Better late than not at all, I wanted to post a few pictures and thoughts about the fantastic reading given by poet and Harvard professor Stephanie Burt in the Writing Center on April 7th.
Somewhat famous as “the Harvard English professor who taught a whole course on Taylor Swift,” Stephanie is a prolific and wildly imaginative poet and critic. She read from her recent book We Are Mermaids (2022) as well as large number of unpublished works in progress.
She talked about the poet’s project to give voices to the world, especially to nonhuman things, from whales to the fake guns they shoot t-shirts out into the crowd with a sporting events.
A lively and engaging reader who dazzled all of us during the q&a, with responses that touched on everything from Chaucer to many different flavors of 21c pop music and film, Stephanie Burt’s event was the second in a series of Poetry Readings the English department is hosting will help from D’Angelo Chair Erica Hunt.
I was especially pleased to have been on campus for this reading, since I’ve known Stephanie since we were grad students together in the 1990s. I remember her quizzing me about Shakespeare, in a mock-exam fellow grad students gave me before my actual Oral Comprehensive Exam – her questions were so smart, so fast, and so perceptive that the actual exam, when it came a few days later, was a bit of a let down.
Such a pleasure to have Stephanie Burt on campus in 2025!
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