The Harvard Advocate

February 14, 2026

E. E. Cummings - “[up into the silence the green]”

Honestly, if you have time to read this blurb, you have time to read the poem. Read the poem. —Anika Hatzius

On a tepid and earnest May afternoon, the Advocate boldly went where no Advocate member has gone before: the Harvard stadium. Equipped with one student-athlete, one former varsity baseball player, and many people kicked off of their youth little league team, we embarked on the ultimate battle (that no one asked for): to beat the Hasty Pudding in Softball. We were the best dressed, drunkest, and least appropriate team the stadium has ever seen.

February 14, 2024

e.e. cummings - “[i like my body when it is with your]”

Cummings may not traditionally be considered a love poet, but as a proud owner of the George James Firmage edited Erotic Poems, I think of Cummings as a poet of sensuality, love, and (lowercase r) romance. “[i like my body when it is with your]” is perhaps his best romantic work. A compressed yet evocative account of intimacy between the speaker and their lover, it begins with a description of bodies being with one another, and comes to a fever pitch when the words describing the bodies blend together, phrases forgoing standard spacing to combine just as the lovers’ bodies do: “i like,slowly stroking the,shocking fuzz.” This combination of classic Cummings formal experimentalism and intense sensuality sells me every time I return to it. —Colby Meeks

February 14, 2025

Caroline Harper New - “Notes on Devotion”

Full disclosure, I read this for the first time yesterday, but then I read it again and again. I’m a sucker for birds in a poem and I think they’re approached perfectly here—beautifully, carefully, not treading too heavily but aimed straight for the heart. —Leila Jackson

Spring at the Advocate is a time for leaving.

School wanes, days get hotter. People trickle

out of Cambridge in ones and twos and then all

at once. Cardboard boxes pile up on the sides

of streets, lled with the expendable matter of

college life: textbooks and miniature trash bins,

cheap desk lamps and plastic shelves. Students

haul them into basements, stack them up in

identical rows, and let them sit for a while, as

they coat with dust and suffuse with the smell

of peat. Then, at a certain point in May, casual



goodbyes gain weight. As our friends say good-

bye for the last time in a while, “see you soon,”



we respond, not knowing if we will.



 



We’ve always found it uncanny and sad

that a mass of people can disperse so seamlessly,

like fog in sunlight. Your social life warps and

shrinks as the people you run into every day

become elsewhere. But the Spring issue comes



to you from this nonspace; our writers and art-

ists bring you with them as they go home, here,



and away. Fittingly, these pages present visions

of worlds in constant transit: mighty kingdoms

dissipate into playgrounds, geological history is

reverse-engineered, empress dowagers are wiped

from the record-books, and the distant past grows

tentacles to come knocking on our collective

front doors.



 



Open it up and let it take you there.