Reviews and Interviews
The Eagle - In Conversation with Michael Schmidt and Dan Burt by Josh Hinton and Ed Kendall
September 2014
It is early March. The warm sun is making its first appearance of the year, and the air is full of the shouts and laughter of inexperienced punters. In a bright and airy New Court set, second-year English students Josh Hinton (2012) and Ed Kendall (2012) meet with Johnian poets Michael Schmidt and Dan Burt to discuss everything from lust to rage, and from caesuras to the true purpose of poetry.
Michael Schmidt is Writer in Residence at St John’s, Editorial and Managing Director of Carcanet Press, and Editor of literary magazine PN Review. He has published seven volumes of poetry and numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Novel: A Biography, released in May 2014.
Dan Burt (1964) is an Honorary Fellow of St John’s. He read English here and then graduated from Yale in 1969, before going on to a long and highly successful career in law. His first volume of poetry was published by Carcanet in 2008, and he has since published four more, along with a memoir, titled You Think It Strange, of his formative years in Philadelphia.
Jewish Telegraph - Dan could look after himself in tough Philly by Jason Stein
15th November 2013
THE title of Dan Burt’s memoirs of a tough upbringing in south Philadelphia in the 1940s and 50s is certainly apt.
His 120-page book, You Think It Strange (Notting Hill Editions, £12), provides a detailed insight into a different time for Jews in America.
During the interview, Dan revealed he doesn’t communicate with anyone before midday, is on his fourth wife and admitted his work is “extremely terse”.
Born in south Philadelphia in 1942, he attended a series of state schools before making it to St John’s College, Cambridge, to read English.
The Jewish Chronicle - Family Matters From Age to Age by Peter Lawson
29th March 2013
The superb American poet Dan Burt's We Look Like This deals ironically with common notions of Jewish appearance; an irony reinforced by Frank Auerbach's heavily impastoed portrait, Head of Gerda Boeh, on its cover.
The Times - If You Buy Only One... by Megan Walsh
8th December 2012
I liked Dan Burt's collection We Look Like This (Carcanet, £9.95) in which he picks at his Jewish ancestry, the scars of his father's rage and inexplicable disconnect within some families (news of his brother's death is "less vexing than a tree fall in my garden").
MEGAN WALSH
Poetry Archive - A Tour Of The Poetry Archive with Rachel Redford
August 2012
Over the last few years I have listened to many of the Poetry Archive recordings and my six poems are taken from those voices, literal and poetic, which stood out and have remained with me. I wanted my selection to be fresh and contemporary – (only Rubaiyat was published before 2004) – and to reflect the great diversity of voice, content, form and language in the Poetry Archive. I have chosen poets who use language that intrigued, startled, moved me, and who in W.H.Auden’s words ‘say something significant about a reality common to us all.’ . . . .
Times Literary Supplement - Mean Streets and Wetland Choirs by Ben Wilkinson
10th August 2012
We Look Like This, Dan Burt's first full collection (which includes poems from, and greatly expands on, pamphlets he has published in the past five years with Michael Schmidt's Lintott Press), meets his own childhood and family history head-on. Born to a violent if admirably driven father whose parents escaped murder by Ukrainian Cossacks, and a distant mother whose family were "tough Jews" living on the edge of the law, Burt's was a gritty upbringing in South Philadelphia. We Look Like This maps his escape from these harsh environs - working as a youngster in the family butcher's shop from dawn till dusk; viewing his parents' marriage as "a bare knuckle fight to the death" - first to Cambridge, England, where he read English, then to Yale and a career in law. Mixing working-class roots and mean streets with college cloisters and Ivy League privilege, Burt is forever trying to make sense of his many-sided identity, though in a commendably unsolipsistic way. "All the dark years haunt me", reflects one poem, "Not what happened.../but warnings missed/because I could not gauge what others felt".
