Cooper is wonderful. School is over. The WNBA season has begun. It’s a good time for short sentences and long evenings at or near the backyard grill. Also a good time to lowball the value of poetry, as I did in a piece picked up by the Boston Globe…
When I’m feeling unusually busy at home I think of a saying communicated to me by someone else I trust absolutely, but atttributed (by that someone else) to the scholar Marjorie Nicolson: “You can always read a sonnet.” That is, you’ve always got time, somewhere in any day, for 14 lines.
David and I will have time for a few sonnets this Friday at Harvard Book Store on Mass. Ave. at 7pm. Drop in!
I’m in a new series of essays on neglected poems, sponsored by Poetry Daily, emailed to their donors and subscribers, and unavailable so far on the internets generally, except in a version pirated by a bot-run website. (I’m writing on S. M. B. Piatt.) You will be able to read the whole series later this year; in the meantime, you can read this striking poem by Terrance Hayes. You can also contribute to that site’s good work.
Plenty of Boston-area poetry readings by major figures coming up, including Kevin Young tonight at BC, James Tate, Matt Rohr and Joshua Beckman tomorrow at Harvard, and W. S. Merwin next Friday at Harvard. I will likely attend, at most, one (see previous post!).
I’m also reading with Ben Mazer at Pierre Menard (10 Arrow St, Harvard Square, Cambridge), at 3pm this Sunday. See you there? No worries if you can’t make it.
Anyone else see this document about “self” and “poem”? I got it from a U of Chicago mailing list and it’s feeding what are already rather convoluted thoughts about the evolution of (and the resistance to) the idea that we have selves, or that poems have selves too. I expect to turn those thoughts into some writing as soon as I can (which may not be super-soon), perhaps in conjunction with my mixed but ultimately admiring reactions to the projects of Jennifer Moxley, whose self-in-poems seems to run exactly against all the positions that her initial supporters in the post-avant world seemed to take.
Close Calls is pleased to announce the arrival of someone else closer to us than any mere literary work could ever be: Jessie and I now have our second child, Cooper Robert Bennett Burt, born safely in Boston on Tuesday April 13, and later delivered safely to our home. He’s got dark eyes, fine blond hair, and a winning smile, which he deploys on nearly every occasion.
Almost forgot: there’s an excerpt from The Art of the Sonnet up now at the Poetry Foundation site, and I have two poems in the current London Review of Books.
I won’t attend the AWP conference in Denver, due to imminent baby! though I am still on the program: if you go, you can hear Jeff Shotts of Graywolf, Don Revell, and Tony Hoagland talk about stuff tangentially related to– and perhaps more interesting than– than some stuff I wrote.
If you are professionally involved in the study of literature, the so-called book world, you might want to know that Publishers Weekly has been purchased. Looks like a good owner. (I hope they re-hire my friends.)
If you are so involved, you should also consider joining the National Book Critics Circle. I’m now on the board; if you ask, I can tell you why you should join, and tell you more about the good things it does.
Did you know that if you read only poetry and poetry criticism for more than a month at a time your eyelids will fall off? Pretty scary. I’ve come close, but I’m happy to say that I’ve avoided that fate, and not (or not only) by reading about the women’s Final Four: also just finished the first novel in the “Science in the Capital” trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, and either it’s really first-rate, or I am the ideal reader for a novel about global climate change in which Washington, DC gets hit by big floods. Or both!
It’s got a witty– but by no means optimistic– ending, and has me scurrying to the second novel in the triad; if you want a short, optimistic look at one way to solve a very big political-cultural problem (though not global climate change) check out this anticorruption tool from India (and from Indian expats). It seems to work!
And if you want to see ecocriticism done entertainingly and reasonably and in a way that might actually interest “lay readers” and American historians (not just professional literary criticism), check out this book about how we see (or don’t see) what goes on in the National Parks.
I’m conducting a discussion of contemporary poetry with Chris Lydon for PEN-New England at Upstairs on the Square, the restaurant, tomorrow (Thursday, April 1) at 5:30pm: apparently there may be free wine. No foolin’.
Via David Blair, I see the magazine storySouth has a new online format, in which you can find a poem I like very much by Christopher Ankney, a fun harsh political poem by David himself (look for the beefsteak tomato), and a very memorable essay by Lee Zacharias, who has just retired after three decades at UNC-Greensboro and reflects on the difference between the Lee who started teaching there in the 1970s and the Lee who has finished teaching now. The magazine, connected to UNCG, also contains tributes to the poet Robert Watson, whom I met and liked when I was there in the 1990s doing research on Randall Jarrell.
My student Victoria Ascheim is a videographer for Harvard’s Office of the Arts: in the latter capacity, she made this long video in which I talk about Laura Kasischke, Kay Ryan, and poetry-in-general.
After a few months with maybe not so many exciting new poetry books I’ve suddenly got a stack I’m (at the least) happy to spend more time looking over: from the “left,” Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path, a big sequence– maybe the best of a few big sequences– whose collage and recombinant techniques let him shift back and forth between worries about the political irrelevance of poems in the age of Big Capital, attractive materials “quoted” from science, war poetry and meta-war poetry, despite-it-all expressions of fidelity to “Ari” (his partner, I assume) and much else. And from the, um, “center,” Sandra Beasley’s second collection, I Was the Jukebox. I may have more to say about this book– which deserves to be very, very popular (I wouldn’t have said that about her first collection)– soon.
Julie Carr in the new Colorado Review has reviewed Close Calls: she gets it exactly right. (It’s flattering, too– though it also outs me as a [gasp!] liberal humanist: don’t tell my devoutly poststructuralist far-left friends. Come to think of it, can you be devoutly poststructuralist? I think it involves a contradiction in terms; then again, that’s what a liberal humanist would say.) Check out Counterpath Press, which Carr co-runs. (Co-operates? Co-exists?)
The Art of the Sonnet has been published, as of this week: there’s a big glossy hardcover copy in front of me now. Thanks to David, and to our editors…
Monica Youn’s amazing book of poems about Krazy Kat has officially been published, and it’s the pick of the day on Poetry Daily!
Marjorie Perloff still likes the poetry of Rae Armantrout. (Me too.)
I’ll be onstage briefly at the marathon reading next Wednesday, March 10, at the New School, where everybody nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award this year can read for five minutes, presumably from the nominated book. It might be grueling, it might be a lot of fun, and if it’s like the last marathon reading I attended (in Chicago a year and a half ago) it should be a little of both. The NBCC’s James Marcus throws fine praise at Close Calls,for which I’m nominated, right here.
If you teach the poetry of Terrance Hayes you will have reason to look up– and your students will have reason to look up– an uncommon assortment of famous, but not very famous, musicians and other performers: that’s how I discovered, yesterday, the music of New Orleans piano player James Booker and how some of my students discovered the early-1970s peak personae of David Bowie. Next week I’ll have to play them some Kool Keith.
Looks like Paul Millar’s selection from the poems of the great New Zealand poet- polemicist-visionary James K. Baxter has now been published in Britain. I can’t really praise him enough, though I’ve tried. If you care about modern poetry in English beyond the bounds of the United States, and you don’t own a Selected Baxter, you need one; and if you care about modern poetry in English, but only within the bounds of the United States, that’s kind of parochial, don’t you think?
Also new and wonderful, though not quite in the same way: thanks to Jessie, the book covers to the left of this post now reflect my next book, co-written with David Mikics. We’ve also brought up to date the part about me.
