| Contents |
Close calls with nonsense : how to read, and perhaps enjoy, very new poetry -- Rae Armantrout : where every eye's a guard -- Lightsource, aperture, face : C.D. Wright and photography -- Donald Revell : dream sermons -- Laura Kasischke : the one I love needs sunblock -- Liz Waldner : how I got from dictionary to here -- Juan Felipe Herrera : undocumentary -- August Kleinzahler : cool among shadows and cellophane -- Allan Peterson and Terrance Hayes : believe your naysayers -- Mary Leader and H.L. Hix : envisioning pain -- Here is the door marked Heaven : D.A. Powell -- My name is Henri : contemporary poets discover John Berryman -- James K. Baxter : I do not expect you to like it -- Les Murray : from the planet Dungog -- Denise Riley : already knotted in -- John Tranter : write another party -- Thom Gunn : kinesthetic aesthetics -- Paul Muldoon, early -- Paul Muldoon, late -- John Ashbery : everything must go -- Richard Wilbur : not unlike you -- Robert Creeley : counting the days -- James Merrill : becoming literature -- A.R. Ammons : marvelous devising -- Stanley Kunitz : out of glacial time -- Frank O'Hara : hi, Louise! -- Lorine Niedecker : raking leaves in New Madrid -- William Carlos Williams : they grow everywhere -- The elliptical poets -- Without evidence : remarks on reading contemporary poetry and on reading about it. |
| Abstract |
Essays and critical writings on contemporary poetry. Stephen Burt's Close Calls with Nonsense provokes readers into the elliptical worlds of Rae Armantrout, Paul Muldoon, C.D. Wright, and other contemporary poets whose complexities make them challenging, original, and, finally, readable. Burt's intelligence and enthusiasm introduce both tentative and longtime poetry readers to the rewards of reading new poetry. As Burt writes in the title essay: "The poets I know don't want to be famous people half so much as they want their best poems read; I want to help you find and read them. I write here for people who want to read more new poetry but somehow never get around to it; for people who enjoy Seamus Heaney or Elizabeth Bishop and want to know what next; for people who enjoy John Ashbery or Anne Carson but aren't sure why; and, especially, for people who read the half-column poems in glossy magazines and ask, 'Is that all there is?'" |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references. |
| Issued in other form | Online version: Burt, Stephen, 1971- Close calls with nonsense. Saint Paul, Minn. : Graywolf Press, ©2009 |
| Genre/form | Criticism, interpretation, etc. |
| LCCN | 2008935602 |
| ISBN | 9781555975210 (pbk.) |
| ISBN | 1555975216 |
