The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them

by Stephen Burt

Contemporary American poetry has plenty to offer new readers, and plenty more for those who already follow it. Yet its difficulty and sheer variety leaves many readers puzzled or overwhelmed. The critic, scholar, and poet Stephen Burt sets out to help. Beginning in the early 1980s, where critical consensus ends, Burt canvasses American poetry of the past four decades, from the headline-making urgency of Claudia Rankine s Citizen to the stark pathos of Louise Gluck, the limitless energy of Juan Felipe Herrera, and the erotic provocations of D. A. Powell.

The Poem Is You: Sixty Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them is a guide to the diverse magnificences of American poetry today. It presents a wide range of poems selected by Burt for this volume, each accompanied by an original essay explaining how a given poem works, why it matters, and how the poem speaks to other parts of art and culture. Included here are some classroom classics (by Ashbery, Komunyakaa, Hass), less famous poems by very famous poets (Gluck, Kay Ryan), and poems by prizewinning poets near the start of their careers (such as Brandon Som), and by others who are not or not yet well known.

The Poem Is You will appeal to poets, teachers, and students, but it is intended especially for readers who want to learn more about contemporary American poetry but who have not known where or how to start. It describes what American poets have fashioned for one another, and what they can give us today.

"

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Essays, Literature

432 pages, Hardcover

First published September 12, 2016

About the author

I write books about poetry, essays on other people’s poems, books of my own poems, and shorter pieces about poems, poets, poetry, comics, science-fiction writers, political controversies, obscure pop groups, and the WNBA.

My published books are: Close Calls With Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (Graywolf, Spring 2009), The Forms of Youth: Adolescence and 20th Century Poetry (Columbia University Press, 2007), Parallel Play: Poems (Graywolf, 2006), Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden (editor with Hannah Brooks-Motl, Columbia University Press, 2005), Randall Jarrell and His Age (Columbia University Press, 2002), and Popular Music: Poems (Center for Literary Publishing, 1999).

I am an Associate Professor of English at Harvard University. Prior to joining the faculty at Harvard, I spent several years at Macalester College, first as an Assistant Professor, then as an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English. I received my Ph.D. in English from Yale University in 2000, my A.B. from Harvard in 1994.

Reviews

[Crystal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely one of the best books ABOUT poetry I have ever read. I read a TON of poetry and Burt still introduced me to some fabulous poets who had apparently been flying under my radar all these years. It's a great joy to see such a flexible, acute mind at work!

[Jonathan Giles · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book of poetry on contemporary American poets and the various poetic movements that have come to the fore since 1980. Some of the poets selected by Stephen Burt seemed chosen by a professor of English (or Poetry) at Harvard, i.e., way more academic than many readers wanting to connect with contemporary poetry, but one can't admonish Stephen Burt for the effort he has gone through to make this book informative and meaningful. I enjoyed reading each and every poem as Burt arranged them and, after following up with his commentary, returning to the poem for a second or third or more reading. (Even now, I have gone back to revisit a poem from his selection.) To be honest, some of the poems would have made no sense without his insight, others seems a little too, too precious to be on a list I might compile, but overall, I liked comparing my limited interpretation with his expertise. All in all a fun read and an enjoyable exercise in reading, studying, and just thinking about excellent contemporary poetry. What a great job Burt must have!

[Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are so many lovely contemporary poems in this book and I enjoyed identifying poets who I am excited to get to know better in the future. Also enjoyed learning about their careers and lives a bit. I got very tired of the analysis of each poem -- I don't want a professor to tell me how to interpret a poem before I've had time to digest it. I ended up skimming all the analyses by the end.

[Sungbin Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you want to study poetry for the first time like me, don't start with contemporary poems. I would not have understood anything without Stephanie's commentaries. Here are my favorite poems from this anthology:

"The Ride" by Richard Wilbur
"Epigraph" by Allan Peterson
"Nature" by Rae Armantrout
"Moab" by Donald Revell
"The Blue Terrance" by Terrance Hayes
"Date: Post Glacial" by Dg Nanouk Okpik
"Class" by Rose Alcala
"Hide-and-Seek with God" by Brenda Shaughnessy
"Oulipo" by Brandon Som

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oy.

