Joan Harvey’s fiction, poetry, essays, and translations have appeared in numerous literary journals. She has won prizes for both poetry and fiction, and work of hers has been read on the radio in Manhattan and Aspen, Colorado. Recently a piece she wrote about the election, “Ghost Ship of State,” was performed as a small opera. She is a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and lives in the hills above Boulder, Colorado. Email: thomyris [at] gmail.com
by Joan Harvey Nightfall. Outside a low elongated cave entrance a small group of humans sit waiting on stone ledges facing the dark aperture. Kestrels begin to soar close in the late evening sky. Snakes too are gathering below, we’re told, but they aren’t in view. This is Bracken Cave, 20 miles from San Antonio,…
by Joan Harvey a skilled Vigilant, flexible, Unemphasised, enthralled Catching of happiness from Born Yesterday by Philip Larkin, quoted in Adam Phillips, One Way and Another But the fear’s so strong it leaves you gasping No way to last out here like this for long ‘Cause everywhere I go, I know Everywhere I go, I…
by Joan Harvey If you can get the old voting against state-subsidized healthcare, and the poor voting in favor of cuts to inheritance tax, then democratic capitalism really is workable after all. —Malcolm Bull As the objective view of the world recedes, it is replaced by intuition as to which way things are heading now.…
by Joan Harvey Our expectations sculpt neural activity, causing our brains to represent the outcomes of our actions as we expect them to unfold. This is consistent with a growing psychological literature suggesting that our experience of our actions is biased towards what we expect. —Daniel Yon Because consciousness is something common to all of us,…
by Joan Harvey i couldn’t cry out because my mouth was full of beast & plunder Kamau Brathwaite A pregnant sperm whale washes up on the beach in Sardinia carrying a dead fetus. 49 pounds of plastic in its stomach Iguanas…
by Joan Harvey What made him a great poet was the unprotesting willingness with which he yielded to the ‘curse’ of vulnerability to ‘human unsuccess’ on all levels of human existence—vulnerability to the crookedness of the desires, to the infidelities of the heart, to the injustices of the world. —Hannah Arendt on Auden[i] Sometimes we…
by Joan Harvey In the dark times Will there be singing? There will be singing. Of the dark times. (Bertolt Brecht) I like the idea of Industrial music as a kind of corrupted psychedelia – the same derangement of the senses, but the childhood innocence has gone. (Comment on YouTube of Throbbing Gristle’s Discipline) I…
by Joan Harvey Where will you be in 2045?. . . All of us right now can testify Take a stand, radical man, oh —Prince Rogers Nelson “2045 Radical Man” Amid all the despair about our future (and there are plenty of reasons to be despairing), it also seems as if finally, maybe, the times…
by Joan Harvey We are all the animals and none of them. It is so often said that poetry and science both seek truth, but perhaps they both seek hedges against it. —Thalia Field A handsome bearded man leads a row of eager young ducklings who mistake him for their mother. Many of us recognize…
by Joan Harvey Like most people of a certain age, at any one time I have the unfortunate experience of knowing several people, some close, some not, who have cancer. It has become standard for the friend or spouse of the ill person to join one of the many message boards devoted to the subject…
by Joan Harvey I no longer remember how or when I stumbled on Concertzender.nl, an internet radio station located in Utrecht, but it has been with me through changes in location, partners, through raising a son: it has been with me from before they had an English translation on the website and before people from…
by Joan Harvey …
by Joan Harvey Colorado has been a purple state so long that the last time the Democrats had all down ballot State offices, the State House, and State Senate was in 1936. We’re a cowboy state. On the map we’re a sea of red with a tiny blue area to the east of the Continental…
by Joan Harvey Even though I knew better, when I was told I could get free magazine subscriptions with my minimal airline miles that would otherwise expire, I succumbed. Of course I didn’t need any more reading material, and I was fully aware of the waste they’d create, but I allowed myself to be lured…
by Joan Harvey Somewhere on an island with sun and shade, in the midst of peace, security and happiness, I would in the end be indifferent to whether I was or was not Jewish. But here and now I cannot be anything else. Nor do I want to be. —Mihail Sebastian Fascism is what happens…
by Joan Harvey I am deeply convinced that it is tactless to speak of tact (unfortunately that is what I am doing). —Roland Barthes, The Neutral A married doctor, a relative of the novelist Amitava Kumar, is having illicit sex with a medical receptionist at a gym across the street from the hospital where he…
by Joan Harvey When the bobbling, babbling, unhinged conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, warned of a second Civil War starting on the 4th of July, most of us laughed, people marked themselves “Safe,” and we enjoyed the holiday. But one thing we’ve learned in these times is that both the Civil War and WWII are still…