Essay on Richard Burns

If poetry is a mystery explained only in part by words, then there might be some benefit from giving it space and context outside of the critic’s realm. The literary critic--with tools sharpened and instructed by words’ usages past and present—may not be the one most in touch with approaches that might make fruitful discoveries beyond traditional discourse. I find Richard Burn’s work invites this broader view.

Burn’s voice often edges on the oracular and seems to arise from a self that has not one place, England, as home. He frequently addresses the reader, as if wishing to convoke and reassure himself of a different community united by sensibility or experience. His quest for meaning, a dilemma handled less transparently by many writers in post-modern years, in part is fed by bringing to his poetry the assembled depths of cultures and wisdom from other places.

I would like to explore the offerings and impact of two of his many fine books. “The Blue Butterfly” and “In the Time of Drought” are poetic, anthropological, metaphysical documents as much as they are bound volumes of skilled and often moving poems. For me, their power (I don’t know if I am the only one to call them ‘collage narrations’) finds its greatest meaning beyond the works themselves: their largest reach extends to the very act of being assembled and written. These collage poems often also re-enforce their declared meanings by using the sanctity of repetition and ritual. In that sense, they represent a form of religious longing.

The scholarly notes, personal communications and even historical photographs accompanying the events Burns enlarges through these two poem cycles are integral to them and certainly add gravity to the work. His factual addenda, as much as the poetry, underline poetry’s central importance to memory and reconciliation, stressing through additional evidence (we cannot call it a failure of imagination) the authenticity and relevance of the questions the poet presents. Within the poetry section of these collage narrations, Burns often adopts a voice that turns to prose and exposition, so that within the poems and then by adding the material contributed by archives, newspapers, journals, Burns breaks through poetry’s illusions. He stands (or intrudes) inside his own work asking: Don’t you understand reader, my claims are not the simple claims of an individual. Evil is real, mechanization is real. Reading is one way not to take shelter from the storm, but to gather strength and insight into the issues. The massacre that took place in 1941 in Kragujevac is still real. “The Blue Butterfly” is not a poem about a massacre but about its origins and its destinations, its energies and its unending effects. Don’t take my word for it. And yet, don’t forget that the only way we can understand such horror is by opening our lives up by facing memory, and in my case, facing the implications of the visitation of a blue butterfly.

In this long poem, Burns allows the present world of reality as it is known through the eye, films, TV, documentaries, history, science to enter, overshadow, interact with his personal experience of the massacre. Opening up experience to process, to others’ experience and suffering, is his solution to the poet’s task of exploring reality. He shows irrationality to be a core of both evil and salvation in “The Blue Butterfly”. He finds contradictions so powerful that forgiveness or something like forgiveness is generated as a possibility and also as a contradiction in this meditative book.

I would think it is no accident that Burns finds himself in “The Blue Butterfly,” in a Dante-like position of commenting on his own pilgrimage through descent into the underworld. His definition of witness in this book, which narrates a massacre that took place in Serbia, in Kragujevac on October 19, 20, 21 1941, allows ample space to victims and others to narrate the horror and significance in that lapse into utter bestiality. The occasion of visiting the site of the massacre in 1985, when a blue butterfly alighted on a finger on Burn’s left hand, contains the moment of personal experience sparking the long journey into the massacre’s history and its unleashed questions. This grace-filled coincidence, which Burns then explores for many years, put the butterfly’s existence and the existence of the massacre on a set of scales that he brings into balance. Burns presents a series of poems suggesting that nothing and everything has weight that continues in physical motions and memory and will never be completely exhausted.

“The dead and the unborn/fill plenty’s horn

giving and forgiving/life for the living.”

Burns demonstrates infinite technical skill, in this work, seemingly, whenever he wishes to use it. In strong rhyming passages, his language is moving, solid and rich. Burns loves rhyme for its living energies, in subtle and powerful ranges as well as for the elemental pleasures to be found in the simple rhythms of folk songs and children’s nursery couplets. He can get mesmerized, however, by the rhythms in ritual and repetition, like his cycles within the poem: “ Seven Wreaths,” “Seven Songs of the Dead,” Seven Statements of Survivors,” Seven Blessings”. Sometimes he gains meaning from the repetitions and sometimes he obscures the power of what he has uncovered by insisting that seven poems has an intrinsic meaning, when five might have been stronger. Burns harbors a tendency in “The Blue Butterfly,” to suddenly drop down into rhetorical questions or flat speech. When he does this, it feels (at least to me) as if he does not trust his readers enough, or that he does not trust himself enough to plunge beyond telling to letting us feel the darkness and silence through images.

So let me make my points about the importance of Richard Burns’ work. We live in times where poetry, often because it is not about a single place, is not central. Perhaps it never was, but now we are well past that early twentieth century attitude where the poet claimed to be a prophet. A century later and we lament book sales, lack of readership. We debate whether popular music lyrics touch more truth than many poets can. We in the west have grown fat and inward looking, giving our own bourgeois limits to values, thus often we have little to say. Instead of seeing the calling as a beautiful gift, helping one to survive the pain and madness of the world we are facing by our own creation, writing poetry often gets reduced, by poets themselves, to a white-collar job.

