In June of 2014, Burnett and Jeff Dolven organized a night of skew poetical resurrectionism. The dead poet of the night? William Blake. The mission? To unravel (and re-ravel) the Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Razor blades were deployed in studied silence by all. See some of the evening’s returns below.

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Burnett has a longstanding interest in poetry, and he and Jeff Dolven host the semi-regular “Poetry Lab” at the Cabinet Space in Brooklyn. See here for stuff about the Séance with James Merrill; and here for the “Idea of Order on the Gowanus Canal.” A Sappho fan? Look here to see what happened when Anne Carson helped Cabinet shatter a set of terra cotta plates inscribed with Sapphic fragments. Yes, at the Whitman evening there was a naked guy with a prosthetic vagina. Back in the spring of 2003, in conjunction with the Humanities Council, Burnett and Dolven organized a much less crazy symposium on language and philosophy, entitled “Poetry and Knowledge.”