Valerie Duff-Strautmann Interviews Stephanie Burt at LARB

Over coffee in Belmont, Massachusetts, Valerie Duff-Strautmann spoke with Stephanie Burt about her latest volume, Don't Read Poetry. "Do you see Don’t Read Poetry as a natural next step or an entirely different enterprise compared with your earlier book The Poem Is You?" Duff-Strautmann asks. From there: 

Their goals overlap, but they also diverge: The Poem Is You is about contemporary American poetry, and its implied or ideal reader has already read more poems, though maybe not many poems from the last five minutes or five years. Don’t Read Poetry should please and instruct somebody who loved The Poem Is You, but it’s supposed to cast a wider net: it’s for (though not only for) people who don’t read any poems in a typical week (but maybe want to start), and for people who feel they don’t know how.

Your book is called Don’t Read Poetry. I thought, flipping it out of the negative, Read Many Poems or Know What You’re After would work, too. Does that feel like an accurate substitution to you?

I’m okay with Read Many Poems — that’s nearly the subtitle! I’m less okay with Know What You’re After, because many of us don’t know what we’re after: especially when we are reading a new poet, or a kind of poetry new to us. We often hope for surprise.

Can you say more about the line in your book: “Learning the history of poetry […] is less like a struggle to become the Black Panther than it is like becoming a Black Panther fan”? And how this relates to ideas about a poetic canon?

Sure. Fandoms (I am in X-Men fandom a lot these days) are communities that try to be horizontal rather than vertical, that try to avoid professional hierarchies, that you can join (or leave) because you care about the material (rather than because you’re already an expert), where you nerd-out together over something that matters to you (rather than cramming for a test). I want my favorite poems to be fan favorites, rather than centers of institutional power. Of course, many poems, especially old ones, end up being both. But the personal liking (as Marianne Moore says) comes first.

Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books.