A review of 'Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry', by Stephen Burt

I reviewed Close Calls with Nonsense as part of the Spotlight Series Tour of the Graywolf Press that has been running from 18-31 July. Click here to find out more about the tour and discover more reviews of books from Graywolf.

Stephen Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2009)

Stephen Burt’s essay collection, Close Calls with Nonsense, collects thirty of Burt’s essays, covering roughly a decade’s worth of writing. The earliest piece is derived from a 1997 review of Paul Muldoon’s New Selected Poems, whilst the two most recent essays (originally published in 2009) deal with John Tranter and C.D. Wright.

The basis upon which Burt collects these writings is that each poet or group he explores write what might be termed ‘difficult’ poems, or in his terms ‘poetry […] in flat packs and in pieces, relying on us to put it together ourselves.’ (‘Preface: In Favor of One’s Time’, p.ix.) In this respect, Burt hopes that these essays ‘are like introductions’ not only to how to read the poems, but also ‘meant to bring poems and poets together with people who might become, as it were, their friends’. (p.xii) If this seems rather sentimental, it is because part of Burt’s project here is to make the impersonal seem more personal; to explain – without overexplaining or protesting too much – why poets like Rae Armantrout, C.D. Wright, and August Kleinzahler ought to be read, and why also we should go back to the work of Paul Muldoon or James Merrill, or with a turn towards a poet not normally seen as opaque, reassess Frank O’Hara. By and large, ‘introductions’ is not the best description of these essays, since for the most part a knowledge of these poets’ works is a prerequisite to a full appreciation of Burt’s criticisms.

According to Burt, ‘all the poets I praise here have added something to the resources of the language, have made forms in words for experiences and attitudes not given effective shape in English before.’ (p.xiv) And for the most part, Burt is overwhelmingly positive, sometimes frustratingly so in the case of Muldoon to whom he is very generous, and whose self-obsessed nature seems to strike against Burt’s own desire to emphasise links between people in the poetry about which he writes.

This emphasis upon the connection between reader and poet is clear throughout the volume. In his instructions as to ‘[h]ow to read very new poetry’ in the eponymous first essay in the book, he suggests that we should ‘look for a persona and a world, not for an argument or plot.’ (p.11) Burt is making an effort throughout to draw attention to show how poetry is concerned with people, that it is possible to relate what poets say – however elaborately they say it – to what we experience. This is essential, he argues, for ‘[i]n saying why this poem works and that poem doesn’t, we draw finally on our sense of what life is like, what versions of the world and the people in it we are willing to entertain – even if those versions contradict one other, or (as in Whitman) contradict themselves.’ (p.xiii) Perhaps as a result of this relational impulse, Burt creates communities in his critical writing. Thom Gunn’s work, he says, ‘rarely shows us a scene without people’ (p.201), and Burt reads Gunn to ‘thrill at his sense of touch and kinaesthesia, of skin and limbs and muscles, poised or excited, at rest or “on the move” (as one early title puts it).’ (p.200) James Merrill’s mature work is ‘resolutely sociable’ (p.269), whilst Burt warns that if you ‘[c]oncentrate on [Frank] O’Hara’s “I” for too long and it threatens to – no, it very much wants to – dissolve into a network of encounters with others.’ (p.310) Even John Ashbery, perhaps ‘the loneliest’ of poets, still writes, according to Burt, with a community in mind: ‘he needs us, and tells us he needs us, as few poets do.’ (p.244)

And it is not just these poets who were most prominent (bar Ashbery, who is still prominent) in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, whose work Burt explores in terms of their relationship with others. In his ‘Postscript (2004)’ to his well-known essay on ‘The Elliptical Poets’, a school he created in 1998 when reviewing the work of Susan Wheeler, he writes that his initial essay intended to ‘describe an emerging set of styles, a family-resemblance notion, a nebula of habits and preoccupations that seemed to me then (and still seems to me now) to enfold currently influential poets (and the poets influenced by them).’ (p.354) This essay, the penultimate one in the book, seems to sum up an important preoccupation for Burt: how to write about write about ‘very new’ poetry whilst maintaining a backward glance towards poets like O’Hara, Merrill, and even William Carlos Williams, who also appears here. How to construct a lineage – predominantly American – which explains, as he says in his ‘Preface’, why ‘poets and poetry [can] be (as my favorite living poets are) at once innovative and traditional, alert both to the troubles of modern language, and to the resources of centuries past’. (p.xiv)

