Could be verse

ORIGINAL SYNTAX Burt helps us recognize modern poets' moves.

Photograph: Jessica Bennett

Today's poetry isn't the careful, rhyming verse you studied in school. It can be cool, mysterious, fun, funny, hip and sometimes off-putting, a kind of Williamsburg, Brooklyn of the mind. It can also be difficult, repulsive and bad. But Stephen Burt, a 38-year-old poet-critic who teaches at Harvard, knows that contemporary poetry can also be vital, multifaceted and rewarding—especially if we understand how to approach it. In the highly readable Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry, his collection of essays from publications like The New York Times and The Believer, he helps us read and enjoy modern verse. "If you have ever brought home unassembled furniture," he points out, "you likely know how important good instructions can be."

Burt's readings reveal a somewhat frantic and exciting voice. He writes as if he's leading a boat tour of the goings-on around, above, within and beside a fast-moving river while he simultaneously narrates what is past, passing and to come. Close Calls reads with all the liveliness of someone telling friends about a cool movie, and none of the stuffiness we usually associate with "criticism." It includes definitive analyses of Rae Armantrout, John Ashbery and D.A. Powell, among others; reevaluations of older poets like Frank O'Hara, James Merrill and William Carlos Williams; and essays on writers, such as Mark Levine, who belong to what Burt has termed the "elliptical" school ("Ellipticals love poems that declare 'I am X, I am Y, I am Z,' where X, Y, and Z are incompatible things"). For newcomers, it will be a guidebook; for experienced readers, Burt offers what may be the first concentrated statement explaining how and why we, consumers and writers of contemporary poetry, read.

Burt favors authors who are often thought of as experimental but who also have one foot firmly planted in tradition, particularly Ashbery, Armantrout (whose recent upsurge in popularity is due in part to Burt), Donald Revell, Laura Kasischke and Paul Muldoon, who combine clear, precise language with tricky, crenellated syntax, form and subject matter. These authors write in ways that make you think you know where they're going, then subvert those expectations again and again.

While Burt acknowledges that reading the poets he likes can sometimes be challenging, he points out that it doesn't require specialized training. "I don't think that any of the poets I admire require tremendous, intense preparation for people to enjoy them," he says. Burt, a basketball fan, sees similarities between how you understand what's going on in a basketball game and in a poem. "You need to be able to recognize a certain set of moves," he says, "and part of the goal of a poetry critic is to help people recognize those moves."

A critic, especially of a marginalized and oft-misunderstood art form like poetry, is of necessity going to be a kind of ambassador, and Burt assumes the role with grace. He wants to open the minds of new poetry's doubters, the "people who believe that contemporary experimental poetry has some kind of resistance to subjects." What's especially rewarding about this book is how well it differentiates the individual writers it covers. "Contemporary so-called experimental poets have different personalities, different tones, different ways of treating subjects and different subjects," Burt says.

Lastly, a good critic must, at some level, be self-effacing. "Part of a critic's ambition," says Burt, "is to make herself or himself unnecessary, to bring a reader to a point where the reader can see what I see in a certain poet without me."

Close Calls with Nonsense (Graywolf, $16 paperback) is out now.

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