/07: Click here for Burt’s second response.)

Update [2/29/08]: “Bachelorettes, Even,” a ver­sion of Jen­nifer Scappettone’s response to Jen­nifer Ashton’s “Our Bodies, Our Poems” (both of which were first pre­sented as talks at 2006’s “How To Read. What To Do” con­fer­ence at the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago) has now appeared in Modern Philol­ogy 105. Scappettone’s response was the first to make the con­nec­tion between Ashton’s argu­ment and Spahr and Young’s “Foulipo.” The arti­cle is also notable for immor­tal­iz­ing this blog in a foot­note in an aca­d­e­mic journal.

The Spahr/Young and Ashton arti­cles have been dis­cussed on sev­eral other blogs as well. I’ll try to keep an updated list of sub­stan­tive com­ments here. The list so far: