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.”

Mark Burnhope

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?)

So, my faith leads me to identify with other groups marginalised by the Church / the world (That’s another thing I like / don’t like: unhelpful dualities. Religion and disability rhetoric is full of them). Other poems are about love, marriage: ‘The Ideal Bed’ and ‘Christogamy / The Centre’ for example, are kind of companion poems. One of them touches on how certain Christian ideas and doctrines — saving oneself for marriage in order to later enjoy inevitably perfect heterosexual sex, and have perfect children, for example — can be totally deflated and undermined in real life. There is no sense of ‘one size fits all’ in doctrine or disability. The other tries to situate a theological idea, which one of our lecturers liked to remind us of, in a landscape.

‘The Snowboy’ is the central poem because it touches on that experience which doesn’t meet such hopes. I’m drawn to and inspired by quite a bit of confessional poetry, even if the anger in my poems is often offset with an ironic joy and humour. Having a joke is sometimes the best way of debunking ideas.

The poem “The House, the Church and Fisherman’s Walk” begins with the arresting line “The non-discriminatory town accepts me,” and later invokes the colloquialism “lame.” How have attitudes toward disability shaped your life and work?

There are the obvious clichés: disabled people either exist to inspire everyone towards ‘triumph over adversity’, or to make them rethink their dark nights of the soul and remember that well, it could be worse, you could be crippled. I’ve heard people say ‘Wow, I’m not sure I could cope if I was in the position you’re in.’ Of course they would. What’s the alternative?

Those extreme positions so rampant in literature (Wilfred Owen’s ‘Disabled’ is so well-meaning, yet reads as clumsy now) have disintegrated, I think, but now we seem to have a bigger problem. Society seems so bored of social commentary, confession, and especially the suggestion that you or I might be prejudiced, that we don’t want to talk about it; we find it very hard to stomach in art. We believe that everything’s been said. All the work was done during all those civil rights movements, we think. The issues are still there, but our polite and politically correct language-play, which doesn’t want to offend anyone, has just got better at making excuses for those issues, or brushing them off.

I can’t change these problems, but they get into my poetry, however true it is that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. If I can make something happen for one reader, that’s alright.

So many of these poems invoke Biblical figures: Jonah, Joseph and his brothers, Job, Saul on the road to Damascus, the tax collector Zacchaeus, and the Serpent. How do biblical stories, and particularly your modern retelling of them, enter in to your personal or artistic ontology? How do they function?

It’s difficult to generalise. I’ve tried to call them out of the mythic contexts I’ve encountered them in; to invite them into my, and the reader’s, experience of the poem. Our Jonah appears as a nutcase tourist, ‘our’ being an affectionate way of identifying a relation, especially, but hardly exclusively, in Northern England (‘our kid’). I read this story on a Boscombe Pier plaque, of a tourist walking along a beached whale’s back, around the middle of last century. In the poem, the man desires some mythic, religious experience; he’s a plain old bloke wanting to step into Jonah’s shoes.

I’m very glad you noticed Joseph’s brothers. They appear in a poem I wrote during a high fever and depression. It’s a straight retelling of a fever dream, so was jotted on paper quickly and without much tinkering (dreams will always have their own interpretation and logic, no need to fiddle). It’s still allusive to me now, though I have this feeling that the images are cohesive; but generally, I was grieving my partner’s miscarriage. The well is an old symbol for the self; lots of poems have been written about staring into wells, meditating on the self.

So in a way, the brothers force me back into my own birth, which had its problems. I survived, but I’m contrasting that with my child that never lived, who we saw as a ‘miracle child’ (I’d been told I was unable to father children). The brothers throw ‘me’, the begrudging survivor, ‘miracle child’, back into the dark. It’s confusing, but it’s a fever dream, so I like that.

‘Saul returned to Paul’ was a helpful image for understanding the post-healing journey of ‘Parochio’. I haven’t covered all of your characters, but I hope that’s helpful.

Other figures, such as Queequeg and Pinocchio, feature large. What drew you to these figures?