Perhaps as a result of this ambitious need to connect past and present, the best essays in this book are the longest, where Burt has room to stretch his legs. Indeed one of the finest and most perceptive is his piece ‘My Name is Henri: Contemporary Poets Discover John Berryman’, in which he examines more or less obvious connections between the poet of 77 Dream Songs and writers like Mark Levine, Mary Jo Bang, and Frank Bidart. One of the particular fascinations of this essay – and elsewhere in the collection – is the way in which Burt can provide evidence of a trend within contemporary poetry that stems from one or more than one canonical writer; a strategy that fits exactly that purpose of explaining why poets are both ‘innovative and traditional’, as well as explaining why the canonical writers have been accepted into the canon. ‘Many poets’, says Burt, ‘now distrust a unified lyric “I,” and find in Berryman usable models for plural or unstable selves.’ (p.130) If Burt tends not to go outwith literature itself for answers (might this distrust of a unified self have socio-political origins too?), it is perhaps because of his prioritising of language as a self-sufficient store: ‘poetry lets us imagine that certain arrangements of words, and nothing else – no camera, no lights, not much action – can tell us what it’s like to be other people, and (in another sense) what it’s like to be ourselves.’ (p.19)

These longer essays also allow Burt to explore the different facets of a poet and how these facets complement each other over time, and the essays on James K. Baxter, John Tranter, Thom Gunn, and James Merrill are particularly useful in this respect, acting as useful introductions to each of these writers. The essays are, however, long enough to contain sufficient references to warrant both a bibliography and an index, but neither appear in this book. Perhaps this is because it is not, strictly speaking, an ‘academic’ book, but given how usefully intratextual and intertextual Burt’s commentaries can be, it would be a great help to be able to cross-reference from one chapter to another effectively.

This is a fine addition to the excellent Graywolf volumes of literary criticism. It is true that on occasion, Burt can exaggerate the worth of poems and poets: one of the first poems he cites as a good example of ‘very new’ poetry, Ange Mlinko’s (admittedly early) ‘Aqua Neon’ can only have been chosen because of the accessibility of its content rather than the quality of its expression. Additionally, Burt’s readings can sometimes prove reductive in their efforts to provide general commentary on a particular period in a poet’s work. When he writes about Rae Armantrout for instance, Burt comments that ‘[m]ost of her poems after 1989 include at least one of these key words: parent/mother/mommy, memory/remember/recall, repetition/repeat/recur, nostalgia, person, self.’ (p.36) And yet, Close Calls with Nonsense provides a substantial snapshot – more, perhaps, of a collage – of poetry that is worth attending to in contemporary times. In his essay on Gunn, Burt admits that ‘I trust Gunn as I trust few poets of his generation.’ (p.209) We should trust Burt in the same way.

Further reading

Stephen Burt’s blog, entitled ‘Close Calls with Nonsense’

C.D. Wright discusses her unease at being labelled one of the ‘Elliptical Poets’

In a 2009 essay in The Boston Review, Burt proposed a new tendency in contemporary American poetry, ‘The New Thing’

‘Each of our letters – is the last’: a review of 'Letters, Summer 1926', by Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Rainer Maria Rilke

Edited by Yevgeny Pasternak, Yelena Pasternak, and Konstantin M. Azadovsky, translated by Margaret Wettlin, Walter Arndt, and Jamey Gambrell (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2001)

I reviewed Letters, Summer 1926 as part of the Spotlight Series Tour of the New York Review of Books Classics series that runs from 16-22 May (see previous post). Click here to find out more about the tour and discover more reviews of the wide range of books in the NYRB series.

I saw a summer on this earth that seemed not to recognize itself, a summer as pristinely natural as a revelation. 

