Stephen Burt's Blog, page 7

owl music

New poem commissioned as part of a series from Jonathan Farmer of At Length magazine: I like commissions, and I like this project, which also has (among others) Juliana Spahr and the Singaporean quasi-formalist Jee Leong Koh, whose book I've been enjoying… here's the whole thing.

coming up in minneapolis

I'll be on this panel for the National Book Critics Circle at the Minneapolis Public Librarynext Wednesday Nov. 3 with other Graywolf authors and editors: Eula Biss, the amazing Marlon James (who came to the Twin Cities just when we left!) and Jeff Shotts.

The night before that I'll be trying not to think about the election results that come in as I listen to Sarah Fox and John Colburn read and discuss the death of poetry (so the hed sez) at Bryant Lake Bowl. Sounds like fun to me.

I've got something new on the Poetry Foundation site about Agha Shahid Ali and what's likely his best poem. Thanks to the patient editors and Urdu-speakers who gave me needed advice.

And thanks, too, to Jessie, who built this site– which I don't use nearly enough– as I head farther away from the books already discussed here, towards the books of the future, by way of the baby of the moment, who can do more, and it seems eats more, every day.

swampy

We're in DC with my family and while our children nap I've been reading this good anthology of "experimental"/ disjunctive UK women poets, edited by the US-to-UK transplant poet Carrie Etter, and also reading this very good anthology of UK and US poets invited to Oxford by Christopher Ricks. They are thesis and antithesis, or avant-garde and retro, or something. I'll have more to say about the apparent opposition between them elsewhere soon, with any luck.

If you are stuck somewhere with no...

new from niedecker

The latest online issue of Verse Wisconsin has a new poem by Lorine Niedecker. Turns out the parts aren't new– but the assemblage is. Take a look.

how reviewers avoid burnout

I'm not sure how other reviewers do it, but I am discovering that having a baby, being home with the baby, and saying to yourself "Hey! I have a very limited time to read books, will have more time later, and need to cut down on reviewing for now in order to come back to it later, because otherwise I won't read anything at all except books I've agred to review" turns out to be a pretty good way for me! Which also explains the relative paucity of posts to this here blog over the summer. (Hey, ...

far behind

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 t...

and far less consequentially

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...

hi, cooper!

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.

me too

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...

zeroes mean so much

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 h...