#stephen burt

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. 

Illustration by Sophie Lucido Johnson

#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…

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