- Boris Pasternak, a letter to Rainer Maria Rilke written after Rilke’s death and included at the end of the manuscript to Safe Conduct. Quoted in Letters, Summer 1926, p.308.

When Boris Pasternak’s father, Leonid, a well-known painter, wrote to his old friend Rainer Maria Rilke in December 1925 to congratulate him on his fiftieth birthday, he inadvertently began one of the most startling exchanges of correspondence in modern poetry. Rilke had always had a connection with Russia: the essential introduction to this volume explains how, after his two trips to the country in 1899 and 1900, during which he met Leo Tolstoy, he had described Russia as ‘my native land’ (p.8). And Rilke had been a tremendous influence on two of the most prominent members of the younger generation, Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsevtayeva. When finally – after frustrating delays – Pasternak finally read Rilke’s reply to his father, he was moved to put Rilke in touch with Tsvetayeva. Remarkably, Pasternak himself was to write only one letter to Rilke before the latter’s death in December 1926, but his relationship with the man he idolised grew vicariously through Tsvetayeva’s correspondence with Rilke. In a letter written after Rilke’s death and published in Pasternak’s 1931 book Safe Conduct, he explained that whilst he did not write to Rilke, ‘I comforted myself with the knowledge that Tsvetayeva was writing to you, and while I could not be a substitute for Tsvetayeva, she could be a substitute for me.’ (p.305)

The core of this skilfully edited collection, originally published in German in 1983, in English in 1985, and reissued here in a 2001 second edition, is the exchange of letters between Tsvetayeva and Pasternak – there are actually only eight letters written by Rilke here – but Rilke’s influence pervades the correspondence from the first letter to the last – and then beyond, for the editors also include two essays about Rilke by Tsvetayeva, translated by Jamey Gambrell. Rilke is monumental in the lives of Pasternak and Tsevtayeva. This collection is, as Susan Sontag says in her engaging preface, ‘a portrait of the sacred delirium of art. There are three participants: a god and two worshipers, who are also worshipers of each other (and who we, the readers of their letters, know to be future gods).’ (p.x) It seems at times as if the relationship between the two Russian writers is in fact sustained by the cherished hope that they might visit Rilke in Switzerland, where he was staying in a sanatorium, struggling with the leukemia which would eventually overpower him. ‘When I used to ask you what we would do if we were together,’ Tsvetayeva wrote, ‘you once answered, “We would go to Rilke.”’ (Tsvetayeva to Rilke, June 3, 1926, quoting her own letter to Pasternak, p.161.) Pasternak and Tsvetayeva had been correspondents for several years, but their growing mutual connection to Rilke seems to reinforce their appreciation of each other and finally even transcend it. The idea that Pasternak might correspond with Rilke, to whom, he said, he was ‘indebted […] for the fundamental cast of my character, the nature of my intellectual being’ (‘Pasternak to Rilke, April 12, 1926’, p.64)  was almost too much for the thirty-six-year-old Pasternak to bear. The news that his father had received a letter from Rilke but that it would be sent along to him in due course, caused Pasternak to burst into tears and be unable to sleep for three nights. (pp.59-60) And, in a correspondence is so heavily influenced by time, Pasternak’s reaction was made the more intense by the fact that he had just read Tsvetayeva’s ‘Poem of the End’. These two events conspired to leave Pasternak in a fragile yet ecstatic state: ‘It’s as if my shirt were split down the front by the expansion of my heart. I’m punchdrunk. Nothing but splinters all about me: there are kindred souls in this world – and how extraordinary they are!’ (‘Pasternak to Josephine Pasternak, March 28, 1926’, p.61) 

