BURT, Stephen (Louis) 1971-

PERSONAL: Born 1971; son of Jeffrey (a lawyer) and Sandra C. (a writer and radio producer) Burt; married Jessica C. Bennett, 2000. Education: Harvard University, A.B., 1994; New College, Oxford University, 1994-95; Yale University, Ph.D., 2000. Politics: Democrat (DFL). Religion: Jewish. Hobbies and other interests: Obscure rock music, women's basketball, political campaigns.

ADDRESSES: Home—St. Paul, MN. Offıce—English Department, Macalester College, 1600 Grand Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55105. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Macalester College, St. Paul, MN, assistant professor of English, 2000—.

MEMBER: Modern Language Association, PEN.

AWARDS, HONORS: Scholarship Award, Breadloaf Writers' Conference, 1997; Colorado Prize for Poetry, 1999, for Popular Music; Mellon Dissertation Year Fellowship, Yale University, 1999-2000; McKnight Foundation fellowship for poetry, 2002; Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award, 2003, for Randall Jarrell and His Age.

WRITINGS:

Popular Music (poems), Center for Literary Publishing (Fort Collins, CO), 1999.

Randall Jarrell and His Age, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Also contributor of reviews, articles, and poetry to magazines and journals including, Boston Review, Times Literary Supplement, Ploughshares, Nation, Poetry Review, London Review of Books, Modern Philology, and Yale Review, among others.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Parallel Play (poems), for Graywolf Press, publication expected in 2005.

SIDELIGHTS: Poet and critic, Stephen Burt is an assistant professor of English at Minnesota's Macalester College. His first book of poems, Popular Music, won the Colorado Prize for Poetry, and Randall Jarrell and His Age, a critical appreciation of that American poet, adapted from Burt's doctoral thesis, put Burt on the map as a critic of note.

Burt's first book of poems appeared in 1999 while the author was still a doctoral candidate at Yale University. Popular Music contains forty-three selections arranged in four parts. Topics range from self-discovery to death to celebrations of other poets. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly felt that Burt "fused" inspiration from Jarrell to James Merrill and Spanish poet Jaime Gil de Biedma, and "the result is a sort of brilliant 'take back the night' raid on what is often called academic poetry." Burt provides something of a memoir in prose, sonnet, and free verse form, taking the reader from awareness of body through education and travel and on to themes of love and death. One of the first poems, "Kudzu," compares the fast growing weed to the poet's "body I hated then, and hate." Burt shows his verbal pyrotechnics in poems such as "For Elizabeth Smart": "Tall sonorous pot vendors pace; lobster-briskmen on stoops hawk their used libraries in stacks." In "Herziliyya," Burt evokes another wordsmith, poet Sylvia Plath: "And the ghost of Plath, / Whom I had hated for so long, / Holds her cool scissors / up to my ear. . . ."A Publishers Weekly critic went on to praise Burt's "taut mastery of free verse," and concluded that Popular Music was "wonderfully unlike anything operating in similar register." For Joyce Wilson, writing in Drunken Boat Online, Burt's debut collection was "funny, confusing, and engaging all at once." Wilson went on to note that many of Burt's poems, such as "Over Nevada," deal with the theme of responsibility, while in "Glass," Burt "examines the disjunction between form and content as an aspect of personal inadequacy," according to the same reviewer. Wilson concluded that the strength of Burt's poems in this collection "is not in their unique choice of metaphor . . . but in their ability to question."

Burt finished his dissertation, "Randall Jarrell and His Age," in 2000 and began at Macalester College as an assistant professor of English. He continued writing reviews and critical analyses on poets from Walt Whitman to Thom Gunn in domestic and international journals, and also publishing his poetry in publications such as the Paris Review and Ploughshares. In 2003 he published an expanded form of his dissertation with Columbia University Press under the title Randall Jarrell and His Age. Jarrell, who lived from 1914 to 1965, was one of the most influential poets of his generation, admired and befriended by Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and Hannah Arendt, among others. The winner of the 1960 National Book Award for Poetry, Jarrell also served as a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, and in his critical reviews and studies championed the work of Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, and Bishop. The poet's work had received something of a renaissance with the publication of a collection of Jarrell's critical prose in 1999, No Other Book, edited by poet Brad Leithauser, and a memoir by the poet's widow the following year, Remembering Randall. Thus Burt's thesis came at an important moment for Jarrell studies. His work looks at all of Jarrell's output, both prose and verse—including poems, critical essays, translations, children's books, and a novel—and included recent research occasioned by the discovery of new poems and essays. Burt puts Jarrell's works squarely in their social context, opening with a section on the poet's life and loves, and then examining essays and poems as the outgrowth of their times: the 1930s and 1940s when economic anxiety prevailed, as well as wartime difficulties, and the 1950s and early 1960s when relative prosperity returned but culturally the United States had changed, busy fighting the Cold War. Burt addresses ways in which Jarrell is still very relevant to modern readers, plumbing many of the same concerns of the postmodern world.

