Harriet Tarlo

Harriet Tarlo is a poet and academic who lives in Holmfirth, West Yorkshire, and teaches creative writing at Sheffield Hallam University. Poetry publications include Love/Land (REM Press, 2003), Poems 1990–2003 (Shearsman Books, 2004), and Nab (Etruscan Books, 2005). Her poems about the Cumbrian coast appeared with Jem Southam’s Clouds Descending photographic exhibitions at the Lowry Gallery, Salford and Tullie House, Carlisle, in 2008–2009. Tarlo also writes academic essays on modernist and contemporary poetry with particular attention to gender and landscape and environment. Essays in books appear in critical volumes published by Edinburgh University Press, Salt, Palgrave and Rodopi. Recent critical and creative work appears in Pilot, Jacket, Rampike, English and the Journal of Ecocriticism (JoE). Tarlo edited a special feature on “Women and Eco-Poetics” for How2 vol. 3, no. 2, and The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry for Shearsman Press in 2011. She is currently preparing a new collection of poetry with the same press. Parts of her critical-creative work in progress on the field in British and American open form poetry appear in the latest edition of Fire and in a new book on Placing Poetry, due out with Rodopi in 2012.

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Radical Landscapes

'The page is slowly turning black'

Recently in Jacket2

Every flower a reminder (PoemTalk #202)

Harryette Mullen, "Chasing Dirt"

PoemTalk

From left: Laynie Browne, Harryette Mullen, Simone White

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Simone White, Harryette Mullen, and Laynie Browne joined Al Filreis to talk a six-page section of Harryette’s new book Open Leaves. The book, subtitled “poems from earth,” was published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press of London in 2023. The section discussed by the group is titled “Chasing Dirt” and consists of two epigraphs, a prose-poem paragraph, a mixed media artwork titled Silent Talks by Tiffanie Delune, and a sequence of three-line poems across four pages of four poems each. Since PennSound’s Harryette Mullen author page did not yet include a recording of Harryette performing poems from Open Leaves, we asked her to read “Chasing Dirt” at the start of the recorded session. The pages from Open Leaves are available HERE.

November 20, 2024

The &vs. (andverse) of the Gurlesque

Becca Klaver

Electric Gurlesque, like the first edition of the anthology, is centered on an idea of the Gurlesque as a feminist aesthetic that emerges most prominently in American women’s poetry at the turn of the 21st century. The braided strands of the Gurlesque — which the subtitle of the first edition identified as “grrly,” “grotesque,” and “burlesque”— come together to form one complex aesthetic strategy, and also suggest the diverse avenues of inquiry pursued by the essayists in this section.

The following is the Preface to the Essays from the new anthology Electric Gurlesque published by Saturnalia Books in 2024. The complete anthology can be found here.

November 19, 2024

Anna de Noailles, translated by Chris Mustazza

Charles Bernstein

Anna de Noailles (1876-1933) was one of the most famous French poets of her day. While her work has mostly fallen out of fashion, I’ve opted to translate this poem because it was one of (if not the) first poems ever recorded to sound by a female poet. Her recording at the Sorbonne, made in the early 1920s, causes this ars poetica to realign itself with the performance of the poem rather than the written text. It speaks to pertinent questions of posthumous reception and the archive, through a light, playful, sexual mode: the nachlass as seduction. --Chris Mustazza