Stephen Burt's Blog, page 9

giant adamantium claws

It's an extremely good week around here for nonacademic nonfiction, by friends and by famous strangers:

Douglas's five-minute explication of Kant with reference to Wolverine and Reed Richards, available here as embedded video, isn't just a very funny, and very useful, explication of Kant: it's also a good quick show of how to give an effective lecture in the arts and humanities, how to know your audience, and how to use images well.

Sara's book about Riot Grrrl isn't out yet, but the site that...

10 you are

Now it can be told: though my title won't change till this summer, Harvard's committees have met and decided to keep me around here. Suddenly I'm able to sleep well.

I'm not sure it's a poem, but it's fun, and it's hard to forget: Silliman links to a video-poem composed entirely of homonyms. It's probably time for me to read Riddley Walker, speaking of homonyms; quite soon I will. Right now I'm in the middle of this novel and this novel, and the usual cluster of new collections of poems.

I'm...

pastoralisms

The onetime Pacific NW fanzine writer and record-label creator Nancy Ostrander has a great blog, with vast swaths of indiepop content: if the term indiepop means something to you, as it has long meant something to me, check it out.

I'm in the current PN Review, number 190, describing the supposed differences between British and American poetry since the 1960s, with examples from Denise Riley, Peter Riley, Alison Brackenbury, Robert Minhinnick, Greta Stoddart, and other poets you probably...

don't get around much?

I've been out having fun with Jessie and Nathan holed up in a cave proofreading the next two books doing stuff, while far away these things happened:

I have an essay about comic book superheroes in poetry in the most recent Michigan Quarterly Review, which also has a thoughtful and counterintuitive piece on the future history of reading by my colleague Leah Price. My essay has something to say about poems by Bryan Dietrich, and by Ray McDaniel, who has been writing about the Legion of...

eastern standard

When you come back to New England from elsewhere you realize how pronounced our seasons are, and how human scale (or, from a Western point of view, bunched all together) our buildings and people have been. I like it here. (And I see, now more than formerly, why visitors from Western and Central Europe sometimes flee New England for other parts of America that look more "American," more unlike what they know.)

I've got a piece on poetry and Project Runway up at the Poetry Foundation site...

the opening of the source

Chris Lydon at Open Source Radio interviewed me last week and the results are up: he's a Real Radio Person– and a reader, too. It was a pleasure. Check out his conversations with Helen Vendler and Rosanna Warren, too.

Before it was a completely absorbing, charming, memorable, entirely recommended graphic novel, Tamara Drewe by Posy Simmonds was a newspaper comic strip.

I'm still speaking with Donald Revell, and he's speaking with me, at UNLV this Thursday at 7:30pm. I see from the website...

the practical and the aesthetic

And here is the sort of multimedia, couldn't-be-anything-else very short film of a microfiction that makes me wonder why I don't write about video art all the time. It's a wonder, and it's apparently also a book trailer for an upcoming book of flash fiction, or microfiction, or prose poems, or whatever the kids are calling such things these days, by Joseph Young. The same webmag, HTMLGiant, said something about me a while back, and now says something haunting about Lydia Davis.

Speaking of...

just another heads-up

I'm on a panel re: the future of poetry at the Twin Cities Book Festival next Saturday morning Oct 10. Also on that panel: Joyelle McSweeney, Ed Bok Lee, Elizabeth Robinson (who has a new book now), Matvei Yankelevich and Alexs Pate.

Also at the festival: Nicholson Baker, Robert Olen Butler, and Lorrie Moore!

I'll be conversing with Donald Revell in public at the Univ. of Nevada-Las Vegas Thursday Oct. 15; he will read some of his poems. I might read some of mine. I've been reading his new...

with a certain alienated majesty

Whatever you're doing, stop doing it; whatever you're reading, stop reading it, and look at the essay by Ange Mlinko in the current issue of Poetry. It is an essay I know I could never have written, and not only because "father" doesn't mean what "mother" means (though that too). Nonetheless, it's in some sense an essay I have long been trying, and always failing, to write, and not only because it describes some of my favorite not-yet-world-famous poets and poems.

If you are a parent yourself ...

thin little leaves

Our edition of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman speeds towards completion, like Tuckerman's "bird that shuts its wings," though such a bird would probably be diving– I hope the book doesn't sink, but catches some prey in its elegant bill. By "our" I mean that the actual textual edition, the edition per se, is Ben Mazer's: I just wrote an introduction and contributed some of the notes. He's been a pleasure to work with, and superbly thorough in textual matters (as makers of editions surely should b...