Elsewhere Burt delivers a modest criticism of John Ashbery, a poet he admires and often alludes to, characteristically sandwiching the criticism between two compliments. “No modern poetry half so original” as Ashbery’s recent work “incorporates half so many clichés.” He finds five clichés in seven lines, but excuses them as reminders that we inherit and bequeath both good and bad language.

In his essay on Armantrout, as in others, Burt is skilled at exegesis and even better at fitting the poet into the typology of American poetry, alerting readers to his identification of the most decisive influences on the poet being discussed. Burt sometimes dares to go even further, actually ranking multiple influences. Armantrout’s work, he says, comes out of W. C. Williams, Dickinson, Oppen, Niedecker, Creeley, and Levertov, “in that order.”

…Burt is skilled at exegesis and even better at fitting the poet into the typology of American poetry, alerting readers to his identification of the most decisive influences on the poet being discussed.

A professor of English at Harvard, Burt uses his academic training and his breadth of reading well. He never reviews poets in vacuo, letting us know instead which other poets have similar sensibilities and styles, and who is the poetic heir of whom, a useful way for us to know which poets we are likely to find to our taste and which ones might expand our range. Influence is notoriously difficult to isolate in a meaningful way, but Burt is alert to echoes and shadows.

While he emphasizes new poets, one strength of this book is his revaluation of poets already in the canon, including James Merrill, Lorine Niedecker, Richard Wilbur, Frank O’Hara, Thom Gunn, Robert Creeley, A.R. Ammons, Stanley Kunitz, and Les Murray. Burt’s essays blend biography and analysis well. Aside from his intense interest in who has influenced whom, Burt writes about poets for a popular rather than an academic audience.

The other poet at the Fordham event, Eamon Grennan, complimented Burt for his poems’ being jumpy, for their unanticipated zig zag movements. The essays in Close Calls with Nonsense, which takes its name from his blog, show a more traditional structure, conversational ease, and linear development than the poems he read.

Stephen Burt looks for occasions to praise momentary revelations of “what it is like to be a particular person” (p. xi), because he says his essays are like social introductions, meant to make new friends. Unlike William Logan, whose reviews are alert first to failures, Burt reads poems to find their successes. In one blog entry not reprinted in Close Calls with Nonsense, he pauses to ask “What else should be praised?” and then answers the question. Both approaches are healthy for poetry. Because Burt starts afresh with each poem itself rather than with established principles, Close Calls with Nonsense contains myriad observations about craft and technique that should prove illuminating and useful for poets as poets, not just as readers.