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.
