Stephen Burt's Blog, page 11

shorter and faster

I have become convinced that I should use this blog for shorter posts, more often. We'll see whether my temperament adapts.

I'm in the current Believer on Gary Copeland Lilley (this is not the Believer music issue but the one just before it). I've been reading more brand-new books that look New Thingesque: still excited about Joseph Massey's now that I've spent time with it; not sure what to make yet of Joel Bettridge– half these people seem to be Ronald Johnson scholars. I'm pretty sure that I'd

positive and negative

D. A. Powell has a blog all his own. I'll be checking back regularly (especially as I'm writing on him again now).

I've just finished writing at length about the differences between British poetry in general and American poetry in general (the print-ready version of this lecture from March) and you know what? I'm very glad to get back to writing about individual poets and their bodies of work. For now. This week, at least.

Ange gets it right, I suspect, about Frederick Seidel. Quickly, and before

muldoon, colbert, jessica bozek and more

I’m reading some poetry at the New England Art Institute this Wednesday July 1 with the inspiring Jessica Bozek: you can read Jessica’s vivid recent poems in Shampoo magazine, and also here, and also here.

There are pianos all over the place in central London. I’d play them; would you?

If you didn’t catch Paul Muldoon on the Colbert Report, you can watch the segment right here:

The Colbert Report
Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Paul Muldoon

www.colbertnation.com


Colbert Report Full EpisodesPolit

heaney and beyond

I’m in the current London Review of Books on Seamus Heaney’s giant book of interviews with the thoughtful Irish poet Dennis O’Driscoll. You can’t read my piece online unless you subscribe to the print LRB– but maybe you subscribe to the print LRB (we do)!

One of the minor discoveries in the interviews (there are larger-scale discoveries too) involves a moment, described in Heaney’s poem “The Flight Path,” when Heaney encountered a Sinn Fein spokesperson on a train: the spokesperson has now said H

the litmag whirl

(Cross-posted from Harriet.) 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

the tiger chest, for tea– and a reading in NYC

I’m reading in New York City on June 3! I haven’t read there in, oof, about two years.

And I’ve been away from this blog (trying to meet other deadlines, as usual). When you I don’t post for over a week, stuff I ought to want to note on this site just accumulates and accumulates: and by “stuff” I mean both reviews/ notices of Close Calls and (more happily) poetry- and music-related discoveries having nothing to do with me.

Among the latter: Jordan’s in Slate on the flu: why is it so hard to figure

certain worlds

One of the delights in teaching a course all about Auden: reading and rereading Auden’s late prose. The poetry, as everyone knows, gets uneven, though I think some of the last poems as sharp as they are sad: but how many people know, and how many should know, about the fun you can have by opening, to a random page, A Certain World?

I’m at the Columbia University Press blog today, connecting Nathan’s recent activities in the field of visual art to the letters of John Keats. No, they are related.

Fi

space opera, or what?

Via Johannes Goransson’s blog, I discover the continuing project that is Anne Boyer’s Odalisqued. Space opera? Experiment in taste? Ongoing prose poem? Fascinating, for now– we’ll see how long the fascination keeps up. It’s certainly an instance (a rare one for me) of something memorable that feels like a poem, not a work of visual art or a web-based game, and yet something that could only exist on the Web, not between pages, without distorting what it tries to do.

Brief but remarkably laudatory–

my brother and the archbishop, and more

Not directly related to contemporary poetry, I realize: my youngest brother’s op-ed in the new U.S. News, about his years of contact with Archbishop Tutu. With pictures. Take a look.

Vermillion, South Dakota is friendly, and flat, and has chislic, which is, or are, deep-fried meat pieces. It’s nothing like Vermillion Sands. Or is it? Would the Coffee Shop Gallery fit there?

I learn from her blog that Sandra Beasley’s second book will be out in 2010. This is good news: I’ve been liking her recent p

vermilion

Tomorrow night I’m talking in South Dakota. It will be my first visit to SD, and my first visit to Sioux City, Iowa, the airport close enough to Vermilion that it’s the first choice for Vermilion-bound flyers. I saw some, but not enough, of the far, non-metropolitan Midwest when we lived in the Twin Cities; and now I’ll see more. I’ll be reading and talking about contemporary poetry, but also giving a talk about science fiction!

My host there, Lee Ann Roripaugh, has a neat, haunting poem that re