It was after reading this poem, the editors say, that Pasternak began his correspondence with Tsvetayeva in earnest and started writing to her using the informal ‘ty’ form of address in Russian. The collection repeatedly shows how both Pasternak and Tsvetayeva believed they shared an indissoluble, even mystical bond – as poets and, at times, as lovers, though they were not to physically meet again until 1935, a brief event that Tsvetayeva later described as a ‘non-meeting’. All three writers use these letters to comment and criticise the others’ work, but the very nature of the letter form is for them also both a space of intimacy and confession. ‘Basically you and I think alike’, writes Pasternak (‘Pasternak to Tsevtayeva, July 1, 1926’, p.206), whilst in an earlier letter Tsvetayeva had told him that they could not live together, ‘[n]ot because of you, and not because of me [..] but because both you and I are beyond life, have grown out of it. We can only meet.’ (‘Tsvetayeva to Pasternak, May 26, 1925’, p.228) 

The book charts the ebb and flow of their relationship effectively, with editorial interventions that fill in where letters have gone missing or the context is not clear. Perhaps because of the problems with the postal service (there were no diplomatic or postal relations between the USSR and Switzerland, for instance), because of intensity of the correspondence, the need to reply almost instantly and continue this epistolary dialogue – because of all these things, misunderstandings occur. Tsvetayeva misunderstands Rilke at one stage, thinking that her letters overburden him; Pasternak’s ardour for Tsvetayeva (‘you are my only legitimate heaven and wife’ (‘Pasternak to Tsvetayeva, May 5, 1926’, p.86)) led Tsvetayeva to cool him, telling him not to come and visit her in France because of his obligations in Moscow. Most astonishing is Tsvetayeva’s decision – in a July letter sadly since lost – to break off all correspondence with Pasternak, a decision that Pasternak believed was a result of his telling Tsvetayeva about his deep love for his wife. Included here is an enigmatic letter that seems to have been written to assuage guilt, in which Pasternak told his wife, Yevgenia, that ‘I did not betray you, nor did I give you any case for jealousy.’ (‘Pasternak to Yevgenia Pasternak, July 29, 1926’, p.246) And yet at the end of 1926, in the coda to the correspondence included in this volume, Tsvetayeva took up her pen again to give Pasternak news of Rilke’s death as if it were her duty. In a powerful phrase, Pasternak asked Tsvetayeva: ‘[c]an you imagine our orphaning in all of its brutality?’ (‘Pasternak to Tsvetayeva, February 3, 1927’, p.274) And Tsvetayeva insisted that she and Pasternak should meet again, arguing that Rilke’s death ‘authorizes my right to be with you – more than a right, a command signed by his own hand.’ (‘Tsvetayeva to Pasternak, February 8-9, 1927’, p.275)

Pasternak’s description of he and Tsvetayeva as children now suddenly bereft of a parent merely complicates the three poets’ relationship. Tsvetayeva tells Pasternak that he had ‘so completely become Rilke’s younger brother’ (‘Tsvetayeva to Pasternak, May 11, 1927’, p.296), whilst Rilke admonishes Tsvetayeva for cutting off correspondence with Pasternak, accusing her of being ‘stern, almost harsh toward him’ (‘Rilke to Tsvetayeva, August 19, 1926’, p.256) And yet because Rilke meant everything to them, both poets constructed relationships with Rilke (Tsvetayeva in letter form, Pasternak in his mind) that went beyond the familial. Tsvetayeva’s letters to Rilke are instantly intimate, but she also thrived on cultivating a secret force of such extreme closeness that it went beyond sexual desire: ‘you might take me for generally passionate (passion-bondage). “I love you and want to sleep with you” – friendship is begrudged this sort of brevity. But I say it in a different voice, almost asleep, fast asleep. I sound quite different from passion.’ (‘Tsvetayeva to Rilke, August 2, 1926, p.252)

