Stephanie Burt is a poet and professor of English literature at Harvard. She is the author of Randall Jarrell and His Age, The Art of the Sonnet and After Callimachus, a selection of translations, some of which were first published in the LRB. Advice from the Lights, a collection of poems, came out in 2017. SUPER GAY POEMS is due next year.
after Pindar, Olympian 3
Once past the man-high teeth and the disintegrating ice that separate human lands from the gods’ secret territory, what Herakles found was nothing on first sight worth even half a breath to the sort of fortune-tellers and singers who vaunt celebrities’ pleasures, who promise new heroes the solace of willing nymphets and smooth-shouldered...
A year ago US healthcare reform seemed inevitable: no one knew whether it would include a public option (a government-backed competition with private insurers), or how much it would try to control costs, but all the smart money expected that some plan to insure America's uninsured, or at least many of them, would go through. Eight weeks ago the smart money went the other way: Republican Scott Brown's surprise election to the Senate not only killed the Democrats' Senate supermajority, but spooked already nervous Democrats in the lower house so badly that it seemed they would not, could not take the necessary votes.
The first collection published by D.A. Powell, Tea (1998), looked oddly like a smart restaurant menu: Wesleyan University Press manufactured a shiny, green and gilt hardback, six inches tall and nine inches wide, to accommodate Powell’s very short poems and very long lines. The promise the cover gave was borne out inside, where those long lines flaunted multiple midline stops, unruly...
It must feel odd – and more than a bit unsettling – to realise that sooner or later, perhaps in your lifetime, somebody will write your biography. Biographers can get lives badly wrong; and even when they get things right, giving attentive accounts with the salient facts in order, they may leave out friendships and discoveries that contributed greatly to a writer’s inner...
It is almost always better for a good poet to be recognised than to remain obscure. And yet it might well frustrate a good poet – and it ought to frustrate his readers – when he gets recognised for the wrong things. Frank Bidart first became famous in America (famous, that is, as American poets go) for the grisly violence of his dramatic monologues, for his poems’ unusual...
Sonnets have no rival. They’ve been written about kingfishers, love, squirrels, the moon (too often), God, despair, more love, grief, exultation, time, decay, church bells beyond the stars...
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