All posts filed under: Articles, Ideas & Discoveries

featuring recent research, events, and discoveries at the Woodberry Poetry Room

Announcing the Recipients of the 2023-2024 Creative Fellowship & Grant

Published by Christina Davis

The Woodberry Poetry Room is pleased to announce that the recipient of this year’s WPR Creative Fellowship is Rosa Alcalá for her project “Beyond Opposing Pages: Poets and Their Translators in Performance.” She will receive a $5,000 stipend and a one-week residency at the Eliot House in Gloucester, Massachusetts. It also gives us immense pleasure to announce that Gbenga Adesina has been selected as the recipient of this year’s WPR Creative Grant for his project “Re-Memory.” He will receive a stipend of $2,500. Both winners will receive year-long access to the Poetry Room (and a range of other Harvard libraries and resources), as well as extensive research support from the curatorial staff. We look forward to welcoming them during the 2023-2024 academic year. About the Project: During her fellowship, poet and translator Rosa Alcalá will study WPR audio and video recordings of poets reading alongside their translators “to explore how the relationship between poet and translator, between original and translation, and between these and the audience, is revealed beyond the page. By noting the interplay of texts …

Elizabeth Baker in the Poetry Room

SONIC ENERGIES: A Conversation with Elizabeth A. Baker

Published by Rebecca Araten

The Honourable Elizabeth A. Baker is a new Renaissance artist, whose current work explores the natural energies of sonic spaces and seeks to dismantle the hierarchies that humans have imposed on the world (and themselves). During her time as a 2021-2022 Radcliffe fellow, Baker has immersed in the Poetry Room’s audio archive and recorded several new mesmerizing pieces that combine an innovative array of electronic instruments (including one that was built specifically for her) with samples from the WPR’s archival sound recordings. The result: AGGRESSIVE PILLOW TALK, an album that aims “to liberate sound from a human-centric narrative.” Click here to access recordings of “Underbelly Law” (recorded in the Law School garage) and “Vibes Under Watchful Eyes” and “Dynamic PONG” (recorded in the Poetry Room). This April, I had the pleasure of speaking with Elizabeth about her creative process: this blog post presents selections from our hour-long conversation. Your Radcliffe project is called “Field Studies”: why did you choose to use a poetry sound archive as the “field”? The concept was originally that I would …

WPR logo and author photo of Mixon-Webster

Announcing the Recipients of the 2022-2023 WPR Creative Fellowship & Grant

Published by Christina Davis

The Woodberry Poetry Room is pleased to announce that the recipient of this year’s WPR Creative Fellowship is Jonah Mixon-Webster for his project “Promise/Threat.” He will receive a $4,500 honorarium and a one-week residency at the Eliot House in Gloucester, Massachusetts. It also gives us immense pleasure to announce that Will Dowd has been selected as the recipient of this year’s WPR Creative Grant for his project “Dreamfall.” He will receive a stipend of $2,000. The Poetry Room’s fellowship and grants program offers financial support and research assistance to poets, artists, and scholars interested in undertaking creative projects that would benefit from the resources available at the WPR archive, as well as from time spent at Harvard University as a whole. Past fellowship recipients have included Diana Khoi Nguyen & Jane Wong, Jared Stanley & Sameer Farooq, Sawako Nakayasu, Tracie Morris, Kate Colby, Dan Beachy-Quick, Erin Moure, Eileen Myles, and Fanny Howe. Past grant recipients have included: Harmony Holiday, Lindsay Turner, Tess Gallagher, and Tongo Eisen-Martin. About the Project: During his fellowship year, Mixon-Webster will work toward the …

