Stephen Burt, “Hyperborea”

after Pindar

Once past the man-high teeth
and the disintegrating ice
that separate human lands
from the gods’ secret territory, what Herakles found
was nothing on first sight worth even half a breath
to the sort of fortune-tellers and singers who vaunt
celebrities’ pleasures, who promise new heroes the solace
of willing nymphets and smooth-shouldered boys,
then give them marble busts and sapphire crowns.
Behind the curtain of snows
lay temperate air and a firepit, and
what heroes, after labors, really want:
a couple of apple trees; a brook; warm shade where hardwoods stand;
a stump for a table; crisp weather, a place to sit down.

“Hyperborea” is from Stephen Burt’s new collection, Belmont. The book also has two poems that originally ran in The Awl (“Belmont Overture” and “Kendall Square in the Rain”), a poem from Slate (“Dulles Access Road”), and, from Boston Review, the poems “Color Theory” and “Butterfly with Parachute.”

Burt appeared at Brooklyn’s Book Court as part of the 2013 “Graywolf Poetry Tour,” and I took the opportunity to interview him for my other website, The Handsell with Ron Hogan. I told him I was a fan of Philip Larkin, August Kleinzahler, and Carl Phillips; he came up with some poets I might like to read next. I’ve been doing this with other writers and indie booksellers lately—it’s been a lot of fun! If you’d like to tell me some books you like, I may be able to line up some recommendations for you…

4 August 2013 | poetry |

John Mantooth: Storms as Metaphors & Non-Metaphors

photo: courtesy John Mantooth

Earlier this year, I was asked to review Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow; not knowing much about the story going in, I was caught off guard by the arrival of a megastorm with strong echoes of Hurricane Sandy, which was still lodged in the foreground of my memory. I had a similar experience with The Year of the Storm, the debut novel from John Mantooth, which I began reading in May, shortly before the tornadoes that went through Oklahoma. When the opportunity to have Mantooth write a guest essay for Beatrice presented itself, I wondered if he might be interested in discussing the power of stories about storms—he took my barely-formed idea and came up with a very effective statement about the potential resonance between fiction and our real-life experiences.

Anytime you write fiction, you run the risk of trivializing another person’s experience. Write about war and the veteran who swallowed the war whole when he was 21 and will die with that same war lodged in his throat, shakes his head, mutters in a disdainful voice, and walks away angry from your book because war just can’t be fiction. Not to him. Write about murder, and someone will read your book whose life has been touched by that act, and she will be turned off, will seek to read other kinds of books, the ones whose storylines don’t hit so close to home. It doesn’t matter how well you write about a topic, someone will always be hurt or turned off or angry. And that’s okay. Fiction must make some readers walk away or it’s probably not worth writing.

My first novel is set in Alabama, and I’ve lost count of how many twisters blow through the woods behind the narrator’s rural home. The book uses these tornadoes as a metaphor of transformation. Storms change things, they pick up the landscape and spin it around, dropping it back in unrecognizable pieces. The storm is a metaphor for growing up, for waking up and finding that the world is actually quite unrecognizable, that the very place you spent your childhood playing is really another place. It’s a book I’m proud of, and a metaphor that I think works.

(more…)

21 July 2013 | guest authors |