About

Carla Harryman is a poet, experimental prose writer, essayist, performance writer and collaborator in multi-disciplinary performance. She is known for her boundary breaking investigations of genre, non/narrative poetics, and text-based performance that begin in early publications such as Under the Bridge (This Press, 1980) and three volumes of selected writings Animal Instincts: Prose Plays and Essays (This Press, 1989), There Never Was a Rose without a Thorn (City Lights, 1995), and Various Devices, a capacious en face edition in Russian and English (Polyphem, 2024).  She is the recipient of numerous awards including an artist award in poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art, New York; a grant (with Erling Wold) from Opera America: Next Stage; an NEA Consortium Playwright Commission;  an Alexander Gerbode Foundation award in poetry, and a Headlands Center for the Arts Residency.  Her work has been translated into many languages, including multiple publications in French and Russian.  Her essays, poetry, prose, and plays have been represented in over thirty national and international anthologies. In 2018 her work was the focus of a two-day Poets and Critics Symposium at Université Paris 7 Denis Diderot. On the occasion of the symposium, L’Impromptu de Hannah/Hannah Cut In, a  score for speaking voices and manual typewriters used as musical instruments, was published in a bi-lingual edition by joca seria with translation by Abigail Lang. Hannah Cut In premiered at University Art Museum, Berkeley in 2017.

The influence of improvised music, electronic sampling, and collaborative practices animate her recent works.  In addition to Various Devices, her most recent books are Cloud Cantata (Pamenar 2022) and A Voice to Perform: One Opera/Two Plays( SplitLevel Texts, 2020).  In 2018,  Sue in Berlin and Sue á Berlin (trans. Sabine Huynh) was published by PURH “To Series” in  separate English and French volumes. In an interview for Décharge the author describes the collection of performance writings and poet’s theater plays as “first an event of listening, tracking itself on the more abstract, musical plane, which carries the figurative, fanciful, philosophical, playful, drastic, and political aspects of its non/narrative.”

Harryman’s Poets Theater, interdisciplinary, and bi-lingual performances have been presented nationally and internationally. In 2012 she performed (with pianist Magda Mayas) Occupying Theodor W. Adorno’s “Music and New Music,” a Re-performance, as the closing keynote of dOCUMENTA 13’s What Is Thinking program in Kassel, Germany. The re-performance of Adorno’s 1959 lecture constructed a quiet yet enlivening surface, creating a “noise” informed by cultural and gender difference as well the passing of time and the present historical moment. This is one of many performances inspired by music, speaking voice, and text collaborations with composer and musician Jon Raskin. In 2012, she and Raskin published Open Box (on the Tzadik label), a CD inspired by her long-poem Open Box (Belladonna, 2006). Their current collaboration is Gardener of Stars, an Opera, an adaptation of Harryman’s experimental novel Gardener of Stars (Atelos, 2001), which she has described as “an exploration of the paradise and wastelands of utopian desire.”

Other key  publications in the 21st century include  Adorno’s Noise (2008), a radical experiment in the essay as form; The collaborative ten volume work, The Grand Piano: Experiments in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco 1975-1980 (completed in 2010), The Wide Road (2011) with Lyn Hejinian, an erotic picaresque in poetry and prose; and the diptych W—/M— (2013), which Tyrone Williams describes as a tracing and retracing of “the line per se as nomadic consciousness multiplying beyond the doubles that mark, and thus engender, the self-patrolled borders of identities.” 

A current essay project focuses on arenas of hope and negativity in a durational project, “Letters Not about Hope.” This project draws from Viktor Shklovsky’s experimental epistolary work Zoo: or Letters Not about Love and philosopher Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope as points of departure for creative essays that pivot, divergently, around the concepts of concrete utopia. A manifestation of this project is Artifact of Hope, published in Kenning Edition’s Ordinance Series in 2017. Of this work, reviewer Piotr Gwiazda comments, “As she turns philosophy into poetry, “thinking” into “making,” [Harryman] crosses many boundaries: linguistic, cultural, national, ideological, generic, disciplinary. The point for her is to retrieve something useful, even provisionally so, from the work, to make the encounter active, dialogic, even dialectical…”

Carla Harryman was born in Southern California in 1952.  In the mid-1970s she left Los Angeles for San Francisco where she became a founding figure of the Bay Area language writing and a co-founder of The San Francisco Bay Area Poets Theater, a collective project directed by Nick Robinson and Eileen Corder that ran from 1979- 1986. In 1995, she moved from the Bay Area to Detroit. She currently divides her time between the Detroit area and Ypsilanti, where she serves as Professor in the Department of English at Eastern Michigan University.  She has served on the MFA summer faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College and on the faculty in the Department of English, Wayne State University. In 2019, she received the  Ronald C. Collins Distinguished Faculty in Creative Activity Award from Eastern Michigan University.