“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer.”

Six is my favourite number. It is the number of years between my younger sister and me. It looks like the lovechild of zero and “C”. The only single digit that is divisible by two as well as three, it seems to encompass both even and odd with a swirling, round-bottomed equanimity.

This tadpole, half of a yin-yang symbol, is also the number for idealists. Six years ago today, I counted myself among them when our son was born. I was determined to be the ideal father to an ideal son. Three days, eight hours and forty minutes later, when the doctor pronounced him dead, that idealism shattered, not by twos and threes, but into innumerable pieces.

His death certificate reflects that he was never issued a US Social Security number. The boxes for “years of education” and “years in country” each contain a single zero. Other boxes: “white”, “male”, “never married” all increment statistical records somewhere. His occupation was listed as “infant”. I wonder how often that column gets a tick.

Recently, strolling through a nearby Victorian cemetery, I was struck by how many headstones were laid for infants and children. In the developed world, in modern times, losing a child is unexpected. I was told that what happened to my wife and me only affects one-in-one-thousand like us these days.

We are now living approximately 5,500 miles away from the Santa Barbara harbor where we scattered his ashes, and from the community that so lovingly supported us through the long, dark aftermath. (The only constant–change.) I miss them terribly.

In the heart of a London winter, in the middle of my life, I am facing down problems for which the answers are not numbers, but a way of life. Throughout the upheaval of the past six years, a few things have remained invincible in me. Among them: a need to make art, and a desire to give back.

Once again, I take this day to be grateful for my son’s short life, and the ways in which it has taught me about how to more courageously live my own.

Yesterday, with the help of an iPhone app, I propped my phone by the window for several hours and set it to take pictures six times per minute. I composited these images into video at 24 frames per second using Quicktime, then looped the clip back-and-forth, adjusted the colour, and added a panning and zooming effect using iMovie.

Valerie and I collaborated this morning on some accompanying words and music, combining it all together into another film-poem.

Upon Arrival

Longing dabbles in shadows
as the day doubles back,

offering honey and vinegar,
wine to the already drunk.

Memory, that bricklayer, stirs
its slush with a trowel.

Glazed squares shriek their re-
flected light. It is never enough.

Crevices hoard the darkness,
and hiss: never enough.

We rub against newsprint
until our thumbs go black.

Steam chafes against its pane of sky.
We can never go back.

Watch all film-poems in order

Piece Work

Winter, and the loom
of the sky has been
picked to wire.

Light etches its memories
through the long strands
of twilight.
We inhabit
the shell of the world,
and carry it gently.

It carries us too,
the echoing stairwell,
the empty glass aflame.

Look what I have brought–
sand from a bullet-pocked
beach, ribbon from a dead
girl’s hair.
It reaches
through shadow play, gesture,
the conspiring laughter
of birds strung high overhead.

We dwell here, suspended
in ether, vibrating
the strands of the web.

Watch all film-poems in order

“How can I tell what I think ’till I see what I say?”

Once again, I have taken a look over the past year, and selected one post from each month that stood out in some way.

January: The Fifth Year

Today, I said goodbye two our two-year-old Australian nephew, not sure when we will see him again. As we near the sixth anniversary of our son’s birth and death, I realise how far we have come, not only geographically, but psychologically as well. Passing the fifth year was a milestone for us.

February: Human Shade

In February, my debut short collection Human Shade was published by Lost Horse Press in America. It was extremely heartening to see so many orders arrive in such a short time. I brought a few copies with me to England.

March: London Calling

In March, we made the decision to move to London. Having lived my entire life in California, I had no idea just what a leap this would be for me.

April: Adieu, America

In April, I said goodbye to America, but not to being an American. In fact, living here, I have never felt so American as I do now. My father also bid me farewell in a very special way.

May: Through the Looking Glass

In May, we arrived with just our suitcases. We had one week to find a place to live before the start of my new job. After the whirlwind subsided, I began to feel like Alice, down the rabbit hole in a world that only superficially resembled the one I had known.

June: Notes on Contemporary British Poetry

In June, I began to take advantage of my circumstances by way of comparative Anglo-American poetics. So began an effort to overcome what I have deemed “poetic culture shock“–and come to understand the subtle differences between British and American poetry.

July: Discovering an Artistic Ancestor

In July, I discovered a remarkable book by another poet named Peake, which had a profound effect on me.

