Customer Reviews

Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry

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Anyone who reads contemporary poetry will learn something useful from this book. If you are a new reader of poetry, Stephen Burt will help you figure out techniques for approaching difficult writers. If you've read some of the major figures and want to find more, this book will give you leads on new poets to read. If you're already familiar with many of the poets here, this book will help you explain what it is that makes you happy or angry or excited about their work. And if you're a poet, you'll probably put it down wanting to write -- whether to imitate or make up something new is up to you.

Stephen Burt's book showcases the talent of one of the most wide-ranging, knowledgeable, and sympathetic poetry critics of his generation. While the poetries of America and Britain are scarcely on speaking terms these days, Burt is one of the few critics who is at ease with writing from both sides of the Atlantic, a breadth of sympathy, which is also perceptible in the links which he forges between high and low culture(s). While 'Close Calls with Nonsense' makes the case, amongst other things, for writing which is usually perceived as difficult and inaccessible (the so-called 'Elliptical Poets'), Burt pursues his argument in a manner which is always as rational as it is accessible. Amongst his many virtues - intelligence, authority, commitment, humour, balance - perhaps his greatest quality is an affectionate enthusiasm. Nobody loves poetry more, and nobody is a more authentic heir to the writings of Randall Jarrell.

I read this book for a class and I'm really glad I did. This helped me understand poetry in a way I hadn't before, both in terms of contemporary poetry as a broader category and individual poems/poets. I like critics who have a unique voice and style, instead of just sounding totally impersonal and objective, and Stephen Burt definitely has an original voice. Recommended for people who are interested in poetry but don't know where to start.

The title piece seeks to help us read 'young' and/or 'new' poets and the early pages of the book (Mlinko, Moxley, Armantrout) gamely do so; all the more disappointing, then, that many later voices are well stricken in age if not actually dead (count 'em). Again contrary to what the title suggests, this does not confront the naked emperors of Po Biz head on; all these reviews are favourable. Or, should we say, not unfavourable - it's sometimes a little hard to pin him down, unlike the more forthright Adam Kirsh. Can this be the same CD Wright whose 2002 Selected Kirsch reviewed in The Modern Element (2008)? It can. One wonders how the two critics would get on

Stephen Burt's Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry aims to do more than merely collect his 21st century book reviews. Instead, Burt hopes his book will do two things: teach frustrated readers of new poetry what to look for in the "not-so-good poetry of the present" (xii) and create a brand name for a hodge-podge of turn-of-the-new-century poets who share certain "tactics, strategies, and attitudes" (345). Like J. D. Scott, who in 1954 herded up Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, Donald Davie, Kingsley Amis, and Elizabeth Jennings into a gang of anti-romantics called "The Movement," and like M. L. Rosenthal, who in 1959 christened Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton "Confessional Poets," so Stephen Burt now wishes to bequeath to us the "Elliptical Poets."

Sadly, Burt is not reviewing books in as auspicious a time as either Scott or Rosenthal. While Burt includes some quite useful critical essays on and career-assessing remembrances of older, established poets such as Les Murray, Thom Gunn, Paul Muldoon, Robert Creeley, Richard Wilbur, and Frank O'Hara, the argument that frames Burt's book is his ethnography of the poets he has dubbed Elliptical. Unlike the Confessional poets, or the poets of The Movement, or even the Moderns, who sought to break away from the restrictions and excesses of what had come before, these Elliptical poets, always-already freed from the tyrannical Pharaoh who forced the enslaved to make autobiographical-lyrical bricks to code, now wander willy-nilly through the postmodern, cafeteria-style desert like bad mannered mendicants, taking a little bit from this faddish literary theory, a little bit from that mental-disorder diagnosis of the month in order to make amorphous lumps of useless matter.

While reading Burt's book that insipid scene from the film American Beauty (1999) came to mind--the one where the troubled teen who has videotaped a plastic trash bag blowing in an alley for fifteen minutes declares, "Sometimes there is just so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can't take it, and my heart is going to cave in," which was somewhat excusable and palatable in the plot of the film but became offensive later when pretentious film buffs would go on and on about how beautiful garbage bags are when they blow around in the wind. When critics grouped together poets and called them Modernists, or The Movement, or Confessional, these labels stuck and had meaning, for there was something real that united the individual poets: a set of coherent, artistic, principled rejections, a difficult style, a manner of allusiveness, a new tone, a dancing in chains. The Elliptical poets, according to Burt, reject not only "prettiness" (when was this last a category in American literature?) but also "authenticity": "they want to remember the self, to pick up their pieces after its (supposed) dissolution." And there's the rub: they do not even "believe in" the (post)deconstructive theories about the self, but having no recourse to authenticity (just another totalizing narrative, dude), they are left with a fashionable "difficulty" that is merely "extravagant, edgy" (353). A hundred years ago, at the turn of the 20th century, poets struggled mightily to create and preserve art in a culture that produced only trash. Now, at the turn of this century, poets seem to want to call any trash that blows around "art."
(more forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review)