Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry by Stephen Burt (review)

155 Book Notes plumbed: When, for example, Potter tracks Ian’s mother to the cult where she now resides and he somehow ends up in bed with her, we are left wondering about the cult, about the mother’s grave decisions, about the physical attraction that never really announces itself. And when Potter chats for a time with the strange man outside the batting cages, a man who apparently is waiting for Potter to finish but who we later realize will beat Potter nearly to death, we wonder whether such anger would truly stand abated as a man chit-chats and advises and even shares amusing anecdotes. And although Freddy’s orange water wings add a nice visual splash, his drowning came when the pool was covered and off-season, so the swimming suit and water wings—even on a ghost—hardly make sense. Overall Beachy has written an amusing and insightful coming -of-age story for early twenty-somethings; his writing is fluid and smart, and his character development is admirable. But what Beachy’s novel lacks is a richness that, quite frankly, often comes with age. In such coming-of-age classics as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, we find protagonists whose exploits carry resounding depth for all ages, not just those likewise entangled in post-adolescent quandaries. In other words, Beachy is a writer to watch. Surely another decade or two of living will only add profundity to an already impressive talent. Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry by Stephen Burt Graywolf Press, 2009 reviewed by Julie Carr Every discipline has its door openers, people who work to popularize the sometimes obscure work of specialists. Stephen Burt’s Close Calls with Nonsense addresses this task with pitch-perfect , lucid prose and just the right mix of erudition and enthusiasm . In essays on a markedly diverse group of poets—Rae Armantrout , C. D. Wright, D. A. Powell, Laura Kasischke, Mary Leader, H. L. Hix, Les Murray, and, from the recent past, Wilbur , Merrill, Ammons, Kunitz, and Niedecker, among others— colorado review 156 Burt seeks to define and describe a series of moves, attitudes, and interests in contemporary poetry at large, and to root these moves in a history of lineages defined, however cautiously, by the influential older (or dead) poets he writes about. And yet, as a book from a formidable critic, Close Calls is a bit unusual. Refusing scholarly conventions such as footnotes or nods to other critics, it also seems to profess no absolute argument . But while Burt’s argument is not overt, his goals for the book are entirely clear. Like Helen Vendler, his chosen mentor, Burt wants to make difficult poetry understandable to a general (though educated) audience. Unlike Vendler, Burt attends, here as elsewhere, to the work of often younger and experimental writers, those whose readership is small and whose relationship to the larger literary market is tinged with mistrust, with alienation , at times even with disgust. Herein lies a tension at the heart of Burt’s project. Burt assumes that poets like Liz Waldner, Denise Riley, Terrance Hayes, or D. A. Powell want to be read by a mainstream audience ; he assumes (or hopes) that their poems can and should be digested by “ordinary” readers, readers who are not themselves poets or students of poetry. Maybe so. But in order to sell these works to these readers, he has to do a lot of explaining, contextualizing , and simplifying. In his preface, Burt likens his book to a set of instructions for constructing furniture, writing, “If you have ever brought home unassembled furniture, you likely know how important good instructions can be. . . . The aesthetic criticism of poetry has something in common with those instructions , at all times but especially in our time, when so much poetry comes in flat packs and in pieces, relying on us to put it together ourselves.” In rendering these often enigmatic, layered poems friendlier, more accessible, even more stylish than they really are, Burt seems to appeal to those youngish readers of mainstream literary novels who are confused by or indifferent to poetry. This task, which is motivated by a...