Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry Book

It's tough to drop stars on a book of this nature--a book of essays about poetry and poets. Why? You should, I feel, be rating the writer, but in this case, some readers might fall prey to rating the subject matter. This book is especially susceptible because Burt covers so many poets. If you're like me, some chapters will be more enjoyable than others because you're interested in the poet OR you're interested in the quotes from the poet's poems OR, better yet, both.

Trouble is, I liked some poets and poems better than others. If I discovered I did NOT like a poet under discussion, I jumped ship on the chapter and swam to the next. Life at sea is fleeting, after all (there's a fleet of ships joke in there somewhere).

Who does Burt wax poetic about? Here's the role call: Rae Armantrout (interesting), C.D. Wright (wrong for me), Donald Revell, Laura Kasischke, Liz Waldner, Juan Felipe Herrera (Burt himself doesn't seem much a fan), August Kleinzahler (gesundheit!), Allan Peterson and Terrance Hayes (imagine getting stuck with a chapter bunkmate!), Mary Leader and H.L. Hix, D.A Powell, John Berryman, James K. Baxter, Les Murray (Oz, mate), Denise Riley, John Tranter, Thomas Gunn (Burt's a fan and will make you one), Paul Muldoon (who gets two chapters called "Early" and "Late"), John Ashbery, Richard Wilbur, Robert Creeley, James Merrill (another Burt favorite), A.R. Ammons, Stanley Kunitz (interesting chapter), Frank O'Hara (charmed life, until the weird finish), Lorine Niedecker, and, one of my favorites, William Carlos Williams.

So, yeah. School of Modern-ish Poetry is in session! I learned a lot about a lot of poets and may pursue some because of Burt's insights. In one of the three "general" essays included in this book, Burt even offers quotable remarks. Thus the need to quote a few:

"To do a poem justice, explain what makes it unique; to get a poem noticed, explain what makes it typical."

"One can demonstrate to skeptics the explicit rules that govern a skill, or a game, but not those that govern an art. Skeptics thus suspect art forms of possessing rules that are trade secrets, or rules that are really table manners."

"Snobbery in the arts is reverse snobbery."

"Why value the appearance of effort in poetry? Why value apparent (or actual) effortlessness? The first appears to demonstrate the mastery of a craft: the second, to demonstrate that poetry is not a craft at all." (I object. Poetry is most certainly a Craft, in my case.)

"A.K. Ramanujan, in an interview: 'Some people are other people, and can never be themselves.' Some people are really, or essentially, imitators. Or readers, rather than writers. Or--alas--critics."

"Fame, the being known, though in itself one of the most dangerous things to man, is nevertheless the true and appointed air, element, and setting of genius and its works" (Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges). But "Publication is the auction / Of the mind of man" (Dickinson).

"Some poets marry a language; some have affairs with it; some treat it as a parent, some as a child, some as an equal, or as a friend."