Stephen Burt's Blog, page 8
March 31, 2010
mightier than…
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'.
March 18, 2010
cusps in greensboro
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 Ankey, 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
carr! beasley! lerner! sonnets! yikes!
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...
March 2, 2010
ignatz!
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...
February 16, 2010
te whiore o te kuri
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...
February 10, 2010
nonstoppery
No, I haven't stopped blogging, nor have I been thrown into a semi-permanent pit of despair by the paralysis in Washington the Democratic Party the structural impediments to government– to any government at all– created mostly by the filibuster. Perhaps we're doomed. But literature proceeds; so does lit-blogging.
For example, I see that Sina Queyras, who writes poems I like and who compiled one of my favorite contemporary anthologies, has started blogging at Harriet. So has Craig Santos...
January 25, 2010
NBCC!
Close Calls, the book, is an NBCC Award finalist. I'm honored and taken aback to be in such good company.
January 20, 2010
sorry about massachusetts
Want to know what the @#$% happened in last night's election? Here's my take on the London Review of Books blog, where I hope I'll be making less than regular but more than occasional appearances.
I've apparently been elected to the board of the National Book Critics Circle, where I'll be joining such luminaries as Craig Teicher, Jane Ciabattari, Lizzie Skurnick, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Kevin Prufer… fortunately my responsibilities don't start quite yet. It's a welcome honor and I hope I don't...
January 11, 2010
too meta
Nathan's favorite word this week is "meta." A dollhouse inside a dollhouse is meta, but a food item does not become meta simply because it has its name ("bread") on its package. Sophisticated stuff.
Also sophisticated: book blogger Neil Verma, who devoted a graf to my Boston Review piece last month, and Canadian culture bloggers The Mark, who put Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden on a decade's-best list.
That would be the last decade. I'm having trouble concentrating, right now, on the literary...
January 3, 2010
where to?
Happy New Year to all, and to all a good preschool restarts on Monday morning night…
Habitual book reviewers, such as myself, keep an eye on the ratio of stuff read to stuff written about; when the denominator approaches the numerator, as seemed likely to happen in 2009, then it's time to take a step back and read in genres you're not likely to write much about, which is what I've been doing over the holiday. Further reports may, or may not, be on the way.
For now, I'd like to call your...
