Category Archives: Life

A Poet’s Tube Map

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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.

-Genesis 2:19 (KJV)

This image has been removedThere 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.

How to Lie with Facebook

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

-Czeslaw Milosz

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.

Interview with Mark Burnhope, Part II

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Mark Burnhope studied at London School of Theology before completing an MA in Creative Writing at Brunel University. His debut short collection, The Snowboy, was recently published by Salt. I had the pleasure of interviewing Mark about poetry, disability, theology, and much more. Click here to read Part I of this interview.

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.
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Interview with Mark Burnhope, Part I

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Mark Burnhope studied at London School of Theology before completing an MA in Creative Writing at Brunel University. His debut short collection, The Snowboy, was recently published by Salt. I had the pleasure of interviewing Mark about poetry, disability, theology, and much more.

How does theology inform your poetry, and vice-versa (if at all)?

It definitely does. But rather than speaking about theological subjects in abstract, theoretical terms, I try to ground them in my experience – as a disabled person in an admittedly broken religion, or more metaphorically, in imagined and fabricated settings where splinters of my life might be buried in the words, somewhere. One thing I’m interested in is how much biblical language doesn’t sit right in a contemporary disabled context: words like ‘sick’, and the well-meaning but ignorant obsession with physical healing. It means well, but it’s totally antithetical to how disabled people tend to see ourselves, as differently but definitely fully formed. (Isn’t everyone different? What is ‘normal’ anyway?)
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The Nature of Peace

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“[W]reathes of smoke / Sent up in silence, from among the trees.”

-William Wordsworth, from
“Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”

My family and I left for a much-needed holiday on the Welsh border as London exploded in riots. We decided weeks ago that we wanted to “escape” the city, but little did we know all that we would be escaping. Since that time, we have been following reports of neighbourhoods very near our own North London home erupting in looting and violence.

Meanwhile, we have been exploring the idyllic countryside of the Wye valley. Images of London engulfed in flame have interspersed with dazzling greenery, the likes of which inspired Wordsworth to compose his famous poem set above Tintern Abbey. The Abbey itself, dismantled by decree from Henry VIII, rises skeletal in the countryside, like the fire-gutted shops, double-decker buses, and police cars photographed on London streets.

In the poem, Wordsworth declares, “I have learned / To look on nature, not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity.” Indeed, this still, sad music has been with me on our journey through the “sylvan Wye.” I am struck by the quiet of this place, in contrast to London’s constant hustle, and the lush natural forms, as compared to the barrage of advertisements, the likes of which program all of us, including would-be looters, that if only we had an iPad, we might be happy.

Here, with space and beauty, where even the grass seems content, it is hard to imagine humans piled into housing estates, crammed into tube carriages at rush hour, struggling against each other to get by. And it seems only natural that such unnatural circumstances are kindling awaiting a spark. My heart goes out to London, and all the cities in the UK experiencing unrest.

A fire is flickering in a great stone hearth in our fourteenth-century cottage. The moon is bathing the river and meadows blue, while the trees darken almost to black. It seems to me the peace we feel in such circumstances runs deep within our nature. I wish the peace of the Wye could wash over all of Britain tonight.

Finding My Footing

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Photo: Wikipedia

I declared my intention, over and over in my head, to “hit the ground running” upon my arrival in London. After three weeks of pounding the pavement with a heavy laptop on my back during my daily commute, I developed plantar fasciitis, an injury to the connective tissue at the arch of the foot. After a range of treatments, including stretches and shoe inserts, tonight was the first night I could walk home from the tube at a normal pace without pain.

It has been nearly three months since they stamped my resettlement visa at Heathrow Airport. Since that time, I have been putting one foot in front of the other, journeying toward what I hope might one day feel like “normal” life again. Each step has been an act of faith, and often what I thought looked level turned out to be uneven ground. So often, whatever I assumed, culturally or logistically, has been perfectly wrong.

My parents are over to visit, giving me fresh eyes on my new circumstances. Having them here brings a much-needed sense of continuity back to me. Still, the journey ahead is one I must ultimately take on my own–toward an understanding of what brought me here, and how to stand tall on foreign soil, sure-footed in this strange new land.

Father-Son Conversation (Poem Online)

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A dear friend in America recently and unexpectedly lost his father. A new friend here in England is tending to his father’s health in what may be the twilight of his life. They have both been on my mind today, along with so many for whom Father’s Day is a poignant occasion. I am now nearly six thousand miles away from my own father, and from the birth- and death-place of my son.

Salamander Cove has put together a fine collection of poems related to fatherhood, and I am pleased to have my poem “Father-Son Conversation” appear in this way for the first time online. The poem opens my debut collection Human Shade, part of the Lost Horse Press New Poets Series. It appears last in this online collection. It is the only poem from a father to a child in this series (the others being addressed to fathers by children), and the editor specifically wanted to end the collection this way. I am honored for my work to have been part of this complex, subtle, and fitting tribute to one of the most important jobs a man can do.

Reading, Writing, Surviving, Thriving

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A Review of MFA in a Box by John Rember

Each chapter of John Rember’s MFA in a Box can be read in the time it takes to travel between Finchley Central and Leicester Square station on the Northern Line of the London Underground. I know because I read it this way. At least, I read full chapters on the days I could claim a seat. Other days, I read what little I could at the distance of two inches from my nose, using the book as a v-shaped shield against the armpits of businessmen’s suit jackets as they made their way into the The City to plan the next financial collapse.