August: The Nature of Peace

In August, the London riots exploded not far from our home while we were on holiday in Wales with my parents. The contrast prompted this meditation.

September: An American Werewolf in London

In September, I began to put my finger on the sense of otherness that had been haunting me, and let myself howl a bit at the moon.

October: “On Being Straight (A Thought Experiment)“

I wrote this piece in October, and within a short span of time my “thought experiment” turning the tables on identity politics had received over 95,000 views on StumbleUpon, and been republished in The Good Men Project.

November: “The Invisible Father“

A colleague’s casual remark set off this mini-essay for The Good Men Project about the being a father without a child.

December: “British Matches“

In December, Aperçus Quarterly published this short poem, inspired by the warning label on a pack of matches. Along with comparative Anglo-American poetics, I seem to be studying semiotic estrangement–the effect of “everyday” signs and symbols on a cultural outsider.

It has been a remarkable year. Wishing peace to you and yours in 2012!

In response to the recent news that my wife’s health condition had worsened, a coworker kindly offered to babysit. “You must have mistaken me for someone else in the office,” I replied, “We don’t have kids.” Being a considerate person, I expected her to respond to my email as others had before–with apologies, saying she meant no offense. But the next part of her message took me by surprise. She said something to the effect that I seemed grounded and settled, and that this is a quality she often admires in dads.

As a child, I always thought invisibility was the best possible super power. To be able to see and know what is going on, without being seen yourself, was something I craved. So much so that I still am taken aback when others share insights about me that they have gained from observation. But the idea that I was behaving in a visibly father-like way struck me as both poignant and profound.

The death of our infant son, and our subsequent inability to have another child, cast me into not only grief, but a longing to understand what my life is about.

Continue reading the full article online at The Good Men Project…

But a vitriolic rant was not the poem that came out. Although I mentioned this experience in my commencement speech at my MFA graduation later that year, I did not read the poem. In the groundswell of Occupy movements, stretching from Wall Street to my own alma mater, now somehow seemed like an appropriate time to share this piece. It came out of my own private protest, years ago, in the hours before sunrise.

Blessing the Bankers

“…one of the principal Chinese curses heaped upon an enemy is, ‘May you live in an interesting age.’”

— Frederic R. Coudert

They are still out there, the stars, commanding
more depth than ever. The light from Venus

seems closer than is safe, more luminous
than a bad idea ablaze in an innocent mind.

But what is innocent? We think, at first, a baby,
upon whose face the weather moves in bursts,

who has not discovered volume control
and empties his bellowed lungs with wailing.

Here, too, in the dusk of life, we wail.
We thought the good times would never end,

forgot the dams were built against bursting,
how terrible the water, still and black.

We troubled no-one with our dreaming.
The surface of the sky went on with changes.

The blessings laid by our mothers on our foreheads—
let this one live a simple life, uncomplicated—

catch fire beneath the weak-but-omnipresent moon.
Let this one be a banker, made of bricks.

Even the tear-down crews are out of work, must find
something else to pull against, at home.

It is winter still, though it feels like spring.
The newspapers print ads for filing bankruptcy—

such a word, the rupture of banking, which means
to pile up, as along the edge of a river—banks

to guard against the overspill, the rebel wave,
the slow rising water, seeking the floodplain.

Gather that child into your arms, the one
you hoped was owed a simple life. The waters rise.

“We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.”

Oscar Wilde would be pleased to know that, based on my experience so far as an American in London, Britain and America are still very much separated by a common language. More than this, as a transplanted poet beginning to send down roots into unfamiliar ground, I am discovering that the set of poetic impulses that find favour in the UK differ from those enriched by my native soil. This makes sense: so much about art is a matter of taste, and so much about taste can be cultural.

And so, even as I have been experiencing culture shock in my ordinary life, I am also going through a kind of poetic culture shock as I find my way in this new literary terrain. One of the best ways I have found to get through culture shock of any kind is to articulate and embrace what is unique about the new environment. While it would be impossible to describe, universally and categorically, what distinguishes British and American poetics, I recognise certain differences on instinct. The Americas could not have made a Seamus Heaney; the British Isles could not produce a Sharon Olds.

And so, I have been making a personal and highly subjective investigation into the strengths of each culture’s contemporary poetry, by reading and re-reading two books: The Best American Poetry 2011 (Scribner) and The Best British Poetry 2011 (Salt). I took note of the poems I liked most, then listed the qualities held in common by my favourites from each book.