I had a lot of feelings about this book. I think it's a good concept with a laudable goal: to make contemporary poetry more approachable. The execution has some real problems. In fact, I would say the execution makes contemporary poetry seem less approachable than ever.

If we took the book as a sincere illustration of "How to Read" contemporary poems, then every contemporary poem would require roughly 15 paragraphs of explanation to fully appreciate. Burt's essays on each of these poems are about the same length: four pages, regardless of the length of the poem. (Even the one-line poem "oh he got a shoe from the waves" gets this treatment. I must be really stingy to think it deserves less.)

It's not just that these essays are too long. A bigger problem is that they are too similar for poems that differ widely. The sameyness of the explanation--the length, the mildly to effusively appreciative tone, the just-so conclusions--does a disservice to the poems and to the reader, who, if they're like me, ends up slogging through the essays to get to the next poem.

The book would more accurately be titled "The Poem is Stephen Burt." The author often seems to be brandishing his knowledge rather than inviting readers into the poems. And the writing is sometimes sloppy. Of Terrance Hayes' "The Blue Terrance," he says "these sixty-nine lines also belong to a larger set." The poem in question clearly has 39 lines. Quite the margin of error there. In his essay on Ross Gay's "Weeping," he refers to "precise" and "tiny" as "adverbs." I suppose mistakes like this will slip through when there is just so much prose to edit.

It's a shame, because the 60 poems in the collection are, with a few exceptions, really, really good. And Burt clearly does love poetry. In that ridiculously long essay on the one-line poem, he says, "We go to a poem, or to poets or to schools of poetry, not as we show up for a standardized test but as we go to the beach." That's just the right attitude. Unfortunately, with his highly standardized approach to each poem, he doesn't practice what he preaches.

[Samuel Cook · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Poem Is You is a classic example of a 'difficult pleasure' type book. There were days where I found this to be an unbelievable slog to get through, and on those days I cursed it, powered through its essays only to grant myself the satisfaction of completing a task; there were days where I loved it, found it enthralling, found it insightful, found it life affirming. I do not regret reading it, not for one second. I spent an ungodly amount of time engaging with these poems, and the attached essays, on their own terms, and out of this came not only several new favourites for me but also (I think) a greater willingness to tackle extremely challenging texts.

Reading The Poem Is You (dedicatedly, anyway; I can imagine flying through the poems and taking Burt's observations on face value, without thinking through their implications and connections, and that would be a faster, less rewarding read) felt like competing in sixty analytical gauntlets against Stephanie Burt and losing every single one. Her fierce intellect, sharp expression and capacious room for a staggering range of knowledge (she is effortlessly fluent in medieval literature, Milton, Shakespeare, Chinese-American immigration, obscure flora and fauna, online alt communities and every last poetic form and tradition you could name) is unlike any other author I've ever encountered in the poetic sphere. She is especially prodigious at scansion – her observations on rhythm, meter, sound devices and enjambment are absolutely bang-on without fail, the closest these essays really get to plainly stating what's going on in their poems.There is nobody on Earth who would be more up to the task of mining these poems for their valuable insights than Burt; it's rare that you feel daunted by a critic, but with Burt I did, genuinely.

