Stephen Burt's Blog, page 10

exemplary

Yesterday I said I'd been enjoying Nicholson Baker and Mark Bibbins, and I nearly promised enjoyable examples: I am almost as good as my word. Baker's The Everlasting Story of Nory is a book you will find either charming beyond belief or so irritating you'll close it as soon as you open it, since it is narrated (if "narrate" is really the word) by a cute-as-a-button nine-year-old girl:

"In Shakespeare's plays what they would do, according to the drama teacher at the Junior School, is they...

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Things that have kept me going this afternoon: the new and fun (groovy, even) Mark Bibbins (his poem "Ending in an Abandoned Month," a relic of the late Bush administration in some ways, reminds me in others of those new, bare, articulate poems by J. Moxley); several books by Nicholson Baker, of whom perhaps more later (his new novel is a lot of fun, though its claim about Robert Herrick seems to be bogus); the rest of the music of Game Theory, the band whose pop music I would make if I were ...

thermophiles

Still in Onset; just saw Falmouth Center (pretty pretty, pretty pretty) and Woods Hole (even prettier). Not as much ocean science on exhibit at the exhibits there as I had hoped, but we did see the inside of Alvin, along with startling pictures of life around hydrothermal vents. There's a poem in there somewhere.

Lots of poems, some in translation, in Rachel Hadas, interviewed in the current CPR.

That was the day; for tonight, I've been rereading and enjoying Daniel Karlin's Penguin Book of Victor

pluralia

We are in Onset, Mass. It's beautiful, and just barely, or perhaps not quite, in Cape Cod: you can sit by a tree on a hill overlooking a bay, if you like, and think about the young Longfellow in Portland. Or just think about parodic plural terms, not all of which are fit for a family newspaper, but all of which, taken together, make an impression: the site's worth a look. I've been reading about plurals and other features of language, considered as linguists consider them this week, and the tech

of norwich

If you are a teacher of literature, and if you teach at an institution with a graduate program in literature, and if that graduate program has oral qualifying exams (a.k.a. generals), and if you have anything to do with those exams, and if those exams cover many fields and periods for all comers (rather than just the field in which a given student expects to specialize), then you will find yourself at some point reading or rereading works at least two centuries and one genre away from what you n

read only memory

I'm up at the National Book Critics Circle blog talking about enumerating recent reading: I seem to have developed a love/ hate/ scratch-head relationship with the latest book by Rachel Zucker. I disliked her first two, never saw her third, and am now enthused and discombobulated by the fourth. If you get it, start with the one where one of her kids has a fever.

In the latest Jacket, Rob Stanton (a critic I want to read more often) looks at Joseph Massey's big collection of small things.

I so want

reviewgled

I've just now discovered the Structure and Surprise blog, which supplements and comments on the poetry-and-poetics material in Michael Theune's edited volume, which I think I'll have to read.

I'm in yesterday's NYTBR. Bite-size reviews, but they were fun to write: some people are going to have their lives changed by the Waldrep, and others by the Estes, though I fear that nobody except me will have a life changed and improved by both. Prove me wrong, broad-minded contemporary connoisseurs…

Joel Br

augustly

Randall Mann, a poet much influenced by Thom Gunn, remembers Thom Gunn.

Adam Roberts at Strange Horizons, which I should read more often, turns in a fine review of a fine academic book, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr's, The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, which I've just reviewed for a reliable but slower-moving academic journal. Anyone with any interest both in academic lit-crit matters and in sf as a literary genre pretty much needs to stop whatever he or she is doing this morning, find Csicsery-

NLHA

No time to post more now, but do check out the just-launched site for the Harvard UP New Literary History of America, for which I had the privilege of serving on the editorial board. The Press is also running a contest for bookstores around the volume, for which I also wrote a couple of the 200-plus entries. You won't see my essays on the site, but you will see Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison; Arnold Rampersad on W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington; and Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors on H

for people in publishing

…and their friends and allies, and anyone who has just signed a book contract.

I'll be attending the Small Animal Project reading this Tuesday, with David Blair, David Rivard and Sam Witt: see you there?

We're off to Greenfield, Mass. for the weekend– almost but not quite coincidentally, the home of one of the two very good 19th century American poets most people who read contemporary American poetry have never read. (Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt being the other.) See you next week.