Stephanie Burt

Literary criticism: new categories of contemporary poetry

Elliptical poetry

Burt received significant attention for coining the term "elliptical poetry" in a 1998 book review of Susan Wheeler's book Smokes in Boston Review magazine: Elliptical poets try to manifest a person—who speaks the poem and reflects the poet—while using all the verbal gizmos developed over the last few decades to undermine the coherence of speaking selves. They are post-avant-gardist, or post-"postmodern": they have read (most of them) Stein's heirs, and the "language writers," and have chosen to do otherwise. Elliptical poems shift drastically between low (or slangy) and high (or naively "poetic") diction. Some are lists of phrases beginning "I am an X, I am a Y." Ellipticism's favorite established poets are Dickinson, Berryman, Ashbery, and/or Auden ... The poets tell almost-stories, or almost-obscured ones. They are sardonic, angered, defensively difficult, or desperate; they want to entertain as thoroughly as, but not to resemble, television. Burt also adds that elliptical poets are "good at describing information overload". In addition to calling the subject of her review, Susan Wheeler, an important elliptical poet, she also lists Liam Rector's The Sorrow of Architecture (1984), Lucie Brock-Broido's The Master Letters (1995), Mark Ford's Landlocked (1992), and Mark Levine's debut, Debt (1993) as "some groundbreaking and definitively Elliptical books."

The New Thing

In 2009, she wrote "The New Things", an essay in which she posits a new category of American contemporary poets, which she calls "The New Thing". These poets derive their style from the likes of William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, Gertrude Stein, and George Oppen: The poets of the New Thing observe scenes and people (not only, but also, themselves) with a self-subordinating concision, so much so that the term "minimalism" comes up in discussions of their work ... The poets of the New Thing eschew sarcasm and tread lightly with ironies, and when they seem hard to pin down, it is because they leave space for interpretations to fit ... The new poetry, the new thing, seeks, as Williams did, well-made, attentive, unornamented things. It is equally at home (as he was) in portraits and still lifes, in epigram and quoted speech; and it is at home (as he was not) in articulating sometimes harsh judgments, and in casting backward looks. The new poets pursue compression, compact description, humility, restricted diction, and—despite their frequent skepticism—fidelity to a material and social world. They follow Williams’s "demand", as the critic Douglas Mao put it, "both that poetry be faithful to the thing represented and that it be a thing in itself." They are so bound up with ideas of durable thinghood that we can name the tendency simply by capitalizing: the New Thing. . . Reference, brevity, self-restraint, attention outside the self, material objects as models, Williams and his heirs as predecessors, classical lyric and epigram as precedents: all these, together, constitute the New Thing.

Poets whom she cites as examples of "The New Thing" include Rae Armantrout, Michael O'Brien, Justin Marks, Elizabeth Treadwell, and Graham Foust.

Writings

In addition to her essays for the Boston Review, Burt has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Poetry Review, Slate, The Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and the Yale Review.

She has a particular interest in the work of the poet/critic Randall Jarrell, and Burt's book Randall Jarrell and His Age reevaluates Jarrell's importance as a poet. The book won the Warren-Brooks Award in 2002. In explaining her book's aim, Burt wrote, "Many readers know Jarrell as the author of several anthology poems (for example, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner"), a charming book or two for children, and a panoply of influential reviews. This book aims to illuminate a Jarrell more ambitious, more complex, and more important than that."Burt, Stephen. Randall Jarrell and His Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. In 2005, she also edited Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden, a collection of Jarrell's critical essays.

In addition to writing about poets and poetry, Burt has published four books of her own poetry, Popular Music (1999), which won the Colorado Prize for Poetry, Parallel Play (2006), Belmont (2013) Advice From The Lights (2017), and We are Mermaids (2022).

On occasion, she has been known to write for a popular audience on Slate and for The New Yorker, including an article about X-Men: Days of Future Past in the voice of Kitty Pryde.

Career

Burt earned an AB from Harvard University in 1994 and a PhD from Yale University in 2000 before joining the faculty at Macalester College from 2000 to 2007. Since 2007, she has worked at Harvard University, where she became a tenured professor in 2010. In 2023, she was named the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English.

In July 2022, Burt began an actual play podcast with Fiona Hopkins named Team up moves. On it, they play various superhero based role-playing games and currently have 13 episodes and 2 seasons, although the show has been on hiatus since August 2023.

In the Spring 2024 semester, Burt taught a course at Harvard University called "Taylor Swift and Her World", an English course surrounding the musical works of American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. The course was met with widespread fame, enrolling almost 200 Harvard College undergraduate students, surpassing Burt's belief that she'd end up teaching the course as a seminar to about 20 students.

Personal life

Burt is a transgender woman and uses she/her and they/them pronouns. She has since been active in LGBTQA+ rights and awareness campaigns.

Bibliography

Poetry

;Collections

;List of poems

Literary criticism

• Randall Jarrell and His Age (Columbia University Press, 2002)
• Randall Jarrell on W.H. Auden (Columbia University Press, 2005)
• The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence (Columbia University Press, 2007)
• Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2009)
• The Art of the Sonnet.(2010) Harvard University Press (co-authored with David Mikics)
• From There: Some Thoughts on Poetry & Place. (2016) Ronsdale Press
• The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them. (2016) Harvard University Press
• Online version is titled "Who really created the Marvel universe?". ——————— ;Bibliography notes

References

References

1. "Stephanie Burt | Department of English".
2. Oppenheimer, Mark. (Sep 14, 2012). "Poetry's Cross-Dressing Kingmaker". The New York Times.
3. (2017-10-06). ""Kingmaker" to Gatekeeper". Harvard Magazine.
4. (2019-10-08). "Stephanie Burt".
5. "Stephanie Burt".
6. (2022-06-16). "The Invention of the Trans Novel".
7. "Stephen Burt's Review of ''Smokes'' by Susan Wheeler".
8. "Stephanie Burt's Review of ''Smokes'' by Susan Wheeler".
9. Burt, Stephen. "The New Thing." Boston Review. May/June 2009.
10. Burt, Stephanie. (May 23, 2014). "Kitty Pryde Has Some Notes on the New X-Men Movie".
11. "Team-Up Moves: Superhero RPG Podcast".
12. Burt, Stephanie. (June 26, 2024). "I Taught the Taylor Swift Class at Harvard. Here’s My Thesis".
13. (3 November 2017). "Harvard poet Stephanie Burt's new volume explores gender, memory".
14. (2017-07-06). "Op-Ed: A Harvard poet who came out as trans shows what patient tolerance looks like".
15. (7 July 2017). "Stephanie Burt, Harvard English Scholar, Discusses Her Transition".