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Stephen Burt Quotes

One chance, One life. Make it or screw it up, it's your choice. Don't wait to long or your time will be up.

One chance, One life. Make it or screw it up, it's your choice. Don't wait to long or your time will be up.

Stephen Burt
Long, Choices, Waiting

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

Stephen Burt
Unique, Justice, Poetry

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.

Stephen Burt
Children, Poetry, Parent
Stephen Burt (2009). “Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry”, Graywolf Press

Durable, memorable poetry is usually alert to complexity. A really good poem gives you a reason to read it 20 times, because the language in a good poem is doing a lot of work emotionally and a lot of work intellectually. That means durable poetry can help us think about complexity, can help us resist easy answers and help us step back. And it can help us sometimes calm down, and sometimes it can help us stay upset.

Stephen Burt
Memorable, Mean, Thinking
Source: www.washingtonpost.com

Powell belongs, in fact to the first generation of American poets who may have grown up without even a vestigial connection to the accentual-syllabic, rhyming English tradition - his inventive lines have this absence at their back.

Stephen Burt
Poetry, Connections, Generations
Stephen Burt (2009). “Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry”, Graywolf Press

In pursuing certain virtues - colorful local effects, personae and personality, juxtaposition, close calls with nonsense, uncertainty, critiques of ordinary language - the current crop of American poets necessarily give up on others.

Stephen Burt
Giving Up, Poetry, Personality
Stephen Burt (2009). “Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry”, Graywolf Press

Gunn would be an important figure-rewarding, delightful, accomplished, enduring-in the history of English-language poetry even were his life not as fascinating as it now seems; he would be an important figure in the history of gay writing and in the history of transatlantic literary relations even were his poetry not so good as it is. With his life as it was and his works as they are, he's an obvious candidate for a volume of retrospective and critical essays, and this one is first-rate.

Stephen Burt
Writing, Gay, Important

In the arts, in places where you're not going to save lives or save species, I think there's no reason to play ball. I can't imagine a serious poet who would want to write or perform for most recent inauguration. I'd be very surprised if there were an inaugural poem, and I can't really imagine what that would be.

Stephen Burt
Art, Writing, Thinking
Source: www.washingtonpost.com

"Poetry" refers to the quite challenging and quite resistant sets of words put together to be admired and interpreted by people who are already into that sort of thing, somewhat analogous to free jazz or academic classical music. Which is stuff that I really like, but is late modernist and is going to have a limited audience.

Stephen Burt
People, Challenges, Together
Source: www.washingtonpost.com

If we recover something like a functioning, well-informed democratic polity - if it hasn't been wrecked for good by the people who are getting in now, if millennials and teenagers can come to maturity in a world where we hold free and fair elections and agree on what fact is - Lin-Manuel Miranda is going to have a lot to do with that.

Stephen Burt
Teenager, Maturity, People
Source: www.washingtonpost.com

Poetry can explain individuals to ourselves, and change our attitudes, and help us see the complexity of the world, but the kind of poetry I follow isn't going to change public opinion directly. Other art forms can - if you're a TV writer, you have some interesting challenges, or if you're a country musician, somebody like Brad Paisley. But poetry not so much.

Stephen Burt
Country, Art, Attitude
Source: www.washingtonpost.com

Good poems do a lot of things at once. Often, by doing so, they encourage us to acknowledge mixed and incompatible feelings. Good poems, like good works of history, resist monocausal explanations for anything. There's not one reason why I am angry or excited or hopeful, when I feel those things. And there's not one reason why President Obama won two elections. And there's not one reason why Donald Trump won the most recent presidential election.

Stephen Burt
Hopeful, Presidential, Feel Good
Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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