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. SUPER GAY POEMS is due next year.
Lucia Perillo, who died on 16 October, was a poet who liked jokes. That’s not unusual in itself, but she also wrote on topics that may disgust you, or ones that you may think funny poetry ordinarily has no right to address: disease, decay, physical humiliation and several kinds of disability, among them her own. In 1988 she learned that she had multiple sclerosis; she long used a...
Everyone’s younger sibling was still in a stroller, learning to drink from a cup or put on a dress. Everyone’s mom was overseeing additions
to our beige, orange and air-conditioned kitchens, choosing the tiles: cake batter, peach, mallow, rose-pink. They matched the crayons that matched our skins.
Everyone’s dad was a lawyer, or else in government service. Our teachers...
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.
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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