Stephanie Burt is a poet and professor of English literature at Harvard. She is the author of Randall Jarrell and His Age, The Art of the Sonnet and After Callimachus, a selection of translations, some of which were first published in the LRB. Advice from the Lights, a collection of poems, came out in 2017.
I used to collect them; they gather a charge under pressure, piezoelectric (I was proud to know the word), semi-precious when clear, pink or green; mine were half an inch thick, striated, unpopular, cheap enough to hoard. In science museums and gift shops I learned to detect them amid the stacks of greater souvenirs.
At the Smithsonian’s cavernous Museum of Natural...
First Event 2013, a convention for transgender and gender-variant people, took up ten rooms and three hallways on three floors of the Peabody Marriott hotel, a low-rise in an industrial estate half an hour from Boston. I was there for a day, but the convention stretched over four, with a revue, a fashion show, a pop-up consignment store inside the hotel (‘Tiffany’s Closet: ReBorn...
If you are a graduate student working on poetry, or a critic writing about an unfamiliar period or tradition, you will probably find yourself opening the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, for a few decades now the best point of departure for such questions as: what was Lettrism? Who are the major Flemish poets? What are the origins of rhyme? The first PEPP appeared in 1965; two of its three editors died in the 1980s, midway through the lengthy task of turning the second edition into the third. The fourth PEPP, published in August, is not only the first in twenty years, but the first with an all new editorial team: Roland Greene, Stephen Cushman and three associate editors rode herd on 1100 articles, some wholly unchanged, many lightly rewritten, and 250 entirely new. (I rewrote ‘refrain’.) It’s a big brick of a volume, almost the size of a child's head, and it may be the last edition of PEPP to take shape as a physical printed book.
There are the books you like, and the books you can recommend, and the books around which you can muster arguments. And then there are the books from which you can get no aesthetic distance at all. Often they’re books about childhood, or about something or somewhere you knew as a child. They can also be books about books. Among Others by Jo Walton, is one such book for me, and not for me alone: last week it picked up the British Fantasy Award, having already won the Nebula and the Hugo for the year's best science fiction novel. The two awards together describe the state of SF (one’s voted on by working authors, the other by fans); when the same book wins both, it’s a recommendation, and it says something about the state of the genre. And yet Among Others is not science fiction at all, if you judge by its plot.
Mitt Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, is a seven-term congressman from small-town Wisconsin, best known for his radical shrink-the-government fiscal proposals, though he's also quite conservative on everything else. A year and a half ago, the ‘Ryan budget’ put him in the national spotlight – with some help from Obama (on which more below) – and made him a hero on the right. It proposes making big cuts in many federal programmes and turning Medicare into a voucher system that would not keep up with healthcare inflation: the government would save money because old people would go untreated or pay more. Compared to many Republican proposals, it’s full of detail, though its arithmetic appears not to hold up.
Sonnets have no rival. They’ve been written about kingfishers, love, squirrels, the moon (too often), God, despair, more love, grief, exultation, time, decay, church bells beyond the stars...
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