Stephanie Burt on Allan Peterson ("I thought all life came from the alphabet")

Close Readings

Very few scholars have as much enthusiasm for poetry as Stephanie Burt, and so it was a delight to have her back for this episode. Steph has been in the news of late for offering a (very popular) course at Harvard on Taylor Swift, and we begin this episode by talking in fascinating ways about the long history of the relation between popular music and poetry.

And then we move on to this episode's poem, Allan Peterson's marvelous "I thought all life came from the alphabet." Peterson was a new poet to me, and I was totally won over by Steph's framing of him as a poet of science, of intellect, and of fun. This is a poet thinking in surprising ways about the match and mismatches between the world as we find it and the consciousness with which we receive it. He is, in that sense, an epistemological poet, but also at his core a naturalist, a poet whose mind grows in relation to the world he describes.

Stephanie Burt is the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. Her most recent book of poems is We Are Mermaids (Graywolf, 2022) and her most recent book of criticism is Don't Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems (Basic Books, 2019). You can follow her on Twitter.

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