#stephen 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. 

*

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

[pecunningham]

My review of Daniel Borzutzky's The Performance of Becoming Human is finally live in a brand new issue of DIAGRAM (16.6): “Why does Borzutzky suddenly look ‘better’ according to Burt? Is it the fact that he was the recent recipient of a National Book Award? If so, is that what also makes Borzutzky ‘more frightening’ and, therefore, better now than before? In 2014, Burt described Borzutzky's ‘having-it-both-ways’ style of writing as "self-righteous." In the same review, he also described the writing in The Book of Interfering Bodies (2011) as ‘vehement.’ Vehement poetry... Sounds frightening to me. After all, it's not that Burt claimed that The Performance of Becoming Human was simply more frightening than The Book of Interfering Bodies. Rather, it is ‘award-winner' Borzutzky—the poet himself—who now ‘looks’ more frightening for some reason. Borzutzky's collection of poems opens with a body ‘congested with images of mutilation.’ Is Daniel Borzutzky now ‘more frightening’ because a book of award-winning poetry opens with a violence-clogged body moving among murmuring, decomposing bodies.”

[poetrysupportgroup]

Little megaphones, we hang out in the garden center and gossip with the petunias three seasons a year. With leaves too small to resemble thumbs or hands or hearts, too soft for any parts of our threadable stems to grow thorns, we prefer to pretend we are horns, cornets and alto sax, prepared to assemble in studios and sightread any charts. We are of course for sale to generous homes. Some of us have become almost overfamiliar with ornamental cabbage, with the ins and outs of kale. Others have lost our voice in a painstaking effort to justify our existence as a perennial second choice. Like you, we dismiss whatever comes easiest to us and overestimate what looks hard. In our case that means we admire our neighbors’ luxuriant spontaneities and treat the most patient preparers with disregard. We strive for contentment in our hanging baskets once we know we will not touch ground. We tell ourselves and one another that if you listen with sufficient generosity, you will be able to hear our distinctive and natural sound.

Poem of the day: September 6, 2016 White Lobelia // Stephen Burt

[omnidawn]

Rarefied, various, unprepossessing, and restless, this poet has reinvented himself over and over rather than dwelling confidently in any one mode. That very imperfection lets him shine, in late prose and in early, thin-sliced verse that suggests James Schuyler’s, where “[s]omething is always / pulling, little / balloons full of / sentences.” Wise sentences, a long career, and “a fine irrational / intelligence” await.

Stephen Burt on Keith Waldrop’s Selected Poems

[fnewsmagazine]

Illustration by Sophie Lucido Johnson

“When asked to answer a question — really any question — about writing, the author Stephen Burt responded by composing a written conversation between himself and his female persona Stephanie. “Hi Stephen! It’s weird to correspond this way, where we agree to write everything down: but it’s a good excuse of talking to yourself, or for asking questions about the self,” the entry begins. Burt’s take on the challenge to advise young writers (in the form of an answer ) is just one of 85 such responses in the stunning new anthology, “Because You Asked: A Book of Answers on the Art and Craft of the Writing Life.” 

[sister-garden]

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.

Stephen Burt, “Ice for the Ice Trade”

[mytreetv]

#Poetry that frees the soul

#Poetry that frees the soul @poetreeproject #Poem #PoeTree

Cristina Domenech: #Poetry that frees the soul http://ted.com/talks/view/id/2163

“It’s said that to be a poet, you have to go to hell and back.” Cristina Domenech teaches writing at an Argentinian prison, and she tells the moving story of helping incarcerated people express themselves, understand themselves — and glory in the freedom of language. Watch for a powerful reading from one of her…

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[jshoulson]

Today’s Poem

In Memory of the Rock Band Breaking Circus --Stephen Burt​

You were whiny and socially unacceptable even to loud young men whose first criterion for rock and roll was that it strike someone else as awful and repulsive and you told grim stories about such obscure affairs as a man-killing Zamboni and a grudge- laden marathon runner from Zanzibar

who knifed a man after finishing sixteenth

Each tale sped from you at such anxious rate sarcastic showtunes abject similes feel like a piece of burnt black toast for example threaded on a rusty wire followed up by spitting too much time to think by fusillades from rivetguns by cold and awkward bronze reverberant church bells

percussive monotones 4/4 all for

the five or six consumers who enjoyed both the impatience of youth and the pissiness of middle age as if you knew you had to get across your warnings against all our lives as fast as practicable before roommate or friend could get up from a couch to turn them off

We barely remember you in Minnesota we love

our affable Replacements who modeled a more acceptable form of rage who thought of girls and cities boys and beds and homes and cars as flawed but fixable with the right drink right mates and right guitar strings whereas you did not and nothing in your songs resolved except in a certain technical sense as a drill

resolves contests between drywall and screw

Your second bassist took the stage name Flour your second drummer copied a machine Somebody else in your hometown took credit for every sound you taught them how to use I write about you now since nobody else is likely to and since even appalled too-serious flat compliments like these

are better than nothing and because to annoy

perseverate and get under everyone's skin beats the hell out of the real worst thing in the world which is to fade into silence entirely which will never happen to The Ice Machine to "Driving the Dynamite Truck" to The Very Long Fuse to Smoker's Paradise such hard sticks thrown in the eyes of any audience that is

I should say not until it happens to me