Obviously, this list does not hold up as a set of universal generalisations. Particularly when it comes to poetry, for every rule there is an exception. London might have produced a Li-Young-Lee; New York could have fashioned a Paul Muldoon. Plus “American” poets in this volume like Charles Simic have strong ties to Europe, and at least one “Brit” in the book is an American transplant. So it goes.

This evening, I will participate in the peculiarly British tradition of Bonfire Night (having previously only ever lit fireworks in the warmth of summer), and then am looking forward tomorrow night to my first gathering of a local poetry group. I am not trying to bend my sensibilities to suit the new context as much as I am trying to get in touch with what I admire and respect about British poetry, to invoke those qualities from within. I was drawn to London to learn, to be influenced, to find out more about myself by contrasts, and to embrace the Old World. Overcoming poetic culture shock helps me further that journey and lighten my load.

Still, many people these days think being straight is unnatural.

Gay friends have tried to “help” me with my “problem.” And I know they mean well. Sometimes they quote the words of holy people who have said that heterosexuality is wrong. “Man was made for man and woman for woman,” they recite from books written thousands of years ago, calling it a perennial truth. But back then, all men were treated like property, and people lived brutal, tribal lives. We select and interpret constantly from the past. I’d like to think that what’s everlasting, even spiritual, is based more on love than condemnation.

People sometimes insinuate that my two dads were unsuitable role models, not gay enough to be “real” men. Or they suspect some woman must have come along and “corrupted” me in my youth. Some people think being straight is a club you can be “recruited” into (and therefore leave). It is not just about sex, or shock value. I am not rebelling against anything or anyone. I am trying, in fact, to be most fully who I already am.

I would like my marriage to my lovely wife to be recognised as legitimate, and for people to see past our different genders, to us as a family. I never wanted to stand out. Not like this. My wife and I hold hands in public, not because we are looking for a fight, but because we want to hold hands. In some countries, I could be violently killed for being straight. It is law. Sometimes it frightens me to be who I am in this world. And yet the alternative–to pretend to be gay just to fit in for awhile–is a worse kind of death on the inside.

Who I am is straight. Except that as soon as I write this, I know it is not true. Who I love and how is only part of who I am. Isn’t variety good for the world? And aren’t my straight wife and I good for it, too? We contribute to our community just as much as two men, or two women, would. We are kind and friendly and productive. We even recycle. Yet constantly, this feeling that some people will never accept us as we are. I am not sorry for who I am, for who we are together, but I’m sorry that not everyone will see past us being two people of the opposite gender who are in love.

I am straight. I am myself. And, like you, I am trying to be happy.

“A short poem need not be small.”

I am tapping this out on my iPhone from Florence, having left the laptop in London. My first time in Italy finds me marveling at so much grand art, and wondering if there is still a place in the post-colonial, post-modern, post-financial-collapse world for the enduring opera magnifica.

Though my nickname in the seminary was “Dante”, my own poems often focus on small moments, coaxing the universal from the quotidian. To attempt to expiate like Milton these days just seems somehow naïve.

Is it true? Has the grand just become grandiloquent? The epic apocryphal? What is left worth having writ large? If Signor Alighieri knows, he isn’t saying so far.

And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

There are many ways to settle in to a new place. One is to give them names of one’s own. Inspired by parodies giving alternate names to tube stations in London, I have produced a map whose stations take into account the poetic landscape. This is not intended to be the poet’s tube map, but rather a poet’s tube map–mine, representing my own thoughts and experiences at the intersection between London and the lyre.

Click to view the map.

“Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself, so the weary travelers may find repose.”

I have been previewing Facebook’s upcoming Timeline feature. It turns one’s profile into a scrapbook-style autobiography, arranging multimedia posts in a chronology from birth to present. It is part of a larger strategy to promote information sharing that has been intelligently criticized in general terms. But it was a specific moment in my exploration of Timeline that pulled me up short. Clicking on the small heart icon for “Relationships”, up popped a menu item for marking one’s timeline with “Lost a Loved One.”

Though we have memorialised our son in many ways, the thought of posting his photo on Facebook beneath the small flower icon to make it part of this music-video-all-about-me of a web application struck me as painfully absurd. He is deeply and irrevocably part of my life. But a biography is not a life, much less an online profile. We have become a society obsessed with crafting our image–so much so that we almost believe, and sometimes attempt to inhabit, these spun self-tales.