These epistles, directly addressing a set of fictional characters, provided a way to explore a range of issues, generally revolving around discrimination, prejudice and stereotype.

I wrote them when I was starting to think about how to respond to my disability, and those related things, in a way which wasn’t directly or uncomfortably confessional, and didn’t just appear to the reader like dirty laundry. I wanted to invite them into my questioning and experience, not tell them about stuff, which might have inspired curiosity, but when it comes to disability, curiosity is something we don’t need more of. I deal with them in different ways.

My version of Pinocchio is too shy to say that actually, he doesn’t want to be a ‘real boy’, mythical miracle fodder. But he’s healed, and consequently goes and does a whole bunch of things that the church wouldn’t approve of. Those things are mostly left to the reader to imagine, but I’ve mentioned that he goes and loses his virginity out of wedlock. He has a new-found freedom, of a kind that no one round him is going to like. I’m questioning what the obsession with physical healing really accomplishes for the church itself, without implicating anyone real in my doubt.

The stories of Queequeg and Quasimodo, again, encompass so much of these things. Moby Dick is a story in which, through his extremely intimate friendship with Queequeg, Ishmael is eventually able to confront his doubts about this once-ugly, tattooed savage (‘I too am tattooed’ is the one fact in the poem). His friendship leads him to consider his feelings on difference, whether they be on faith – Christian vs. Heathen – xenophobia, white supremacy, or love and sexuality. His full loving acceptance of this ‘monster’ involves a total U-turn in his thinking. The eventual (politically incorrect) defeat of the White Whale is richly symbolic of Ishmael’s transformation. In my poem, I try to develop and live for a while in this kind of relationship with Queequeg myself. I become Ishmael, really.

In “Twelve Steps toward Better Despair” you invoke the slippage, “Tried dying–sorry, died trying.” How do vernacular idioms and language-play enter into your creative process?

I’m conscious that a lot of poetry I’ve loved and want to work with is traditional and already well-represented. I certainly love a lot of poets and poems which have been anthologised all over the place, and thrown into the bookshops. I want to honour those poetries which first fired me up. But I’ve had to temper my interest in that ‘traditional stuff’ with who I am: I’m relatively young. I have no desire to be ‘trendy’, ‘edgy’ or whatever, but I like a good laugh and irreverent tomfoolery, and I want to freely use slang – as I would in conversation – even in my efforts to be sincere and poignant.

So those language slip-ups are a way to take a poem potentially full of pathos and ‘instruction’, and admit my hesitation to deliver a message (couple that with the title, which I hope incorporates some of that doubt in a comedic way; despair is a serious thing, and who am I to properly address it for every reader, or instruct them on how to wade through it? The tone is ironic, like in the song ‘Everybody’s Free [To Wear Sunscreen]’ by Baz Luhrmann).

I like to play with a reluctance to put forward ideas, the humility to admit that I might be wrong (Wallace Stevens was so good at the hilarious questioning of received knowledge, or poetic truth). Maybe there is a disability element there as well. I have Spina bifida and Hydrocephalus. The latter means that short-term memory is a small problem, as well as a tendency to lose my train of thought, or get a word wrong here or there, and have to correct myself. Sometimes I use that to construct poems: an aesthetic of confusion, maybe.

Click here to read Part II of this interview.

One poem in particular, from the “Heartscapes” series, stopped me on the page:

Your Face

swims
in the window
where I wave
at the childminder’s
new child

The enjambment spring-loads this poem like a haiku. The moment of recognition unfolds, as “Your Face / swims / in the window,” then is seemingly recognized and acknowledged by the speaker’s wave.

But just as suddenly as grief can seize upon the moment, so too are we readers startled by what I call a sense of “wrongness within the rightness.” The repetition of “child” in the lines “…the childminder’s / new child” lends “rightness” to the phrasing, since, after all, a childminder should have a child to mind even as a shopkeeper should keep the shop.