Jane Wong installation

Announcing the 2021-2022 WPR Creative Fellowship and Grant

Published by Christina Davis

The Woodberry Poetry Room is pleased to announce that the recipients of this year’s WPR Creative Fellowship are Diana Khoi Nguyen and Jane Wong for their collaborative project, “Radical Altars to Alter.” It also gives us immense pleasure to announce that Jonathan C. Creasy has been selected as the recipient of this year’s WPR Creative Grant for his documentary-film project, “A Library of Voices: A Living History of Modern Poetry.” The Poetry Room’s fellowship and grants program offers stipends to poets, artists, and scholars to undertake creative projects that would benefit from the resources available at the WPR archive, as well as from time spent at Harvard University as a whole. Past fellowship recipients have included Jared Stanley, Sameer Farooq, Sawako Nakayasu, Tracie Morris, Kate Colby, Dan Beachy-Quick, Erin Moure, Eileen Myles, and Fanny Howe. Past grant recipients have included: Harmony Holiday, Lindsay Turner, Tess Gallagher, and Tongo Eisen-Martin. About the Project: This project focuses on altar spaces as a speculative means to ‘alter’ the entangled past, present, and future. In this project, we endeavor to create radical altars as …

COLLABORATIVE POEM PROJECT: A Living Anthology

Published by Christina Davis

In June 2020, during the early months of social-distancing, the Poetry Room sought to counteract the isolation and to generate creative engagement by inviting local poets to participate in a collaborative poem project, called “Boston Renaissance.” Over 75 poets responded from Boston (and beyond), agreeing to be randomly paired with a poetry pen-pal. Once introduced, we left the rest up to them…. This Fall, we reached out to see what had come of our experiment. Several poets responded with enthusiastic accounts of their experiences in communing with other aesthetics, rhythms, languages, histories, modes and mindsets. Some undertook erasures, some translations, some the surrealist form of the exquisite corpse. We have published some wonderful examples here, and (to honor the diversity of each vision) we have retained the original layout and font of each collaborative poem. José (Jodie) Edmundo Reyes and I (Ros Zimmerman) have found it to be a meaningful, generative exchange, regardless of outcome or intention.  We did not know one another before this exchange began, nor did we know where or how our …

FESTSCHRIFT FOR FANNY HOWE: On the Occasion of Her 80th Birthday

Published by Christina Davis

If you caught a glimpse of Fanny Howe’s calendar for Thursday, October 15th, 2020, you’d find the simple word: “B-O-R-N.” It’s as though the word were not simply a rote noun (“birthday”) but an urgent verb, a continuous commandment. “I seem to be a Verb,” as fellow New Englander Buckminster Fuller famously observed. And, in truth, it’s hard to imagine anyone more born than Fanny Howe, more wholly emerged, more naked, or a poet whose multi-dimensional knowledge and hard-earned experience have been so cloaked in humility and accompanied by such impish good humor, searing insight, and unfailing generosity. Over the course of the last eight decades Fanny has only continued to grow, to be born, to “accumulate the human….” As her 80th birthday approached, and the pandemic didn’t relent, I decided to reach out to a few friends from different parts of her life to see if they might contribute some words and photos by way of a little Festschrift. But please don’t let this limit the festivities: I encourage you to share your own fanfare …

Collage of Howe and Newspaper

(HOWE)VER: Some Thoughts on Mark DeWolfe Howe

Published by Fanny Howe

Mark DeWolfe Howe (1906-1967)—father of poets Fanny Howe and Susan Howe and the artist Helen Howe Braider—was a veteran of World War II, a renowned Harvard Law professor, a pioneering biographer of Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, an informal advisor to JFK (helping to coin the phrase, “The New Frontier”), a vigorous activist against HUAC, and a dedicated lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Steadfast in his efforts “to bring to fruition the rights granted by the 13th and 14th Amendments,” Howe helped his students establish the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Review, founded the Lawyers’ Constitutional Defense Committee, and devoted his final year of life to the desegregation of the Boston school system. On the night he died, he had just returned from hours of political organizing in Roxbury, Massachusetts. As a father, Howe encouraged his daughter Fanny to attend rallies with him at a very young age, urged her to go to Malcolm X’s 1964 speech at Harvard (which she still considers “one of the most searing events” of her life), asked her …