The antidote to the future we now inhabit, wherein everyone has their own Wikipedia page for fifteen minutes, is art. Mark Twain called biographies “the clothes and buttons of a man,” deciding, “the biography of the man himself cannot be written.” But something approaching what it feels like to be a man can come across in the literary arts, and especially poetry. Poetry is the anti-wiki, striving for truths that need no citation, encompassing contradictions rather than devolving into fact-slinging “flame wars.”

And so, when it is released next month, I will use Timeline. But for matters that transcend time, and excavate the inmost reality, I’m sticking with poems.

Mark Burnhope

The two poets mentioned in this collection–Wallace Stevens and Zbignew Herbert–are both poets of rich imagination and lyrical intensity. The former generally relates to more abstract thoughts and feelings, whereas the latter treats difficult personal topics such as the Nazi occupation of Poland. What do you see as the role of personally difficult subject matter in your own work? How does this inhibit or fuel your creative power?

That’s a fantastic observation, that thoughts and feelings / topics and issues paradox. I am interested in what happens when thoughts and feelings, beliefs and doctrines (which are abstract and elusive, however much we argue about it) bump into authentic, concrete experience; how faith or religion helps and hinders social change, and how the desire for change sometimes necessitate a revision of personal belief systems.

To take one hot potato for example, homosexuality and homophobia: there was a point when I decided, “Stuff all this in-fighting, I’m tired of being part of a religion which fails to recognise and offer love wherever it finds it. God doesn’t exclude, he welcomes.” I’ve always identified with the ways the LGBT community has been maligned in the Church, because a lot of disabled people experience the same thing; for me, it finds its crux in talk of ‘healing the sick’. A lot of people want to heal us, believing that God made us this way by accident, or that we’re the handiwork of Satan. Even in completely secular contexts, there are feelings of pity and the desire to see us fit a more able-bodied norm in order to be accepted. Inclusiveness and equality are essential values to my faith, and that finds its way into my poems.

It’s a chicken and egg thing. I’m hoping I depersonalise it, make some of these received notions less romantic (and Romantic, even though I quite like the Romantics).

I quite like the Romantics, too. Who are some of the poets who influenced you early on? Who are a few more recent favourites?

Early on, I’d read and enjoyed things by Keats and Coleridge. I was fourteen when Wordsworth and Blake grabbed me by the scruff of the neck. It’s difficult to remember what I thought of them then, but Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” is something that all of us who wrote poetry as teenagers know too well (and which “Romanticism” has sadly been reduced to, sometimes). Wordsworth qualified it by saying that poets should think long and hard to ‘earn’ the right to pour out feelings. I liked that, and wanted to have a go at it. Blake attracted me because he was full of irony. The Romantics revelled in irony. Even their name is ironic, because, far from being fluffy, they had balls: a social and public vision. They wanted revolution. But they knew that revolution begins in the heart, and the pen. Songs of Innocence and of Experience was children’s nursery rhymes for grown-ups. That musicality and magic was offset by harsh social criticism, anger, and corrective satire.

Most of my reading-for-pleasure has probably fallen into the metaphysical or ‘religious’ (whatever that might mean), pastoral / landscape / nature, the ‘anti-poetries’ which are either slightly experimental, or deal with difficult personal and public subjects, satire. I’m generally quite flummoxed by the separation of ‘mainstream’ from anything else. So, I love Ted Hughes, Heaney, McCaig, the Thomases. Recently, I’ve been inspired by Mick Imlah, Peter Didsbury, Alice Oswald, Andrew Philip, Luke Kennard, Lisa Jarnot, Tony Williams, A.B. Jackson, Angela Topping, Michael Symmons Roberts. Experimental writers such as Tim Atkins and Ira Lightman, and various things coming out of The Knives Forks and Spoons Press: Steven Nelson, Bobby Parker, Joshua Jones. Disability seems quiet in contemporary poetry, and I’ve found few poets writing from it. But Laurie Clements Lambeth’s brilliant Veil and Burn encouraged me that it’s out there.

Lastly, he’s not exactly contemporary, but Larry Eigner, a Black Mountain poet, is a recent discovery. He had Cerebral Palsy, and although his poems rarely mentioned it, they were filled with his particular physicality in the way they were shaped and formed. That’s exciting, to me.

