Big Blue Marble welcomes back poet and essayist Stephanie Burt. She'll be in conversation with Philly poet and translator Mai Schwartz, exploring what poetry is and how it shapes/is shaped by our world.

Stephanie’s newest book is Don't Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems. is an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another--and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter.

Mai Schwartz is a poet, a storyteller, a sometime carpenter, an unofficial historian, and a native of New Jersey with lots of opinions about diners and malls. Based in Philadelphia, Mai can often be found tending beehives at Bartram’s Garden and working on translations of Argentine writer Néstor Perlongher.

Stephanie Burt is the author of three poetry collections, Belmont, Parallel Play, and Popular Music, and several collections of critical works. Her essay collection Close Calls with Nonsense was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other works include Don’t Read Poetry; Advice from the Lights; The Poem is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them; The Art of the Sonnet; Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler; The Forms of Youth: Adolescence and 20th Century Poetry; Parallel Play: Poems; Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden; and Randall Jarrell and His Age. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The Believer, and the Boston Review.