Stephanie Burt

Harvard Book Store welcomes celebrated poet and critic STEPHANIE BURT for a discussion of her latest book, Don't Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems. She will be joined in conversation by award-winning poet DAVID BLAIR. This event is co-sponsored by Mass Humanities.

About Don't Read Poetry

In Don't Read Poetry, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another—and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about "poetry," whether we think we like it or think we don't, in order to help us cherish—and distinguish among—individual poems.

A masterful guide to a sometimes confounding genre, Don't Read Poetry will instruct and delight ingénues and cognoscenti alike.

Praise for Don't Read Poetry

"Don't Read Poetry is for readers hunting sharp, nimble thinking about culture, comprehension, and poems. Whether discussing an ancestral Hawaiian language, a canonical poet like Langston Hughes, or contemporary poets like Rodrigo Toscano and Jennifer Chang, Stephanie Burt manages to illuminate 'the difficult process of turning paired marks into words.' Don't read poetry, she suggests, read poems. This is a book for anyone who reads with curiosity, care and imagination." ―Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

"When I began Stephanie Burt's Don't Read Poetry, I fully expected her to widen and deepen my appreciation of this art form. Burt is, after all, a masterful poet, teacher, and literary critic. What I didn't necessarily expect was that I'd have such a great time absorbing what she has to say. Whether you love poetry or resist it, you will enjoy this entertaining and enlightening book." ―Wally Lamb

"For the past fifty years, poetry critics have battled over what poetry is, which poets mattered, and which didn't. Stephanie Burt says they had it wrong. Don't read poetry, this dedicated pluralist tells us, if by poetry you mean one thing. If however you want to read poems, and discover the manifold ways they can be—and help readers to be—good (for Burt's aesthetic vision is ultimately ethical), read this lucid, informed, and deeply humane book." ―Langdon Hammer, author of James Merrill: Life and Art