You mentioned Confessional poetry. What are some of the challenges of this mode, and how do you navigate them?

Confessionalism is rife with hazards, so I’m careful to make it one of several streams I draw from, rather than a focus. Disability and faith are big themes in this pamphlet. Both are potentially fraught with personal therapy and soul-searching, or political soap-boxing, and that’s all well and good, but poetry fails if it’s only that. Plath has inspired diary-scribbling teenagers everywhere, and I love that. I want to deal with suffering and difficult feeling – poetry which avoids suffering can be less than human – but this is poetry; it has to draw me in and keep me because it inspires reflection, needs mulling over, not because it forces an agenda down my throat.

If I flirt with confession or argument, I might temper it with irony and humour. The most emotionally honest poems might be ‘The Snowboy’ and ‘Shinglehenge’. Even they have their own ways of restraining their feelings. Some say that irony removes emotion, but actually it can serve it, I think. It’s true in life, isn’t it; making light of things is comforting for us. And if we make jokes, others can feel we’re hiding things, but that can be when our pain seems most palpable. I once read this advice, on writing fiction, but I think it’s still relevant: ‘If your character cries, your reader doesn’t have to.’ I’ve always been mindful of that.

There is a massive tendency to see Confession as autobiography. It’s a fallacy that Confessional poetry is necessarily about the poet, though, even if it explores the self. Plath and Sexton often situated themselves in landscapes, imagined and real; made mythical figures of themselves, or others. Lowell felt free to draw from experiences not his own in order to get to the emotional truth of the matter. Ai, who you might call Confessional, spoke with invented characters’ voices to create angry, painfully difficult poems. So when I use material from life, it’s often fabricated, exaggerated, made mythical in a slightly irreverent way. One or two poems are based on dreams. I’m not shy about my disability but use it inadvertently, because it ‘just is’, it’s not ammo for an agenda. Similarly, if religious poetry only cuts the mustard for religious readers, it hasn’t worked.

Why poetry? Of the myriad ways one could express oneself, why this one? What drew you to it? What keeps you coming back?

I always did various other creative things: painting and drawing, playing drums in bands. I was with a rock band for ten years or so. But I seem to have settled on poetry as the major preoccupation. It’s got multi-sensory effect: imagery, sound. Poems are made things, and I love their sculptural quality. They’re an almost three-dimensional ‘landscape’ the reader can live in for a while, eventually getting to those feelings, thoughts and ideas between the cracks, underneath the layers. There are rudiments, techniques, a need to have subtlety and tightness in a similar way to drumming. Poets are in control of several creative activities at the same time. They’re one man bands, sound technicians.

I’ve never fully trusted prose, or my ability to write it. I like R.S. Thomas’ ideas of poetry as sacrament, vessel for incarnation, because words fail me. I can’t fully expect them to ‘express’ anything, and I find the concept of poetry as self-expression fairly problematic for that reason; it seems rather arrogant to think that I can imagine it, and get it down exactly. So I like the idea of language as pliable; that words can be manipulated, set next to and against one another, juxtaposed. They can contradict and disagree.

I’m not a big novel reader. A poetry collection gives depth, but allows me to view a kaleidoscope of themes and ideas. I’m not confined to a definite number of threads. Poems are as absorbing as songs. I still remember my favourite poems from years ago, and still visit them time and again. Two or three collections are beside my bed because I’m still reading them, years later. They allow skim-reading, but also beg to be given sustained attention.

Personally though, poetry has been central to my emotional life, intellectual and spiritual life. I’ve lived in it. I have one of your books here, Robert, and in it you say that poetry has been your ‘lifeline’ in everything you have been through. I completely relate to that; poetry has centred me, kept me sane, even at times when I couldn’t stomach religious faith, it was too painful. So I want to try and pay that forward in poems or critical writing about poetry. I hope to overcome my reluctance with prose, one day.

Mark, this exchange has been a pleasure. Any parting thoughts?

Thank you for having me on the blog, the pleasure was all mine; and thanks for your interest in The Snowboy. I should have a wise or pithy comment to leave you with here, but I don’t, so I’m going to use this old chestnut, which possibly touches on a few things we’ve spoken about: “Before you criticise someone, try to walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticise them you’ll be a mile away, and you’ll be wearing their shoes.”