To be clear, this is NOT a good introduction to contemporary American poetry for a beginner. It is an extraordinarily challenging read: the poems do have a broad range of difficulty, but the floor of that range is elevated, and the ceiling of that range is absolutely astronomical (what is happening in the Yau poem? or the Goldbarth poem? Even after reading the attached essays, I'm still not quite sure.) Not to be outdone, Burt's essays are extremely dense, betraying the sort of every-sentence intentionality you often see with absurdly smart people. There are several instances where Burt offers a thesis that could have, probably should have, been the subject of an entire paragraph, and yet she pivots away immediately to some other topic, some other complex point; it is almost as if she doesn't realise that the mechanics of her mind are not as readily available to any other reader, and certainly not to an inexperienced one. You do not read The Poem Is You – you go to work with it. You sit down with it, clock in like you would with any other job, and chip away at it, preferably tirelessly. In that respect I really do think this is a book better suited for those with experience in academia, as doubtless those audiences would be more comfortable with the style and density of a text like this. Certainly she is loathe to simplify difficult poems for you, and it becomes clear after the first dozen or so that this is very far from her intent. There were times (albeit uncommonly) where I finished an essay more confused about the poem than I was before I started it.

I think Burt would have liked that, though. In the end I came to the conclusion that Burt's truest intention with The Poem Is You is not to be a translation of sixty complex poems, of their coded meanings – it's to extract, and then build on, the myriad questions they might raise, about life, perception, passion, poetry. These essays place a particular focus on the latter, which on the one hand is understandable for an anthology that aims to comment not just on topics but on the medium – an ambitious, but worthy, goal – but on the other hand threatens to distract from the works themselves; Burt displays a dogged insistence on using the language and sentiments of the works to make broad statements on the role of poetry, which I appreciate in theory, but Burt often seems to suggest that the poems are flatly about poetry, and that this is the author's explicit objective. Save for a few notable examples it tends to come across as over-ambitious analysis, assigning intent where intent pretty clearly does not exist.

But the questions themselves are valid, and are almost always worth raising. Once I began to read The Poem Is You as Burt using sixty poems as vehicles for broader explorations of their themes, I began to enjoy it a whole lot more. It's not worth getting caught up on whether the authors had some of these specific ideas in mind when they wrote the poems, because, as Burt says, the poem is you – or, put another way, there is no poem without you; it only exists in relation to how you read it, what it makes you feel. And Burt is a real good reader, and an even better feeler. These poems inspire ideas in her that you would never consider even for a second had she not been there as a guide: that right there is what you should read The Poem Is You for, not to find the 'tools' to make difficult texts easy (where's the fun, Burt would say, in that?) I came away from these poems, and these essays, with a worldview that had been amended for the better, and that for me is the sign of a high quality read. Good stuff.

It's only fitting that Burt's anthological voice comes through heavily in the selection of poetry here, another reason why I found this a great book but a poor introduction to this era of poetry. She clearly took some effort to select poems that proportionately represented the various themes, subjects, narratives, demographics, forms and images present in contemporary American literature, but there is a very clear bias towards certain ideas here that must reflect Burt's own taste. Some disproportionately represented motifs here include:

* nature, often its destruction at the hands of deleterious human behaviours;
* sensory perception – how we receive and interpret information;
* the human desire to collect and categorise the world around us (the poems here often concluding that there is no system linking the world's disparate things, instead favouring nonjudgemental, impartial observation);
* sex-as-destruction;
* African-American music, especially blues and gospel;
* childhood;
* dreams.

Ultimately – and I'm sure Burt would be happy with this – I'm grateful to The Poem Is You for introducing me to some fantastic poetry that I never would have encountered otherwise. There are poems, like Yau's Modern Love and Clifton's my dream about the second coming, that I outright did not enjoy, but the list of ones that I DID enjoy is too long to list. A selection of five that I adored more than any others:

* tito madera smith
* [untitled] (Above the Inland Empire today...)
* Lightnin' Blues
* Oulipo
* Our Lady of the Snows

Really grateful I stumbled upon this book. Hate it, love it, rewarded by it.

[James Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of 60 contemporary poems, each accompanied by a Stephen Burt essay explaining "how a given poem works, why it matters, and how the poem speaks to other parts of art and culture." I loved the essays. Except for a handful, I didn't care for the poems.

[Madeline Riley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really rewarding reading experience! It took me forever to get through - poetry is so hard! But I loved many of the poems and found the essays analyzing them extraordinary. I am amazed by the depth in the poems - the interesting use of language, the commentary on poetry itself, the references, the interesting perspectives on the world - I wouldn't have picked up on half of it without the essays.

