Remembering John Burnside in The Empire of Forgetting
.
In my final year as an undergraduate at St Andrews, John Burnside supervised my dissertation. He died a week after I received his feedback. Over those last few months, we had spent hours each week discussing poetry, philosophy, music and cinema. These were conversations I didn’t have time for with even my closest friends. So when I learned Burnside had died, I wondered if I had a claim to grief, and if I did, whether it was for the poet I admired or the generous teacher I had come to know.
At the memorial in St Andrews, St Salvator’s chapel was filled with students, teachers, writers, family and friends. Afterwards, I slipped away from the crowd and sat on the grass outside the window of his office. Looking in brought me back to some of our conversations. There would usually be a queue outside the door, as a fifteen-minute chat stretched into the hours. Inside the book-strewn study, one gesture would move from Lou Reed to Heidegger; another to Salinger’s Franny and Zooey; then on to Zen in Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai. Burnside often spun these webs of reference, a tendency his memoir traces back to an unstable past.
In Waking Up in Toytown, Burnside recalls that ‘when I was a full-scale lunatic, I suffered from a condition called apophenia’. He describes this experience as a ‘hypernarrative’ that presented ‘the whole world at once, jabbering constantly in a mind that can only find rest in oblivion.’
In The Empire of Forgetting, his recent posthumous collection, Burnside cherishes a more liveable and grounded experience. The opening poem, ‘Notes Towards a Devotio Moderna’ turns its focus away from ‘all that / bright dust floating down / from worlds we have no reason to pursue’. Here, our tendency to seek the transcendent is resisted. Burnside is more concerned with where the dust settles; with what slips between the nets of our apophenic castings. With ‘everything / so close to unison, we bow our heads / and call it prayer as if all things were One’, but this is only if. For Burnside, what matters instead is how we live in a world that denies our attempts to unify and reconcile it.
‘Winter Sutra’, first published in The London Magazine, develops this understanding. Its epigraph, ‘World is suddener than we fancy it’, comes from Louis MacNeice’s poem, ‘Snow’, which continues:
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.
‘Let there be light and shadow’, opens Burnside’s response. Here, light is woven with its absence, as the dawn of the world is made inseparable from darkness. This version of Genesis is closer to our lived experience, in which we sometimes ‘wake to something distant in the house’, and what we expect to find familiar and comforting becomes strange. When confronted by these cohabiting contradictions, we are ‘beguiled by something we have yet to name / and suddener than habit can imagine’. Only then, when interrupted from the rhythms of denotation and repetition that we live by, can we move closer to reality.
This is the best sort of presence poetry, one that expresses the nuance at the edges of experience. This is the place of most concern to Burnside.
As I sat outside of Burnside’s office, piecing my memories of him together, my eyes fell on the flora bedded below his window. I cannot remember now the names of all those plants, though I have no doubt that he would have been able to. True to the contradictions in ‘Winter Sutra’, while Burnside could dismiss mere denotation, he often makes poetry of botanical names alone. Description can be unnecessary when the nomenclature is allowed to do its own work – in ‘Variations on “The Ruin”’, Burnside details ‘foxgloves, purple / loosestrife, sprawls / of clematis and Kiftsgate / roses, speedwell, pyracantha, / creeping phlox’.
The music in this list of names makes denotation evocative, an effect Burnside puts in context by citing Marianne Moore’s, ‘The Steeple-Jack’, in the next stanza:
trumpet-vine,
fox-glove, giant snap-dragon, a salpiglossis that has
spots and stripes; morning-glories, gourds,
or moon-vines trained on fishing-twine
at the back door;
Moore’s poem presents an idyllic town whose construction reflects the formal patterns found in nature. As the corresponding flora emerges from the coastal climate, so the town’s features allow its inhabitants to flourish. Just as we infer a wider structure from a ruin, Burnside uses this fragment to suggest Moore’s broader meaning. Throughout this collection, references gesture towards their contexts. In doing so, reference becomes an important form of remembrance.
‘The Steeple-Jack’ ends with an assertion of ‘hope’. I remember Burnside saying that it was a high achievement for a poet to earn the use of such a word. ‘Variations on “The Ruin”’ ends on similarly high stakes, with ‘ewig…ewig… / ewig…ewig…’, German for ‘forever’. As these words drift out of the poem, finality feels elusive, though Burnside’s references remain clear.
The collection ends with sources, translations and notes. This was not a poet covetous of his gnoses, something I came to know as one of his students. Nor did he deny reciprocity. Despite his extensive library of knowledge, Burnside always made you feel that your own references were worthy of discussion.
To end this reflection on Burnside as poet and teacher, I’ll pass on a fragment of a reference he once shared with me. It is worth noting that, as Burnside developed his craft, he began composing as Wordsworth did, ‘on the lips’. He would take long walks, as whole poems worked their way out in his mind, until he could return home and write them down. As every reference is an invitation, I hope this one encourages the reader to travel further into Burnside’s work:
I see narrow orders, limited tightness, but will
not run to that easy victory:
still around the looser, wider forces work:
I will try
to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening
scope, but enjoying the freedom that
Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,
that I have perceived nothing completely,
that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.
– A R Ammons, ‘Corson’s Inlet’
.
.
Callum MacKillop is a writer and the editor of Slow Burn, a biannual collection of lyric poetry supported by the T. S. Eliot Foundation.
To discover more content exclusive to our print and digital editions, subscribe here to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.