Log inSign up
Image
user avatar
Dr. Han VanderHart is on Bluesky
@hmvanderhart
Poet/Author: Larks (@OhioUnivPress, 2025) & What Pecan Light (BCP, 2021). Editor: @riverriverbooks. Host: @OfPoetryPodcast. Queer. Southern. PhD Duke. they/them
Shakori Land (Durham, NC)
hanvanderhart.com
Joined September 2014
3,114
Following
14.4K
Followers
  • Pinned
    user avatar
    Dr. Han VanderHart is on Bluesky
    @hmvanderhart
    Jan 24, 2023
    New poem with a heaping side of ekphrasis in @DenverQuarterly
    HAN VANDERHART Thou Wast Mild and Lovely (dir. Josephine Decker, 2014) and the cows doe-eyed the green oversaturated lover and god were a thing apart: objects ordinary in the air: whisk, a chorus of hands, a pair of shears lay down in the grass let the cows wander through the fence in need of mending how is life so slow in the country and death so fast moments go on like snapping beans and then the steel bowl overturns with a clatter beans everywhere
    29K
  • user avatar
    Dr. Han VanderHart is on Bluesky
    @hmvanderhart
    Sep 2, 2021
    I don’t care who you are, you deserve this photo today.
    Denzel Washington and Keanu Reeves from Much Ado About Nothing looking FINE in blue uniform pants, swords, and white doublets with double rows of brass buttons. Leaning jauntily against a door.
  • user avatar
    Dr. Han VanderHart is on Bluesky
    @hmvanderhart
    Nov 9, 2022
    listen I love you joy is coming Kim Addonizio
    TO THE WOMAN CRYING UNCONTROLLABLY IN THE NEXT STALL If you ever woke in your dress at 4 A.M. ever closed your legs to a man you loved opened them for one you didn't moved against a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach seaweed clinging to your ankles paid good money for a bad haircut backed away from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled into the back seat for lack of a tampon if you swam across a river under rain sang using a dildo for a microphone stayed up to watch the moon eat the sun entire ripped out the stitches in your heart because why not if you think nothing & no one can / listen I love you joy is coming
  • user avatar
    Dr. Han VanderHart is on Bluesky
    @hmvanderhart
    May 2, 2023
    Mary Ruefle: hold my beer
    Image
    user avatar
    Jane Greer
    @NorthDakotaJane
    May 1, 2023
    IMO, “erasure poetry” is not poetry in any way. And to destroy someone else’s writing—or, God forbid, poem—and then call the leftover words a new “poem” is pure philistinism. Fight me.
    107K
  • user avatar
    Dr. Han VanderHart is on Bluesky
    @hmvanderhart
    Nov 6, 2022
    Can’t see a single leaf twirl down without thinking of this poem. 🍂
    l(a le af fa ll s) one l iness -e.e. cummings
  • user avatar
    Dr. Han VanderHart is on Bluesky
    @hmvanderhart
    Sep 22, 2021
    Poets on the first day of fall.
    Image
  • user avatar
    Dr. Han VanderHart is on Bluesky
    @hmvanderhart
    Jul 9, 2021
    Lucille Clifton
    Image
  • user avatar
    Dr. Han VanderHart is on Bluesky
    @hmvanderhart
    Aug 18, 2022
    Ocean Vuong on our violent metaphors, though: this.
    Old Glory Knock 'em dead, big guy. Go in there guns blazing, buddy. You crushed at the show. No, it was a blowout. No, a massacre. Total overkill. We tore them a new one. My son's a beast. A lady -killer. Straight shooter, he knocked her up. A bombshell blonde. You'll blow them away. Let's bag the broad. Let's spit-roast the faggot. Let's fuck his brains out. That girl's a grenade. It was like Nam down there. I'd still slam it though. I'd smash it good. I'm cracking up. It's hilarious. You truly murdered. You had me dying over here. Bro, for real though, I'm dead.
  • user avatar
    Dr. Han VanderHart is on Bluesky
    @hmvanderhart
    Dec 1, 2020
    Submitting to literary journals:
    Image
  • user avatar
    Dr. Han VanderHart is on Bluesky
    @hmvanderhart
    Jun 21, 2024
    Happy birthday to Anne Fucking Carson 🎈
    SHORT TALK ON LE BONHEUR D'ÊTRE BIEN AIMÉE Day after day I think of you as soon as I wake up. Someone has put cries of birds on the air like jewels.
    43K
  • user avatar
    Dr. Han VanderHart is on Bluesky
    @hmvanderhart
    Oct 2, 2022
    “I didn’t have a career, I had a life.” Agnès Varda
  • user avatar
    Dr. Han VanderHart is on Bluesky
    @hmvanderhart
    Dec 13, 2021
    “Books have a stillness in them.” —my seven-year-old
  • user avatar
    Dr. Han VanderHart is on Bluesky
    @hmvanderhart
    Jan 2, 2023
    Me, teaching poetry
    Image
    GIF
    44K
  • user avatar
    Dr. Han VanderHart is on Bluesky
    @hmvanderhart
    Nov 13, 2022
    “It’s like seeing someone across the room and deciding you want him.” Carl Phillips, Paris Review #Syntax
    PHILLIPS Well, syntax is the thing that allows for manipulation in a sentence, in a way that grammar doesn't. Syntax allows us to move blocks of text around, stall the delivery of information, establish hierarchies. Its ability to give only so much, then to switch directions, teasing the sentence out-that's like foreplay. You decide when you'll draw the readers in, and when you'll release them, and for how long…To me this is very erotic. It's like seeing someone across the room and deciding you want him…I often describe poems as little systems of restraint and release. The prioritizing of, say, noun clauses over verbs, withholding the action, the crux of the sentence, establishes a power structure-though which has more power, the prioritized noun or the verb shrouded in mystery? It's a bit like the ambiguity that hovers over the power dynamic in BDSM-who actually has power, and who just appears to? And that's so much of what eros is, as well.