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 …

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 …

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 …

The Harvard Square Lit Map is an invitation to explore the literary history of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and to experience “the presence of a plurality of times.” The Lit Map is a collaborative atlas created by Lynn Sayers and Chris Lenney (of Lamont Library), in conjunction with the Woodberry Poetry Room. We also wish to thank the countless poets, scholars, and members of the general public, who contributed immensely to our knowledge of historic venues and creative locales: their names are listed below the map-in-progress. The map represents only a small portion of the total artistic activity in the vicinity and is in no way indicative of the breadth and depth of what has been created here. It is simply “the mooring of starting out,” as John Ashbery would say, a way for you to begin your literary exploration…. In creating this map, we also wish to acknowledge the Massachusett, Pequot, Wampanoag, and other Indigenous peoples, who have long inhabited this land—with their profound histories, cultures, and voices. Please assist us in expanding our understanding of the area by notifying us …