Stephen Burt : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

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It is a lucky thing, but also a bit of a melancholy thing, to write about contemporary poetry as I do, as often as I do: having written about living poets– sometimes at length, and sometimes for the sort of periodicals that have dozens of footnotes, and sometimes for the sort of periodicals that actually pay you– since 1994, I now get a lot of poetry books in the mail, from a lot of presses– from perhaps half the US presses (air mail is another matter!) whose books I would try to read anyway. In good weeks I’m simply grateful for the in-flow: surely I could not have bought all those books myself, and one in any given stack is going to have something memorable, exceptional, perhaps by a first-book writer whose name I’ve never heard, or a second-book writer whose volume I would never have seen (this year for some reason they’re most often prose-poem writers: Brian Johnson, Carol Guess, Alison Benis White, among others). But in bad weeks I’m almost overwhelmed: how can I give every one of these books a fair chance? How can I take each one of these books quite as seriously as I would had it been given me by a friend, had I sought it and bought it in an independent store? Of course I can’t— but I can try; and yet the effort, on alternate afternoons, can bring me something close to new-book burnout.

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06.02.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (10)

Stephen Burt

a cheerful hour, refrains

Not a true blog entry here so much as an attempt at auxiliary crowdsourcing: other than the ghazal, what poetic forms– oral or written– from non-European languages feature prominent repeated stanzas, “choruses,” or refrains?
(If the post title baffles you, click here.)

02.13.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (11)

Stephen Burt

te whiori o te kuri: james k. baxter redux

When you read much of the poetry that comes out now— when you try hard to read as much as you can, to figure out fast what’s going to seem original, what’s going to stick in people’s heads years down the road– when you do this and, at the same time, remember and reread and think about the poetry of the past– the so-called canonical writers, the cult figures, and the people who would be influential were there much more justice in this world–
When you do all those things, and when you get to know the good, hardworking people who decide what to publish, you can get very happy at how some good poets are treated, but very frustrated, too, by the way in which other good poets, especially dead ones (who can’t tour the globe giving readings from their work), don’t get noticed at all.
With a dead poet whose only claim on us is the quality of her or his verse, it’s sad but understandable if it takes a while– and takes several critics and poets, shouting together– before the poet’s work comes back into print, or shows up at all very far from where that poet lived.
But what about a dead poet who was not only one of the century’s great language-users, one of its great inventors of new lines and forms, a reinventor (e.g.) of such traditional forms as couplets and sonnets, but also a man who changed the culture of his country, a great (if also extreme and disturbing) example to future countercultures, an activist on behalf of indigenous people– more committed to such issues than any white artist of equal talent in the United States has ever been? What if the dead poet in question became, more or less, his nation’s answer to Whitman, to Allen Ginsberg, and to Robert Lowell, all at once? What if the story of his life would have made a superb feature film, even were he not (as in fact he was) a major poet judged simply on the invention in the verse?
What– to put it simply– has to happen, how many stars have to fall from the sky, before some American publisher– either Oxford or somebody else– decides to give a serious boost in the United States to the amazing work of James K. Baxter (1926-1972), who in his mid-twenties got hailed (rightly) as the best new talent in New Zealand, and who, after his early death from exhaustion (and periodic drinking), was mourned by banner headlines in national newspapers, identifying him simply as “HEMI,” the Maori version of his first name?

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02.08.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Stephen Burt

surveying the territory

Like most of the other folks around here, I’ve just come back from the ~~pneumonia-generating crowds and rainstorms~~ professional event for writers and critics that was the annual conference of AWP, this time in New York. (Don’t worry, I’ll quote some poems in a moment.) This time, the big event had me thinking about– sometimes frowning on, sometimes making excuses for– the “professional” dimensions of writing now, the ways in which poetry (far more than prose fiction, and much like the rest of the academic humanities) has become part of what Al Gore’s favorite book called “the drama of the gifted child”: young writers may feel stifled by their own need for approval from authorities of various sorts, but find it hard to write at all without that approval (not just practically; emotionally, too).
That’s not a new problem (Keats had it with the Hunt circle), it’s not confined to “creative writing,” and it’s not a problem you can avoid entirely by joining an avant-garde, nor by calling the circle whose approval you seek a community rather than an institution, although there’s certainly something to be said for caring most about readers farthest from institutions on whom your material well-being depends. Those of us who might be called “midcareer” writers (poets, critics, whatever) go to large professional events and find ourselves in the odd position of being both approval-bestowers and approval-seekers, willy-nilly.
We might also– I did, this time– come away (a) excited by the huge spread of promising or enthusiastic work available at AWP (the most exciting place, and the most daunting, is always the bookroom), and (b) eager to learn, to read about, to make some imaginative connection to, places and pursuits far from the institutions of creative writing, and far from cultural centers like New York.
Pursuits such as political campaigns; places such as Greensboro, North Carolina, or rural Ohio, or pre- and post-hurrricane New Orleans. Poems and poets of each below the fold.