A recent transplant to London from a rural town in California, I was following the “when in Rome” adage–immersing myself in written ideas to transcend the fact of my animal body crammed in with the warmth and smell of my fellow humans in a speeding subterranean metal box. Each article in the tabloids unfurled all around me had been engineered to be read in the length of one tube stop. By a precise mix of fact and moral opining, they were also designed to provoke an “Isn’t that terrible?” reaction, before being discarded in the overflowing waste bins at the top of the stairs.

I was reading a book about why one should try to write literature. But in fact, MFA in a Box is about much more than this. It is about how to survive, and perhaps even thrive, through writing, in this highly-engineered world.

I met John during my first residency in the Pacific University MFA in Writing Program. It was less than a year after the death of our infant son. John gave a talk that was to become chapter eight, about The Book of Job, and Leviathan, and why one should “go deep” in the process of writing–as “conscious dust” in a cosmos that we can only pretend to control, wrapping our arms around the big human questions because we are human, and questioners, and big and deep at our core, despite our cultural contract that says we should instead keep lacquering the surface.
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National Insurance, National Mythology

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I recently received my UK National Insurance number. American friends warned me before I left what this would mean: high taxes, long waits, and terrible hospitals. Apart from the ongoing aluminum versus alumninium tiff, views on healthcare are one of the most divisive issues in the special relationship. Joking aside, I believe this difference actually reflects the much deeper matter of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.

So much of a people’s character seems to involve a glorification and reenactment of formative national events: America’s finest hour was in fighting for its freedom in the late eighteenth century; Britain’s finest hour was in enduring against tyranny in the mid-twentieth century. Since those times, Americans continue to fight under the belief that they are doing so for freedom, and the British continue to endure hardship under the belief that it is toward a noble end. In times of financial difficulty, the American military budget remains sacrosanct. In Britain, it is the National Health Service that is unassailable.

Without monarchs or fascists threatening American freedoms, much of U.S. foreign policy since the Second World War has been governed by a terror of communism. The Red Menace became an emblem of assault on all that was American, conveniently giving us another opportunity to “fight for our freedom” in places like Korea and Vietnam. Substitute “terrorist” for “communist,” and the Middle East for the Pacific Rim, to bring this reenactment of our national story into modern times.
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Through the Looking Glass

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I have heard some say of parenthood that if people knew ahead of time what would be involved with raising a child, most would not go through with it. I am beginning to suspect the same can be said of immigration. As a newcomer, I must conform to adult expectations without having been taught gradually, as a child, how everything works. As a result, I don’t know which signs to read as though my life depends on them, and which to ignore. New drivers in the UK are required to place a particular sign on their vehicle: a white field superimposed with a red block-letter “L,” which stands for “learner.” I feel as though I should have one constantly taped to my back.

The direction of traffic, how doors are hinged, and even the way electrical switches turn on or off are all diametrically opposed to what I have come to expect since birth. Yet I must cross the street, open doors, and turn on lights and gadgets dozens of times per day. If I operate unconsciously for even a moment, I get a shock.  But this is only the beginning. It gets, as Alice would say, “curiouser and curiouser.”
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The Immigrant Experience

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“… now there was a match-head in my thoughts.”

-Marvin Bell, from “Wednesday”

I have been in London for one week. On my previous three visits, I never stayed for more than two weeks, and often split the time with other parts of England or other countries in Europe. But this time, I am here to settle. My new job starts tomorrow.

And so, I see everything, not through the eyes of a tourist, but those of an immigrant. Instead of laughing at quaint cultural differences, I take note for future reference. When I discover that the way I have been doing things in my homeland for decades, and which I assumed to be universal, works completely differently out here, I have to figure out the new way and adapt.

Walking along the Thames last night, I felt a sense of connection to other immigrants I met. Some may have fled despotic regimes, others no doubt came to seek their fortunes. For many, English is not their first language (and I am discovering it is actually not mine either!) Few leave their families lightly. And abandoning the cumulative comfort of so many small known quantities has led me to feel like an infant here at times, re-learning fundamentals of language and behavior/behaviour.

After a week of apartment-hunting, bank account setup, and other logistics required to survive abroad, an outing in Brighton yesterday with my new colleagues let me see things as a tourist again, instead of just an immigrant. Returning to the Thames that night rekindled the “match-head” that was placed in my thoughts many years ago, when I first encountered London, and found it at once imposing and familiar, both a great city, and one I could call my own.

Adieu, America

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“You don’t have to dislike a place to leave it.”

American soldiers on D-Day

Last weekend, we drove down to Seal Beach to say farewell to my wife’s aunt. Her parting gifts to me were a bottle of champagne, two sleeping pills for the flight, and a small pin with an American flag on it. She met her American husband in England not long before he shipped off for the D-Day landing on the beaches of Normandy.

I imagine it is always poignant to leave one’s home country. I liken my evolving relationship to my homeland to how I imagine a mother might regard her teenage son. I admire his idealism and energy, robustness and strength, the sense of freedom and possibility. I also notice with chagrin his sense of entitlement and invulnerability. I likewise find it hard to believe reports that he has become a bit of a schoolyard bully, taking advantage of others at times, and behaving recklessly in the hubris of youth.

I love my country, and will miss it. But I am glad for the opportunity to live in the Old World as well. More than politics, it is the people I will miss, and of course the vast open spaces, encompassing nearly every biome on Earth. I will be glad, though, for a more immediate sense of connection with the continuity of human history. London itself has been continuously inhabited for more than two millennia, emerging and reemerging, phoenix-like, from each collapse.

And so I say, “so long” for now to the beautiful and complicated place where I grew to become a man. I am not leaving my homeland due to political or religious persecution, or even necessarily to seek greater economic opportunity in another land. I am going because it is time to go have this adventure. And wherever I go, I will be an American.