#steph burt

[woundgallery]

Steph Burt

[bostonpoetryslam]

Poetry does seem to be especially good at certain things. For example, we are all going to die. Poetry can help us live with that.

Steph Burt, “Why people need poetry,” delivered as a TED Talk

[gaygemtheirs]

Everybody wants a piece of me. I have been weighed and measured, tested and standardized, throughout my young life. It happens to everyone, or to everyone with my ability. Now I live quietly and mostly in the dark, amid sawdust and sheer or streaky wooden surfaces. My role, when I reach maturity, may be to help people behave more sociably, and reduce the irritations of summer, or else to make it easier to eat. For reasons I cannot fathom, I weep when it rains. My handlers keep me wrapped in awkward cloth. They will not let me touch my friends or show any curves. They have taught me how to shave. A few twigs and dragonfly wings got caught near the center of me long ago; they serve to distinguish me from others of my kind, along with some bubbles of air. I am worth more when I am clear. When I am most desirable you should be able to see yourself through me. Some of my distant relatives will probably never go far, because they are too irregular, or opaque. Many of us will end on a cart. I, on the other hand, have had my work cut out for me by so many gloves and tongs, pallets and barges, poles and planks that I am sure I will go to New York; there people who own the rights to me will give elaborate thanks to one another, and go on to take me apart.

Ice for the Ice Trade, by Stephanie Burt

[chenchenwrites]

So psyched to see my book in this Yale Review piece by Steph Burt—a long review essay that focuses on first books and identity politics/poetics in 2017. The essay reads like the most serious yet least pretentious conversation about poetry you could have with a writer friend. Honored to be in the staggering company of Kaveh Akbar, Raena Shirali, Cortney Lamar Charleston, Ari Banias, Courtney Kampa, Molly McCully Brown, and Blunt Research Group.

Thanks to Burt for engaging with the high stakes of what these first books are doing, and for highlighting what each poet does well, does idiosyncratically, does out of both necessity and wild imagination (which are maybe the same, sometimes). 

Each section is also honest about shortcomings, but always in a way that makes me contemplate this weird art. There's a big difference between imposing one's aesthetics and seeing how someone else's might (need to) be pushed further. The latter is criticism. I don't always agree, but I know it's coming from the right place. Anyway, time for me to stop reviewing the review. Read it for yourself. 

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OK but this has to be my favorite passage; Steph Burt telling the god honest truth about my poems mhm. 

[bostonpoetryslam]

Poems are made of words, nothing but words. The particulars in poems are like the particularities, the personalities, that distinguish people from one another.

Steph Burt, “Why people need poetry,” delivered as a TED Talk

[bostonpoetryslam]

When a poem does what it’s trying to do, what it ought to do, that poem also asks questions that it can’t answer; it asks what doesn’t make sense, what can’t be done, what’s still unreal, as well as validating, claiming, making up, compensating for what we can’t have, what language can’t do, in the literal, instrumental world of plain prose.

Steph Burt, interviewed by Sarah Jane Barnett for The Pantograph Punch

[bostonpoetryslam]

Poems can help you say, help you show how you're feeling, but they can also introduce you to feelings, ways of being in the world, people, very much unlike you.

Steph Burt, “Why people need poetry,” delivered as a TED Talk

[bostonpoetryslam]

I do think poems are imaginary alternate bodies: they are representations of speaking selves that we could have, even when they do not contain the word ‘I.’ Some poets find that these speaking selves stick close, at their best, to the poet’s real earthly body; others delight in the distance. Many do both, even within the same poem.

Steph Burt, interviewed by Sarah Jane Barnett for The Pantograph Punch