Randall Jarrell and His Age won the Warren/Brooks Award as well as praise from the critics. Writing in a starred review, a contributor for Publishers Weekly noted that "Burt is one of the leading critics of his own emerging generation, turning out an astonishing amount of terrific review-based criticism. . . . His project here is nothing less than the full-scale rehabilitation of Jarrell." Morris Hounion, writing in Library Journal, similarly commended the book as a "required resource for anyone doing research on the life and work of this noteworthy American poet and critic." Reviewing the same title in the Los Angeles Times, Vivian Gornick noted that "in his own person, Jarrell—alternately fey, brilliant, manic, theatrical and malicious—was as complicated and disordered as his prose was simple and lucid. It is this Jarrell who is at the center of Stephen Burt's schematic but intelligent and empathic book." For John Palattella, writing in the American Scholar, Burt proves an objective critic of Jarrell's works. "It is good," Palattella wrote, "that Burt, while clearly an admirer of Jarrell, is not afflicted by the piety that has turned other Jarrell fans into sycophants." Palattella continued, "Burt doesn't mimic Jarrell's critical methods. Jarrell was a good scene-setter, a critic who could quickly chart a poet's or an era's strengths and prejudices, but he rarely plumbed a particular poem's linguistic dimensions. Burt rolls up his sleeves and pays attention to the formal and symbolic qualities of Jarrell's writings." Palattella also went on to note that Burt's "lines of explication are intelligent and occasionally supple."

Burt told CA: "I write poetry when I can, and less frequently than I would like. I revise most, but not all, of my verse fairly heavily, over weeks or months or in a few instances up to six years. Most of the poets I admire are poets I have been lucky enough to write about for publication. I agree with Samuel Johnson's claim that works of art should help us 'better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.' I sometimes wonder why anyone ought to read my work, when they could be reading, say, Hardy, or Marianne Moore. I enjoy doing literary criticism when it amounts to a way of helping other readers enjoy works of art."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Letters and Commentary, 12, 2000, Sam White, review of Popular Music, p. 174.

American Scholar, spring, 2003, John Palattella, review of Randall Jarrell and His Age.

Boston Globe, April 20, 2003, William Pritchard, review of Randall Jarrell and His Age, pp. 144-147.

Library Journal, December, 2002, Morris Hounion, review of Randall Jarrell and His Age, p. 125.

Los Angeles Times, April 13, 2003, Vivian Gornick, review of Randall Jarrell and His Age, p. R16.

New York Review of Books, November 19, 2002, Stephen Burt, "Two Poems by Randall Jarrell," p. 45.

Poetry Review, summer, 2000, Roddy Lumsden, review of Popular Music, pp. 59-61; spring, 2003, Jan Montefiore, review of Randall Jarrell and His Age.

Publishers Weekly, October 25, 1999, review of Popular Music, p. 76; December 9, 2002, review of Randall Jarrell and His Age, p. 73.

Times Literary Supplement, May 23, 2003, Lachlan Mackinnon, review of Randall Jarrell and His Age, p. 11.

ONLINE

Columbia University Press Online,http://www.columbia.edu/ (June 30, 2003).

Contemporary Poetry Review,http://www.cprw.com/ (August, 2003), Garrick Davis, interview with Stephen Burt; (November, 2003), Joyce Wilson, review of Popular Music

Drunken Boat Online,http://www.thedrunkenboat.com/ (spring, 2001), D. H. Tracy, review of Randall Jarrell and His Age.

Macalester Today,http://www.macalester.edu/ (June 30, 2003).