Top poems in no particular order:
- tito madera smith, Tato Laviera
- Saxophone, Liam Rector
- Facing It, Yusef Komunyakaa
- Domestic Mysticism, Lucie Brock-Broido
- Haylley's Comet, Stanley Kunitz
- Our Lady of the Snow's, Robert Hass
- [when he comes he is neither sun nor shade: a china doll], D.A. Powell
- Oversized T-Shirts, Gabby Bess

[Vyla · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this for school- an intermediate poetry workshop. Honestly, I only read some of the actual critiques/ analysis, but I read all the poems.

I thought this book was a cool concept. It introduced me to new poets and new styles of writing. I think it serves as a good introduction to American poetry, but could also be a desirable read for people who have already read a lot of poetry.

Some of the poems I did not like, some I loved. I found the critiques kind of long and sometimes pretty boring and repetitive (why I did not end up reading many of them).

Overall, I'm happy my professor assigned this book, but I am not sure I would have read it outside of class.

[Peggy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A helpful reference book that contains the text of sixty poems arranged chronologically from 1981 to 2015. The author discusses each poem in a 3-5 page essay, describing poetic techniques used, placing the poem and/or the poet within larger literary movements, and mentioning the poet's literary influences and followers. Informative, fascinating, and a must-have source for anyone who wishes to better understand contemporary American poetry.

[Gerald Greene · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book hoping to develop a taste and appreciation for modern poetry.

Perhaps I don't try hard enough, I've thought, but after reading this book, I'm convinced modern poetry is not meant to be understood in a casual setting.

Stephen Burt's knowledge covering so many topics is truly impressive as he guides the reader through the maze that would otherwise remain a kluge of confusion.

I'm glad I stumbled across this book at the local library and recommend it highly.

[Karen Boyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the way Burt discusses each of the 60 poems first published between 1981-2016. He poses questions implied by the poems, presents possible answers and gives in depth background information about the poets.

[erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this read, both the poems were incredible, and the content was phenomenal. it's very well-written, and the poems are EXPLAINED IN SUCH DETAIL. if you are like me, and find it so difficult to understand and analyze certain poems, read this.

[Ren]

I would recommend it for people who have read a ton of poetry, understand lots of poetry, and love deep deep analysis of poetry.

I as a beginner and casual dabbler found it too dense for me but can see how someone else might love this book.

[T.J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

...and Emma must have flown away for good,
judging from the not brutal silence at breakfast, as Mikayla chewed

the waffle goofily with her one front tooth gone, and weakly smiled

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rare to find a collection of poetry curated by a poet that showcases obscure poems from well-known poets. A lot of gems.

[Jordan]

I gave it 50 pages. I was hoping for a more approachable text to guide me into the world of understanding poetry— this wasn’t a good fit.

[Ron Cruz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent and delightful way to learn more about understanding contemporary poetry

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a complete novice with poetry so this was a wonderful start to dip my toes into several decades of American poetry. Burt's essay on each poem and its author were wonderful teaching tools, helping to understand the more difficult poems, appreciate the structural beauty that I was unaware of, and give background on what informed the poem itself in the author's life, world politics, and the poet scene. Definitely introduced me to some poems and poets that I thoroughly enjoy and appreciate, and plan on reading more of.

[World Literature Today]

"Since nobody reads poems, we are reminded often enough, it’s better, the editors assume, to knock down than put up fences. Predictably so, Stephen Burt, the noted poet and Harvard professor, apologizes for not being more inclusive, too, but he really shouldn’t. Despite its limited scope and explicit preference for work championed by the editor himself, this is the best anthology of American poetry out there." - Piotr Florczyk

This book was reviewed in the May 2017 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website: https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...

[Diane Reynolds]

This book is in the subcategory of "taking my sweet time with it." Some books you fly through, others, you read like a normal human. And some, you study, very carefully and very slowly.