Tag Archives: national poetry month

The Art of the Review IV: Stephen Burt

Parul Sehgal -- April 8th, 2011
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It’s National Poetry Month, and we’re extremely lucky to have Stephen Burt with us. Considered to be the leading poetry critic of his generation, Burt writes about poets and poems with more subtlety, shrewdness, and heart than just about anyone (he’s also a bit better-acquainted with the X-Men than you’d expect).

He’s a prolific reviewer, a professor of English at Harvard, the author of two poetry collections (Popular Music and Parallel Play) and critical studies including The Art of the Sonnet and the sublime Close Calls with Nonsense, an introduction to reading new poetry. Oh, and he’s also at work on four new books. Excellent.

Burt talks to us about how books are like people, why criticism is like making chairs, and how to review even the dullest book.

What drew you to criticism?
I’m tempted to say that criticism itself drew me, in the sense that a comic book artist draws the character in the comic book: that I am its invented creature. Resisting the temptation, I’ll say that I grew up indulged, heard and overheard by parents and teachers as I opined on the relative merits of X-Men storylines, for example, or prog-rock albums, and I gradually discovered that other people—even people I had never met!–might read my opinions if I researched them and wrote them down in the right ways. By that time they were opinions about other art works and other art forms, most often and most happily about poetry, although I still have opinions about the X-Men, if asked.

Another answer: in my teens I read Randall Jarrell and William Empson and Hugh Kenner and (by that time I was enrolled in her courses) Helen Vendler. Even before my teens, if I remember rightly, I was reading popular science explainers and language mavens and other explainers of complicated things in clarified, non-esoteric language. I was storing up models, without knowing why.

I have been fortunate enough to be taken up by congenial editors early. Not all critics, not all reviewers, get that.

I read a wonderful interview you did where you said the following: “Reviewing, like all other literary criticism, like the making of chairs, like the making of film scores, is an applied art: it’s heteronomous, serving ends outside itself, and should not let its own artfulness detract from those functions.” What function do your reviews serve? And how do you know–can you know?–if you’ve succeeded?
Time to quote Auden! “What is the function of a critic? So far as I am concerned he can do me one or more of the following services: 1. Introduce me to authors or works. 2. Convince me that I had undervalued an author or a work because I had not read them carefully enough. 3. Show me relations between works of different ages and cultures. 4. Give a ‘reading’ of a work which increases my understanding of it. 5. Throw light upon the process of artistic ‘Making.’ 6. Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.” (This and much else from the essay “Reading,” at the front of Auden’s The Dyer’s Hand.)

Reviewers can do all those things. I hope that I have done them, now and again.

Reviews can also clear space for the appreciation of neglected, undervalued or misunderstood art by dispelling bad arguments about art, or by trying to clear worse art out of the way when it seems to be obstructing the view of better art. (Sometimes the better art and the worse art are by the same artist.)

As for how you know when you have succeeded, W. S. Merwin recalls in a poem that he once asked John Berryman whether and how he knew his poems were good, and Berryman replied “You can’t you can never be sure/ you die without knowing.” You can’t quite know what you have done inside a reader’s mind.

On the other hand, reviews can get books more attention—and that’s something you can know. If I review Jane Doe’s second book, and then her third book gets more attention than her second (more reviews, more people reading it, even more copies sold), perhaps at the margin I had something to do with that. Reviewing is like writing poetry in some ways (it’s an art) but it’s also like making chairs (see above) and it is in a third set of ways like voting: an individual contribution to a necessarily collective effort.

How do you sidestep the peril that is reviewspeak (oh, all those “luminous,” “lyrical” “tours de force!”)–and formulaic review structures?

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NPM @ PWxyz: On Not Waiting Alone Part 3

John Gallaher & G.C. Waldrep -- April 6th, 2011
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To celebrate National Poetry Month, PWxyz has asked John Gallaher & G.C. Waldrep, a pair of poets who collaboratively wrote their new collection of poems, Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, to reprise the method by which the book was written–a conversation conducted by email exchange–in order to create a series of blog posts on the art of poetry and their process of writing. They’ll offer one post per day between Monday and Thursday of this week. Here’s the third:

G.C. Waldrep:  One of the reasons I liked using the particular Spicer quotation for an epigraph for the book—“Like somebody knocking on your door at three in the morning, you know.  And you try to pretend that you aren’t breathing”—is that I’ve never been entirely sure just what the space opened up by poetry is.

A colleague of mine here at Bucknell recently defined the poem—a poem, any poem, literature itself—as essentially a space of waiting, in part because while you’re reading, you’re not really “doing” anything.  In another context, I’ve written “Poetry is like entering a room someone or something has just left.  Maybe it’s a homey sitting room, fire crackling in the grate, inviting; maybe it’s a sumptuously-appointed hall.  Either way, you’re the only one there.  There was music playing, but it’s quiet now.  You’ve missed someone or something important by minutes, perhaps even seconds.  The telephone has just been ringing—somehow you know this—and you pick it up, just in time to hear click.”

For me, this was part of the essential mystery of YFOTTOG—writing poems in this voice that was neither John’s nor mine, but somehow a stepping-outside of our usual voices, perhaps of Voice itself.

What do poems do when we’re not reading them? …is one way of thinking about it.  What are they up to?