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02.06.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Stephen Burt

domestic and foreign

The classroom next to my office has been booming all morning in Russian, a language I don’t speak at all: I recognize it when the students respond to the teacher, in unison, by shouting “Spasibo!,” though the other frequent shoutouts wouldn’t be phonologically possible in any of the (too few) languages I read: one of them sounds like “Ktonk!” and the other like “Adgno!”
The din not only made me wish I had a true gift for learning foreign languages (especially for learning ones relatively remote from English), rather than just for scrounging up facts about them (you can see new features of English-language poetry, for example, if you learn about aspect, a.k.a. the distinction between completed and ongoing action). It also made me take another look at the enormous new anthology of contemporary Russian poetry, out now from Dalkey Archive, whose facing-page versions remind me of how much I’m missing– while making available, to my mild surprise, a number of poems that seem to work in English. Examples below the fold…

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01.31.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Stephen Burt

ode-y & emo

I’ve been reading part five of The Grand Piano, the serial ~~self-mythologizing~~ ~~nostalgia~~ ~~1970s scene report~~ “collective autobiography” of ten poets and critics who lived in the Bay Area during the 1970s, participated in (some also directed) a reading series at the eponymous café, and later became known as Language Poets. Since one of the ten is one of my favorite living poets, I’d be following this series even if I had no interest in any of the other poets involved, nor in the way we think about literary history and literary scenes; since I do, and I do, I’ve been hooked.
Part five (whose keyword is “friendship,” I think, unless it’s “community”– for each part there’s a semi-secret noun to which all ten entries relate) confirms three senses I get whenever I read the prose Language Poets (or former Language Poets, or so-called Language Poets) write about their own endeavors:
1. It’s about as useful to describe Language Poetry as if it were one thing with shared principles as to describe the Decadents of the 1890s, or the “school of Auden” in the 1930s, as if those groups of poets and poems were one thing. About as useful, but no more so.
2. All these writers (the ones whose poems I admire and the ones whose poems, not so much) thought constantly about how to get around, disable, or replace the constraints (notionally fixed reference, Gricean appropriateness, the authority or lack of authority we attribute to a given speaker) which enable most prose to make prose sense. But the degree to which those writers succeeded in doing so, and the degree to which they wanted to do so, do not indicate the depth, or subtlety, or interest, in the poems.
3. As with the deeply Christian, deeply undemocratic, or deeply democratic, poets of the past, we don’t need to subscribe to the poets’ principles in order to admire, enjoy, or learn from their poems; we should, though, try to learn what those principles are. Even if they seem, to us, self-contradictory, or implausible, or overtaken by events.
4. As with all other avant-garde movements in poetry (though perhaps not in the visual arts), no matter how often some of these writers (and, more shrilly, some of their interpreters) go on about the radical break (with something— with what?) involved in modernism (whatever we take “modernism” to mean), their practice at its most interesting always links up with a literary past, one that goes back more than 150 years.
You’re free to tell me that in saying something like that I haven’t said anything about Language Poets, but only shown what I consider interesting. In response I refer you to Bob Perelman’s entry in the new GP, in which he discusses Catullus’ Odi et amo, lines that poets of apparently opposite tendencies seem to find ripe for translation, if not stuck in their heads. What poets, how, why? You know where to click…

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01.28.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Stephen Burt

hallo out there

I warned you about it last month, and now it’s happened: this week I think I did more writing than reading, and in the rush of finishing up other sorts of prose about poets and poetry, I plumb ran out of new poetry-related discoveries of the sort that one would blog. I hope to bring back a few from what looks to be a very crowded AWP, but at least I’ve recovered enough to use the blog for what I’ve decided (in a literary context) fits blogs best: ideas & connections too unlicked to make confident essays, too chatty or too critical for poems, and too personal or spontaneous to become reviews. More Scots, Scotland, and Scottish poets again, and the telephonic origins of “Hello!”– plus previews of upcoming interests– as usual, below the fold.

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01.27.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Stephen Burt

all-name team

Poetry is a kind of naming– the Rilke of the Duino Elegies certainly thought so, and Wallace Stevens, in the wonderful late poem “Local Objects,” said that he wanted to give the things in his poetry fresh names, “to keep them from perishing.”
Naming is a kind of poetry too: or so the news around these parts suggests… examples, elaborations, partial dissents, a journey to A’Quonesia, and some rock music await below the fold.

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01.21.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Stephen Burt

more scots, less porn

We knew that the continuing malaise among independent bookstores (despite success stories in North Carolina, in Minnesota, and elsewhere) has long spelled trouble for literary fiction, which relies on in-store events, loyal customers, and local buzz to move the books that never become bestsellers. Now comes word via an expert in the field that the decline of the independent bookstore evens spells trouble for well-written porn.
Fiction of all kinds– even the kinds you might think have a built-in, durable market– is on its way, I suspect, to the status that American poetry already occupies: you can devote your life and your spare time to it, you can find steady work and even a rewarding career track by doing something connected to it, but almost nobody will make a living through being paid, directly, to write books of it. Some consequences– and some news from Scotland (the kind that stays news) below.

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01.18.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (8)

Stephen Burt

rounding up and rounding off

As some of you know, I write– indeed, I promise various editors that I will write– reviews and essays about other people’s poetry with an almost depressing frequency. When I started trying to do that sort of thing I would visit this wonderful bookshop, pick up an armload of poetry books, and try to review them. At this point I’m lucky enough to get books in the mail– lots of books, though surely not as many books as Douglas gets records, more books of some interest than I can review under a byline or at any length.
And as a few of you know, my spouse runs this neat blog, which offers posts from authors and journalists on many a Tuesday through Friday and the occasional Sunday, and, on many a Monday, a roundup of links and brief descriptions of material that couldn’t be covered at length.
I’m going to emulate it, and her, and try to do justice to cool things that came in the mail. Discussed below: the mind-body split, Joyelle McSweeney, Jenny Browne, Stephen Oliver, Kevin Carollo, a couple of litmags, rock and roll, and the mysteries of made-up words…

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01.14.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Author Archive

Stephen Burt

the litmag whirl

Stephen Burt

a cheerful hour, refrains

Stephen Burt

te whiori o te kuri: james k. baxter redux

Stephen Burt

surveying the territory

Stephen Burt

domestic and foreign

Stephen Burt

ode-y & emo

Stephen Burt

hallo out there

Stephen Burt

all-name team

Stephen Burt

more scots, less porn

Stephen Burt

rounding up and rounding off

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