And it is Tsvetayeva’s voice that comes through most clearly in this collection – her voracious hungers and desires for literature, for love, for intimacy. She is unafraid to challenge her correspondents, demanding from Rilke ‘a big letter, quick, for me alone’ (‘Tsvetayeva to Rilke, July 6, 1926’, p.224), and telling him that in his latest work ‘you sound briefer, each line an abridged Rilke, something like an abstract.’ (Ibid., pp.221-222) Her letters in particular – but Pasternak’s too – seem to be written in a great rush, sometimes even contradicting themselves, as if grasping towards experience that is just out of reach. For what Tsvetayeva really wants does not appear to be in life: ‘Darkness, light, transfiguration.’ (‘Tsvetayeva to Pasternak, Saturday July 10, 1926’, p.231) It is rather to be found in mythical experience, an assertion that only deepened with Rilke’s death. Her dreams were filled by him; her poem ‘Attempt at a Room’, begun with Pasternak in mind, became a poem about Tsvetayeva and Rilke; and as the editors suggest, ‘Tsvetayeva adopted a spiritual outlook apparently based on the anthroposophical conception of the reincarnation of the soul. This gave her the hope of yet meeting Rilke.’ (p.282) Such a position was a logical extension of the statement in her initial letter to him: ‘You are an impossible task for future poets. The poet who comes after you must be you, i.e., you must be born again.’ (‘Tsvetayeva to Rilke, May 9, 1926’, p.106) 

The editors note poignantly that after Rilke’s death, Tsvetayeva’s poetic output declined. Some of the explanation for this no doubt lies in her need to produce prose articles to support her increasingly impoverished family, but subsequent tumultuous personal and political events in Russia where she returned in 1939 resulted in a time, the editors describe, in which ‘lyric poetry […] withered under the Terror and the threat of World War II.’ (p.315) These future events make the content of Letters, Summer 1926 all the more extraordinary and valuable as a way of writing and living that was soon to disappear forever.

Further reading

Pasternak 

- A selection of Pasternak’s poems in English and Russian
- Andrei Navrozov (trans.), Second Nature: Poems by Boris Pasternak, 2^nd edn. (London: Peter Owen Publishers, 2003)

- Boris Pasternak, An Essay in Autobiography, trans. Manya Harari (London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1959)

- Lydia Pasternak Slater (trans.), Boris Pasternak, Fifty Poems (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1963)

Tsvetayeva

- Joseph Brodsky, Less than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986) [Contains Brodsky’s essay ‘Footnote to a Poem’, his famous commentary on Tsvetayeva’s elegy for Rilke.]

- Elaine Feinstein (trans.), Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, 5^th edn. (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1999)

- Elaine Feinstein (trans.), Marina Tsvetaeva, Bride of Ice: New Selected Poems, 6^th edn. (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2009)

- Elaine Feinstein, A Captive Lion: The Life of Marina Tsvetaeva (London: Hutchinson, 1987)

- Angela Livingstone (trans.), Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry by Marina Tsvetaeva (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 2010)

- David McDuff (trans.), Marina Tsvetaeva, Selected Poems (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1987)

Rilke 

- Stephen Mitchell (trans.) The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (New York: Vintage International, 1989)

- Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, bilingual edition (New York: Vintage Books, 2009)

- Reginald Snell (trans.), Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (B.N. Publishing, 2008)

Spotlight on NYRB Classics

I'm going to be taking part in the upcoming Spotlight Series Tour of the New York Review of Books Classics series.

The Spotlight Series focusses upon a small publisher for each of its 'tours', and asks bloggers to review books from each publishing house. I'm going to review a book from this thoroughbred stable, and the volume I've selected is Letters: Summer 1926 (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2001).

Letters: Summer 1926 is a collection of the four-month correspondence between Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Rainer Maria Rilke. The three writers were spread throughout Europe: Pasternak was in Moscow, Tsvetayeva in exile in France, and Rilke in a sanatorium in Switzerland.

The book - in its second edition and edited by Yevgeny Pasternak, Yelena Pasternak, and Konstantin M. Azadovsky - also contains two essays about Rilke by Tsvetayeva, and has a preface by Susan Sontag and an epilogue by Jamey Gambrell.

My review will appear here on 20 May. In the meantime, have a look at the Spotlight Series blog for more details about the tour, or at the NYRB page for more information about the book.

Starting point

Having spent years deciding not to write a weblog, and entering perhaps the busiest point in my career to date, I've decided to start one now.

Postings will reflect upon literature and culture (mainly American) - things I'm reading and seeing. Because of the nature of what I'm doing day-to-day (writing a PhD thesis), postings may also have a faintly academic flavour to them.

I look forward to comments on future posts.