Happy Birthday, Rhode Island’s first poet laureate, Michael Harper

Happy Birthday, Rhode Island’s first poet laureate, Michael Harper

“My poems are rhythmic rather than metric; the pulse is jazz; the tradition generally oral; my major influences musical; my debts, mostly to the musicians who taught me to see about experience, pain and love, and who made it artful and archetypal.” – Michael Harper It’s Michael Harper’s birthday, Rhode Island’s first poet laureate 1988-1993! That link is to the obituary in The Providence Journal and it gives a wonderful portrait of the man, his…