Guest poet Stephanie Burt reads for Alan Feldman Week of Poetry

By Francisco Omar Fernandez Rodriguez Arts & Features Editor Arts & Ideas and the English Department hosted a poetry reading on Oct. 21 at the Heineman Ecumenical Center, starting off the Alan Feldman Week of Poetry. This year’s guest poet was Stephanie Burt. English Professor Rachel Trousdale thanked everyone for coming to the event. She said while poetry reading is always good regardless, it’s better to have people in the room to hear it. “Like a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there, it’s still art, but it’s not art being adequately valued,” she said. Trousdale introduced Burt as “the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University.” She said it is difficult to count how many books Burt has written because she’s not sure whether to include the poetry books, critical analysis books, and edited collections in the same count. The Arts & Ideas schedule of events brochure says she has nine published books. Trousdale met Burt shortly before starting graduate school, and Burt was very welcoming, she added. “I was like, if all the people in graduate school are like this, I’m gonna have the best time. All the people in graduate school were not like this, but Stephanie was,” she added. She said Burt is a generous “sharer of ideas who wants to bring everybody into the conversation.” Before reading any poems, Burt started off by telling everyone about Trousdale’s full-length book of poetry coming out soon. She asked for the preorder link to be put in the Zoom chat. The first poem she read is by Trousdale and is called “Carboniferous.” She asked if there were any Swifties in the audience. Despite only finding one, she chose a poem which has origins from Taylor Swift. When the track list for a new album came out with a song titled “The Albatross,” Burt hoped it would be about a poem by Charles Baudelaire. She explained Baudelaire’s poem “is about being an artist who wants lots of attention for being an artist, but kind of sucking at daily life.” When the actual song came out, it was not about Baudelaire’s poem. “So I figured if we need the poem about Taylor Swift and Charles Baudelaire’s Albatross, I would have to write it,” she said. She named the poem after one of the subcategories of albatrosses called the guillemont, she added. The bird can be found crossing the Atlantic, similarly to how Swift herself does, she said. It’s also worth noting Burt has taught a course on Taylor Swift at Harvard. One time Burt read a certain poem in front of an audience with many British and Irish people, and they didn’t know what a T-shirt cannon was, she said. She asked a member of the audience to explain it. After a quick explanation of what it is and where they’re usually used, she said the poem is titled “T-shirt cannon.” The narrator is one of these cannons, and “it’s about watching your kids grow up and go off to college,” she added. After reading that poem she asked if anyone has heard of Paul Muldoon, an Irish poet known for his “out of control” rhymes and elaborate sentences. “When the poems don’t work, you’re just, like, ‘what was that?’ And when they do work you’re like, ‘oh, oh, OH!’” Burt said. While thinking about his poetry in Ireland, she saw someone with a giant travel backpack walking up the street, she said. She said she thought, “She couldn’t look back if she tried.” Burt then connected this idea to the story of Orpheus. In the myth, he had lost his wife forever because he looked back as they tried to escape the underworld. “If only he had one of these backpacks,” she added. The poem lets the lovers have their happy ending, thanks to the travel backpack. She also wanted to take that myth’s straight romance and make it gay, she said. “Because sometimes I find things I like that aren’t gay, and I try to make them gay.” Burt asked if there were any X-Men fans in the audience. Then she asked those fans for their favorite, and got Wolverine. While looking for a poem she wrote about Wolverine, she said she had sent a book full of X-Men poems to her publisher. “They were like, ‘We love this but there’s too many X-Men.’ And they were right - which is itself an X-Men reference,” Burt said. One of her Wolverine poems is about how it feels to be an older trans person, she said. “This one is about the weirdness of being a queer elder, a trans elder, where you’re like the oldest trans person you know, which isn’t literally true for me, but it was for a while,” she explained. The poem is spoken by parenthesis, the punctuation mark that looks the most like a single Wolverine claw, she added. It’s also about Logan serving as a mentor to Kitty Pryde in their 1984 miniseries, she said, noting how everyone definitely got the reference. Some of the other poems read but not discussed in great detail were about quotation marks, the strange fruit rambutan, “love with comic books,” snow, and Hawkeye. The Q&A section began with a question about how Burt’s work has been influenced by her trans background, and how it had changed as Burt’s identity did. Burt shared some of her personal background. She’s a binary trans woman who uses she/her pronouns, she said. She has anxiety, likes durian, and is a mom, an X-Men fan, and white, she added. “It is very important for people who are white to own whiteness and to notice whiteness, so that people who are not white don’t have to go around asking everybody who’s white to notice their whiteness, and can do other things that are maybe more fun,” she said. These characteristics are more than just demographics - they are a part of everything she writes, “even the durian,” Burt added. She thought her poetry was obviously LGBTQ+ and represented how she couldn’t get to be her gender until she was an adult, she said. However, when her first book came out in 1999, no one else seemingly noticed, she added. Her reception has changed since then, similarly to how the way people look at her has changed since she came out, she said. What she considers to be her saddest book, “Belmont,” was written when she was trying to be a dad, she said. “There were a lot of square-peg round-hole situations,” she added. She said her most recent book, “We Are Mermaids,” is her happiest one, and it’s about the LGBTQ+ community finding each other. Another member of the audience asked if Burt could share her writing process. Her poems usually start from a phrase she thinks sounds good, but sometimes she has an idea in her head that takes months or years before becoming that phrase, she said. If she waited until the right time or circumstances, she’d never get anything written, Burt said. She carries a notebook with her, and starts many more poems than she finishes, she added. A motivation that often gets her to start or finish a poem is the sense that someone will want to read it once it's done, she said. It could be someone she knows, or just an editor paying her, she added. She said as she’s grown as a writer, her work has felt more collaborative, especially her next book where she’s collaborating with writer and podcaster Mary Hampson. Collaborations, commissions, or any feeling that someone is going to care about the work once she’s done with it helps her, she added. Someone from Zoom asked who Burt’s favorite poets are other than Trousdale. While she doesn’t like being asked to name her favorite living American poets, it would be Terrance Hayes and Laura Kasischke, she said. One emerging poet she likes is Rosa Alcalá, and Burt is also fond of Angie Estes’ work, she added. From outside of America Burt strongly recommends Jenny Bornholdt from New Zealand. “It’s just like a very normal person who’s wiser than any other normal person you’ve ever met,” she said. As the event wrapped up, Burt wanted to thank the people behind the scenes who set up and clean up spaces such as the Ecumenical Center. Copies of her books were available to buy at the event.