Silt by Stephen Burt

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend April 15, 2015   Silt   Stephen Burt

Things you know but can’t say, the sort of things, or propositions that build up week after week at the end of the day,   & have to be dredged by the practical operators so that their grosser cargo & barges & boxy schedules can stay.   The great shovels and beaks and the rolling gantries of Long Beach, and of Elizabeth, New Jersey, can keep their high and rigorous distinction between on-time and late, between work and play.   “Since you excluded me, I will represent you, not meanly but generously, with an attention that is itself   a revenge, since it shows that I know you   better than you have ever known yourselves,   that if I could never have learned how to be you, nor how to be somebody you’d like to be very near, nevertheless   you could not do without me, or keep me away.”            Copyright © 2015 by Stephen Burt. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “I was thinking about the commercial ports and harbors that have to be dredged so that they can stay commercially viable, and thinking that they resemble the mind, which fills up—as we grow up—both with practical information of no lasting resonance (timing for school closings, doctor’s appointments, when to get your car inspected) and with things you realize—about yourself and about other people—that you can’t say out loud; they’d offend, or make other people feel terrible, or make you look like a hypocrite, or require way more time to explain than other people ever have in an informal setting.   These two kinds of things—practical data and unsayable truths—might gradually fill up the minds of adults, making us like old ports that have to be dredged. Or like new ports, which also have to be dredged: like container ports—like the Port of Elizabeth, New Jersey, which we used to drive past, or the Port of Oakland, which if I recall correctly inspired the AT-AT walkers in The Empire Strikes Back.   These ports and their machines decide what comes into the country and what can’t be brought in; and what if the excluded, the never-unloaded, the dredged-away, had a better view of us than we have of ourselves? If you’ve already been excluded, you don’t have to worry about social proprieties, about not telling the truths that will get you kicked out (because you’ve already been kicked out): that’s not a new insight (it’s a variation on the idea I vaguely associate with Hegel—the slave knows the master; the master does not know the slave) but I hope I’ve made it at least a bit new in this poem, which (like most of what I’ve written lately) has one foot in gossip and youth (it’s a poem about mean girls) and another in the peculiar restrictions of adult lives.” —Stephen Burt   Stephen Burt’s latest book of poems is Belmont (Graywolf Press, 2013). He is a professor of English at Harvard University. Most Recent Book by Burt   Belmont (Graywolf Press, 2013) "This Is My Call for Apologies" by Amy Lingafelter "the fare-well letters [excerpt]" by Evie Shockley "Landscape with a Blur of Conquerors" by Richard Siken Read This Poem   For National Poetry Month, we’ve teamed up with 826 National to produce Read This Poem, a celebration of poets in cities with 826 chapters. Read this week’s featured poems by poets from Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038