Burns seems genuinely fuelled by energy coming from an inner source. He has a great gift for languages. And he sees the poet as still un-ironically relevant to engagement and truth. The longing in a book-length poem like “The Blue Butterfly” to uncover peace and resolution is a sincere and challenging mood transmitted in that work. This longing bleeds through the illusion of pure writing or poetry and reaches the reader, in part, from the side of facts. The book originating from this mixture stimulates a reader to meditate on the unending effects and mysteries remaining in violence, torture, war. A poet has sent us to that consideration. The important sense of doubt and resolution that he leaves us with is not due wholly to the poems, but because he has insisted on the reality of the world beyond poetry. His poetry puts us back into the world almost as if we had seen a play or heard a concert. They suggest performance and whisper libretto.

I would call Burns’ Butterfly poem Wordsworthian at many points. By abandoning any sense of irony, Burns records, in its fullest implications, the moment of the butterfly reflected in tranquility and the worlds its winged contact and presence opened. He gives us the gift of memory about the massacre, which most of us, perhaps knew nothing about, as well as the gift of inspiration and mystical pursuit, which the coincidence of the butterfly and its intersection with the memorial site occasion. His exploration of life beyond death, most specifically to be found in the memories of the dead, is a powerful invitation to readers to meditate on the enormous worlds unarticulated in the violent and suffering deaths of people caught up in identities of nationhood and village. The near channeling that the author does and the near liturgical organization he lends to the poem, added to the riveting evidence of photos and notes, make the long poem a document that challenges us to construct our own documents about patches of historical memory and the deadened pain and revengeful energies still lodged there.

Enter the internet. The instant connection. The border leap. New worlds where relationships and reality are both utterly real and utterly illusions. I had written an essay for a literary journal on my personal links to butterflies, words and spiritual connection. Mine was a passionate piece that touched on my son’s death, mystical experience, and words’ power. It showed the innate energies that words release once held to the flames of truth. The piece began by telling about a butterfly that had landed on my shoulder and cracked open my perception of the day I was in. Richard Burns had written a book of poems called “The Blue Butterfly”. The editor, who was publishing both, thought we would like to be in touch. Our synchronicities set off a hundred matches of lit and shared experiences and meanings. In part, this happened because we were following experience through the doors of experience. We were both writers, both poets, but the knowledge and realms we shared were psyche and imagination, as well as a profound repugnance for war. The power and excitement joining our work was our work but also the fact that we both believed in a common source of inspiration. Both of us had experienced butterflies as more than themselves. The sense that we knew the same experience came from our correspondence as well as our work. That sense, a different kind of fluid border drawn from the life side of being an author, is some of the authentic energy that we now assume about much writing when we pick up books as readers. Writing is endowed with significance as if the pages are lined with real events and the author’s real and sincere presence.

Then Richard (for like many internet exchanges, we were instantly on a first name basis) sent other books he had written. One, with a historical photo of a young girl dressed in leaves on its green cover, I mentioned at the beginning of this essay. “In the Time of Drought,” is a near anthropological piece on a figure in the Balkins who is known as a rain goddess. He traces the words through many Baltic variations and flickering through its various etymologies we find the word for butterfly. Burns recounts the spring ritual, which is now nearly lost, centered on the figure of the Dodola, a young beautiful girl who removed her garments in order to be clothed and covered in branches and vines. This figure, as recently as fifteen years ago, traveled house to house, where at each door stoop, water was poured over her and incantations for rain and fertility were offered. He writes a charming series of poems that both evoke the spirit of life, of water, of community ritual, proposing in new forms the rite that was once widespread throughout the Balkans. He invents lovely poem versions of the cycle and saga and amplifies them with facts in the second part. In rebirthing this story, Burns does not look at the myth as much as he looks at the way the myth once was lived and enacted. He claims the role for himself of revitalizing the real story and creating new uses for it. He offers them up for others to use and to remember. We readers are not people who have necessarily experienced the ritual or heard it from our grandmothers. But Burns brings it alive and, in the combination of verisimilitude, of once real history, and always living words he, by making us see a simple beautiful ritual that has been lost in a part of the world where history has torn up so much, leaves us with a sense of real pain and enchantment. His documentary poem/book offers an invitation to expand memory in the present by listening to his story’s implications and suggestions. For me, it is this ineffable sense of hope, of real uses for poetry as a handbook for life, which characterizes an utterly original important unnamable invitation that Richard Burns’s work offers.

--Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

Wallis Wilde-Menozzi is a poet who has lived in Parma Italy for nearly thirty years. Her most recent book of poems is Heron Songs. Mother Tongue An American Life in Italy, a memoir published by North Point Press, NY, 1997, paper 2003, has been called a classic. She has recently finished a novel set in modern Florence.