At Boston Review: Stephen Burt Reviews 'Poems About Poems'

What's Stephen Burt reading? Recently, it's books by Daniel Borzutzky, Tytti Heikkinen (translated by Niina Pollari), and Adam Sol.

From Boston Review:

If you write a book of poetry about sharks, you might get attention from readers who care about sharks. If you write a book of poetry that is explicitly and consistently about poetry—its institutions and conventions, how we decide what counts as poetry, what we expect it to do—you might get extra attention from readers who care about poetry, which is to say from anyone likely to pick up new poetry at all.

No wonder, then, that some poets take the institutions and the limits of contemporary poetry as their explicit subjects. Attention to such things connects Conceptualism and Flarf, the two most hyped U.S. movements of the last ten years, to each other and to the historical avant-garde. But there are other ways to address conventions of present-day poetry and to make poems explicitly about them. It is a good decade for such poems—take Amy Newman’s much-noticed Dear Editor (2011), Guy Bennett’s Self-Evident Poems (2011), or Peter Davis’s underrated and very funny Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! (2010). In “Poem Addressing My Intentions in This Poem and How I Feel Like I’m Doing,” Davis writes, “It is important to me when considering this poem to do something that’s easy, something that doesn’t take much time or energy. I say that because this isn’t the only poem I need to write. I need to write others too, to increase the possibility of publishing something. On the other hand, it’s also important to me that it contains a great truth.” Davis is also the author of “Poem Addressing People With Certain Expectations About Poetry That Are Not Fulfilled in This Poem”; the rest of the poem reads, “Change.” It’s a joke about Rilke too.

While these authors appear to take poetry as their subject almost to the exclusion of anything else, other equally self-conscious poets keep different goals in view. Daniel Borzutzky is probably best known for his translations of the Chilean poet Raúl Zurita, but his own recent book takes up kinds of poetry that try to represent, or to utter, great truth about terror, state torture, global inequity, and public violence. The Finnish poet Tytti Heikkinen uses her unruly characters to ask how poetry can speak to, or about, or for, people who seem inarticulate, unable to “express themselves.” Adam Sol takes the narrower field of North American lyric, its clichés and its history, and manages both a sheepishly funny series of attacks and a measured apology for poetry as such. Together the books show how poems about poems about poems can put up a corrosive critique of poetry as we already know it and how they can mount a considerate defense. [...]

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