Yet the parity in this phrasing is deceptive. The “wrongness” of the situation is driven home in the first word of the final line–”new.” We are thereby stunned in the realization that it is not at all “Your Face,” but the face of another. Here we enter the complexity of grief, torn between the supposed normalcy of life going on–the childminder finding a new child–and the heartbreaking realization that the speaker’s child, assumed to have been formerly under this same childminder’s care, is now forever gone.

It is this ability, not just to speak of, but to impart the particulars of such profound, at times existential grief, that draws me to this book. In this brief poem, Agee demonstrates grief’s unexpected, and at times overwhelming conquest of mundane living in the aftermath of loss, and the sometimes unconquerable sense of “wrongness” in the fact that life goes on.

In poem after poem, Agee weaves a rich tapestry–finding solace, as I have, in conversing with great poets like Yehuda Amichai and Seamus Heaney; blending the landscapes of Ireland, America, and Eastern Europe; figuring and re-figuring the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice; and above all giving full, fierce, and heartfelt tribute to his beloved daughter, Miriam. This collection is a remarkable gift, not only to a bereaved father, but to each of us on this Earth, baffled by our own individual and collective griefs and triumphs, and, even, as he says at the end of “Depths,” “by the empty sky, / the bitterness // which will never wash / out of the shining blue.”

Individual Video Tracks:

• Part 1–Publication and Its Surprises (06:23)
• Part 2–The Medium of Language (08:52)
• Part 3–The Music of Poetry (09:06)
• Part 4–The Importance of The Page (03:23)
• Part 5–Grief and Hope (07:17)

Complete Audio Version (35:00)

For More Information:

• Andrew Philip’s Website
• The Ambulance Box Virtual Tour Page
• About Salt Virtual Book Tours
• Salt Publishing Website

“Even the pick / of those we share our pulse with shares this jolt / beneath the ribs, this double click of love. / How could they cope with even just one heart?”

I have Jilly Dybka to thank for sending Andrew Philip my way. Since I have written openly about the difficult and transformational experience of losing our first-born son, she must have recognized the the rare opportunity our being in touch provides. I am glad she did. It is an experience Andrew and I share.

Naturally, I was keen to read his debut book. What I discovered was not only personally moving, but profoundly accomplished work. Andrew writes in both English and Scots, placing himself in a tradition stretching back to John Barbour and encompassing Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns. As an American, I feel under-qualified to comment on the unique cultural and socio-political implications of this dual-language approach. (And, I must admit that I gave the online Dictionary of the Scots Language a good workout in making my way through some of the poems.) However, both as a poet in love with lyricism, and a father who lost an infant son, I can not resist adding my praise and commendation to the acclaim this book is gathering.

Andrew writes not only in Scots, a Germanic (not Gaelic) language, but in German as well. In “Berlin / Berlin / Berlin” he combines all three. If it is true, as Robert Frost tells us, that “Poetry is what gets lost in translation,” there is a poetry uniquely found between the languages by Andrew Philip. Wildly associative, and at times experimental, the musicality of these poems lend congruity and veracity even as they burst with linguistic mischief. This is, above all, a collection full of life–which is what makes the moments in which poems touch, lightly but unflinchingly, upon grief, all the more profound. From the premonitory vision of a “difficult, unasked-for joy” in “Pedestrian” through the incredible moment in “Still” when grief rewrites the resurrection, announcing in broken lines across the page, “he is not here / he is not here / he is not here,” these poems are rapturous even in despair. Sentimentality and easy words seem as though they might never have been invented in the remarkable worldview Andrew hands us in this book, “in a language,” as he says at the end of “Tonguefire Night,” “yet to be born.”

As part of Salt Publishing‘s innovative cyclone virtual book tour, I will have the pleasure of interviewing Andrew in about a month. I hope you will join me. Salt has also recently launched a highly successful “just one book” campaign to save this well-regarded imprint from financial doom. If you do choose to support world-class poetry publishing by purchasing just one, or one hundred, books from Salt, be sure to make your first The Ambulance Box.