POETRY FOCUS: STEPHEN BURT

Eyewear is thrilled and delighted in equal measure to feature two new poems from the new Stephen Burt book, Belmont - from Graywolf Press.  Burt is quite simply one of the best and most influential poet-critics in America today.

The New Burt Book

His two previous books of poetry are Parallel Play and Popular Music, which won the Colorado Prize. He is also the author of several works of critical nonfiction, including Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Believer, the London Review of Books, the Nation, the New York Times Book Review, and the Times Literary Supplement, among other newspapers and journals. He is Professor of English at Harvard University, and he lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.

IN MEMORY OF THE ROCK BAND BREAKING CIRCUS

You were whiny and socially unacceptable even

to loud young men whose first criterion

for rock and roll was that it strike someone else

as awful and repulsive and you told

grim stories about such obscure affairs

as a man-killing Zamboni and a grudge-

laden marathon runner from Zanzibar

who knifed a man after finishing sixteenth

Each tale sped from you at such anxious rate

sarcastic showtunes abject similes

feel like a piece of burnt black toast

for example threaded on a rusty wire followed

up by spitting too much time to think

by fusillades from rivetguns by cold

and awkward bronze reverberant church bells

percussive monotones 4/4 all for

the five or six consumers who enjoyed

both the impatience of youth

and the pissiness of middle age

as if you knew you had to get across

your warnings against all our lives as fast

as practicable before roommate or friend

could get up from a couch to turn them off

We barely remember you in Minnesota we love

our affable Replacements who modeled a more

acceptable form of rage who thought of girls

and cities boys and beds and homes and cars

as flawed but fixable with the right drink

right mates and right guitar strings whereas you

did not and nothing in your songs resolved

except in a certain technical sense as a drill

resolves contests between drywall and screw

Your second bassist took the stage name Flour

your second drummer copied a machine

Somebody else in your hometown took credit

for every sound you taught them how to use

I write about you now since nobody else

is likely to and since even appalled

too-serious flat compliments like these

are better than nothing and because to annoy

perseverate and get under everyone's skin

beats the hell out of the real worst thing in the world

which is to fade into silence entirely which

will never happen to The Ice Machine

to "Driving the Dynamite Truck" to The Very Long Fuse

to Smoker's Paradise such hard sticks thrown

in the eyes of any audience that is

I should say not until it happens to me

----

TO SUBARUS

In poems autobiographical information serves the same purpose as references to birch trees or happiness or Subarus.

-David Orr, The New York Times Book Review, July 20, 2008

Whose silver is lead in sunlight, whose maroon

looks like the rust on a storm drain,

whose popular Forrester also comes

in dead pine-needle green,

with rounded roof and trapezoidal frame,

you seem to mean

that I will never surprise anybody again.

So studiously unglamorous, at rest

in our one-car driveway, you seem to claim

that to be adult is simply to care less

about doing your own thing on your own,

and more about what other people require:

to care less for the space cleared by new brooms,

for the fast lane and the fine line

that might, or might not, separate

romance from folly, and more

for Dr. Harvey Karp, who taught new parents how to calm

their infants with attempts to recreate

the volume and vibrations of the womb.

Poems by Stephen Burt, copyright 2013.  From his new collection, Belmont.