Stephen Burt gives Ted Talk + poetry advice

Give yourself deadlines. Try several things in case one fails. Explore; don’t sign yourself away to one style or one approach. Read widely. Don’t just read contemporary America. If you don’t have another language, get one. If you do, translate! Make other languages’ poems into your own, and don’t worry about accuracy if that is not what you are trying to produce. So many major poets have learned their own technique from rendering Latin or French or Spanish or, these days, Arabic or Kannada.

-Stephen Burt, Why Poetry Makes Sense: An Interview with Stephen Burt, conducted by Laura Cococcia, Huffington Post, August 31, 2013

The Power of Poetry: Stephen Burt at TED Global 2013 

OVER CONNECTICUT: EMINENT DOMAIN

Inland, the antique milemarkers spread
themselves out into twentieth-century lanes,

__________

Read rest of Stephen Burt’s poem at Diagram