John Gallaher: I swear I saw some minor poems of Wallace Stevens’s wandering aimlessly in the soda aisle at Walmart the other night.  They seemed rather forlorn.  For me, this sort of defining is fun, as it creates an architecture, or a landscape where we can think of poetry going, not just the singular poem.  I’ve always been more interested in poetry than poems, if that makes any sense.  There’s a form of letting go involved.  Neil Young talks about it.  How technically proficient musicians can play better than he can, but they come to a wall.  He likes to go through the wall.  Collaboration is a form of that, I think.  At least it felt that way to me.  I was writing talking to a friend and I had no idea where we were going, where it was taking us.  The friend part, the poem I was responding to, took over, and then whatever happened happened, wall or no wall.

GCW:  The last time this happened to me, with a friend, we wound up eating Ethiopian in Brooklyn….

I’m interested in that wall, though.  Is it keeping us from something, or is it the something from which we are being kept?  Should we try to scale it, or decorate it, or blow it up?  Sketch it in pastels?  Tell our pets about it, late at night?

NPM @ PWxyz: On Not Waiting Alone

John Gallaher & G.C. Waldrep -- April 5th, 2011
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To celebrate National Poetry Month, PWxyz has asked John Gallaher & G.C. Waldrep, a pair of poets who collaboratively wrote their new collection of poems, Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, to reprise the method by which the book was written–a conversation conducted by email exchange–in order to create a series of blog posts on the art of poetry and their process of writing. They’ll offer one post per day between Monday and Thursday of this week. Here’s the second:

John Gallaher:  For many years these two questions have continued to tap me on the shoulder:

What are you going to listen to?
What are you going to listen for?

I think they’re two of the fundamental questions for artists, whether the artist thinks directly about it or not, as the answers to these questions become the metaphors the poet will use to tune into the process.  If the poet believes poetry comes from inside, this singer you mentioned, the poet will tune to that.  If the poet believes poetry comes from outside, the poet will tune to that.

That’s the LISTEN TO.  And it matters, because what one listens to will exclude things that one could listen to.  So one has to have a belief as to where poems come from.  Then there’s the LISTEN FOR.  And what one listens for matters, because when one tunes to one thing, one will invariably miss other things.  Like conversations in a crowded room, something will/must get filtered out.  But, either way, the inside and the outside will both still get in.  There is always bleed-through.

I found myself circling this formulation many times during the back and forth that became YFOTTOG.  A poem written by you would pop up in my inbox, and I was to read it and then respond.  And what form would that response take?  We both went through many versions of what “responding” meant.

G.C. Waldrep:  Jack Spicer says “The words are counters, and the whole structure of language is essentially a counter.  It’s an obstruction to what the poem wants to do….”  So, if language is a game—if poetry is a sort of game we play with language—what then is a “response”?  What are the words, the poems in earnest of?

JG:  Spicer’s been important to both of us in this way, I think?  I suppose, to use his terms, the response is predicated upon what furniture we leave in the room for the voices to inhabit.  How we prepare.  Or unprepare.

GCW:  Although sometimes, it’s the voices that turn out to be the furniture.  We live here, we move some things around, some things move us around.  A heart attack.  A radio.  A poem is a vessel, or a poem is searching for a vessel.  Or…something else, entirely?

National Poetry Month on PWxyz: On Not Waiting Alone by John Gallaher & G.C. Waldrep

John Gallaher & G.C. Waldrep -- April 4th, 2011
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To celebrate National Poetry Month, PWxyz has asked John Gallaher & G.C. Waldrep, a pair of poets who collaboratively wrote their new collection of poems, Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, to reprise the method by which the book was written–a conversation conducted by email exchange–in order to create a series of blog posts on the art of poetry and their process of writing. They’ll offer one post per day between Monday and Thursday of this week.  Here’s the first:

G.C. Waldrep:  For me, the origin of Your Father on the Train of Ghosts was a set of largely inchoate ideas about poetry and community—about art and life.  It seemed to me that we were all still mired, largely, in a Romantic conception of the poet as a solitary singer:  that poetry, from both a writer’s and a reader’s standpoint, was something isolated and isolating.  But this wasn’t how the Dadaists and Surrealists viewed it.  As someone who has committed his life to a certain ideal of community outside the classroom and written page, the presumption bothered me.  What sort of poetry might arise out of collaboration, that is, artistic community?  Out of friendship?

It’s a question I’m still pondering, even after the 16 months of poetic exchanges from which YFOTTOG was sculpted.  Can reading and writing be public/ collective/ collaborative acts?  Rather than personal/ private/ individual?  What sort of literature—what sort of poetry—might result if they were?

John Gallaher:  The creation of YFOTTOG was a social act (and it still IS, as we figure out what to do with all the poems that are not in the book).  That’s one of the things I really enjoyed about it.  We didn’t have a purpose or plan, other than what was in front of us.  It’s interesting to hear you mention the “solitary singer” conception.  It’s one of the many things I didn’t know about you when we started, but it’s something I’ve also been contending with for a long time.  This “solitary singer” is just as fraught (or, as I’ve also heard it termed, “authenticity”) as is “originality.”  What I mean is that the notion of this Romantic I with its “authenticity” gets passed around a lot, and I think it’s largely a fantasy.  Just as “originality” is largely a fantasy.  These are relative terms, not absolutes.

Poems, in reality, come from everywhere the poet can find them:  memory, environment, gum wrappers.  It’s all reaching out into the context to add something new.  The poet just tunes in to whatever works.  It’s been my general feeling all my writing life that all writing is collaborative.  One collaborates with the world.  Working on this book has made it literal.  It’s given the world an email address, so to speak.