The Poem Is You pairs each of its poems with an explanatory and appreciative essay. In that sense, it goes beyond the traditional ‘anthology’, which not coincidentally, is a word that does not appear on the cover of this volume, a fact that might escape the reader who is arrested by the slightly didactic tone of its subtitle, ‘60 contemporary American poems and how to read them’. Didacticism in the defence of poetry is no vice, but, happily, nothing could be further from the spirit of these essays: throughout, the style of Burt’s writing is as relaxed and inviting as its content is trenchant and learned. If the sheer capaciousness of contemporary American poetry is one of its defining features, Burt’s achievement here is to have been an enviably capacious critic, responding to the event of each poem in labile and unpredictable ways. Pairing each poem with an essay has another advantage over more conventional anthologies: the case for each poem’s inclusion can be made quite directly. As for the poems and poets left out of this volume, ‘the poets whose best poems are twenty pages long, or are whole books, or are audio files, or were written too early to count’ (the longest poem in the collection is James Merrill’s late ‘Self-Portrait in TyvekTM Windbreaker’), Burt is generous in his recommendations for further reading; this is a book that continually points beyond itself.

A limit on length of this kind necessarily tilts the collection toward what used to be called, perhaps too complacently, the ‘lyric poem’. But the lyric has always invited its own antithesis, the anti-lyric that asserts the primacy of language over the communication of deep subjective truths. The growing diversity of American poetry since 1980 enlivens and enriches the dialectic between these two approaches; indeed, insofar as American poetry after 1980 gets beyond the classic avant-garde and post-avant-garde versus traditionalist rivalry, dialectic is too limited a term for such a multiplicity of voices. It is no coincidence that these years also witnessed the explosive changes brought about by personal computing and the internet, leaving the lyric poem jostling for attention with a drastically expanded field of textuality. But it is equally true that precisely this expanding textual universe can furnish new resources and new vernaculars for poets to explore, as selections by kari edwards, Gabby Bess, Claudia Rankine, and others demonstrate.

Stephen Burt (photograph by David Shankbone, Wikimedia Commons)Indeed, Burt is notably sanguine about the tired story of poetry’s decline: this volume’s lack of defensiveness is one of its most salutary characteristics. Burt seems content for the poems themselves to justify the poet’s art, just as the supple explications that accompany them justify the critic’s. And though those explications consistently demonstrate Burt’s mastery of close reading and poetics, they do so in an unflashy way. At every step, that knowledge is deployed only as an aid to readerly comprehension and never as an end in itself: what effects can a given form or trope produce for readers? Moreover, each poem is experienced, as it should be, in the fullness of its potential to disrupt critical certainty, as when, opening his commentary on Robert Grenier’s ‘Shoe from the Waves’ (which I choose as a test-case of avant-gardism, since it consists only of the line ‘oh he got a shoe from the waves’), Burt offers a series of contextual frames for the poem in sentences, each of which begins with a disarming ‘maybe’. Burt’s approach, in other words, is to eschew certainty and the vast machinery of avant-garde poetics in favour of – and this is a word that recurs throughout the introduction – an invitation. And even the most traditionally minded reader of poetry would be churlish to refuse one so generous; raising the question of how much interpretation a poem as slight as Grenier’s can support, Burt concludes ‘that kind of overreading – sometimes comic, sometimes deadpan, sometimes philosophically ambitious – might be what poetry, in general, rewards’. Those rewards are amply displayed here.

For Australian readers, this book serves another timely, if perhaps unintended, purpose: to remind us that the yawning contradictions of the American project, even though they may produce moments of appalling reaction like this one, can help us see better the successes and failures of our own pluralistic experiment. The Poem Is You is a determinedly open-ended book, but if it tells story at all, it is a typically, though not uniquely, American one: it is the effort of poets, critics, and readers in a society founded on an heroic ideal of selfhood – like that often expressed in lyric – to grapple with the limitations imposed by that self’s historically constituted nature. The diversity represented in and by the poems in this volume is not, in other words, incidental to the story of American poetry, just as race, class, gender, and so on are not political hobby horses foisted on to literature by dogmatic critics. If we are to take seriously the promise contained in John Ashbery’s line ‘The poem is you’, we must acknowledge that these concerns issue from the vital heart of the lyric form.