John Burnside - a Poet of Place.
The giant of Scottish poetry, John Burnside, has died. His collection, The Asylum Dance (2000), is a masterful meditation on forms of place, betweenness, and the ways places are connected. One of my favourite collections of poetry by anyone. Here are some thoughts about the opening poem, Ports.
The poems in the collection convey through their meaning and form a tension between rooted belonging and the potential of the space beyond home that we have to navigate. This is conveyed at the outset in Ports
Our dwelling place:
the lights above the firth
shipping forecasts
gossip
theorems
the choice of a single word to describe
the gun metal grey of the sky
as the gulls
flicker between the roofs
on Tolbooth Wynd.
Whenever we think of home
we come to this:
the handful of birds and plants we know by name
rain on the fishmongers window
the walleyed plaice
freckled with spots
the colour of orangeade.
We enter the collection through Ports. The last poem, our leaving point, is called Roads. For a collection focused on dwelling these are unsettling points of arrival and departure. Place is immediately related to somewhere else – anywhere else. Ports is a long poem in three parts, Haven, Urlicht and Moorings. The poems have an irregular appearance on the page. They are constructed of apparently haphazard, scattered lines with plentiful indented lines. This was a break for Burnside, whose previous poems were mostly left aligned in a conventional sense. Burnside announces at the outset his intentions in the shape of the poem. The first line of the first poem is simply “Our dwelling place:”, immediately setting the scene and the central theme of the book’s central long poems: Ports, Settlements, Fields, Roads. Burnside tells us that this grand and somewhat abstract theme – the theme of dwelling – is encountered through details and small things. A leap is taken from “our dwelling place” to
the handful of birds and plants we know by name
rain on the fishmongers window
the walleyed plaice
freckled with spots
the colour of orangeade.
This is one way in which space works in the poem. The very particular, small scale, thing is connected to a much bigger idea – dwelling and the spots on a flat fish that resemble the colour of orangeade. This allows the development of a sense of a particular place. It is a paradox that the more universal something appears to be, the fewer people have experienced it. The objective ‘view from nowhere’ – the omnipotent, god-like view, is the view that has been established as universal (it is the view of ‘science’) but in fact is known to no-one. The only thing that everyone has shared is the particular (that which is specific to a place or individual experience). We all have our own particulars - our own places and experiences of place. But this experience of difference, that at first blush seems to separate us, actually connects us. We can recognize the experience of the particular, even if it is not our particular. Even if we do not know the colour of the spots on a plaice or even the colour of orangeade we recognize the attempt. Just as the idea of a “handful of birds and plants we know by name” suggests an intimacy with the world even if we do not know the same bird’s names as Burnside. It is an act of poetry to write “egret” or “hummingbird” in a way that cannot be replicated by the generic “bird”. It is the act of knowing the specific that provides roots and allows Burnside to relate to the reader. Within these few lines there are two simultaneous spatial moves – one is this vertical move between the view from nowhere and the view from somewhere and the other is the sideways, horizontal move, of metaphor – from plaice to orangeade. Both take us in and out of the time and place.
Just a few lines earlier Burnside presents us with another list, still in the reader’s mind as we encounter the rain and orangeade:
the light above the firth
shipping forecasts
gossip
theorems
This list, as with the earlier list, is separated by space rather than punctuation.
The light above the firth is a specific image and sets up the reader for repeated references to qualities of light through the collection. Shipping forecasts are, of course, evocative of life in a space between land and sea. In many ways they are evocative of life in Great Britain as many of us hear them regardless of our distance from the sea. Gossip is ubiquitous but something we may associate more with a small town. Theorems? Theorems seem out of place in this list – abstract and from the world of science. The final three things in this list are all forms of communicated knowledge that scan in and out of a sense of dwelling – that take us from the world of shipping forecasts (‘objective’ knowledge often heard on Radio Four as we are preparing dinner) to the world of gossip with its local and particular connotations. Dwelling is being layered in this list.
Burnside’s approach to place has been outlined in an essay in which he makes this paradoxical connection between the particular and universal at the outset.
It may be a very idiosyncratic and personal view, but I would maintain that the purpose of the lyric is to stop time, by somehow conveying the timelessness of the chosen place: paradoxically, this attempt to break the flow of linear time is achieved by focusing very specifically on the moment, (i.e. on transience, which is the space in which linear time disappears).[1]
The emphasis here is on time but the same applies to space and place – the ability of the poem to open up the universal through the gate of the particular.
Part II, Urlicht,[2] immediately takes us back to the beginning again with its first lines
- our
dwelling place:
a catalogue of wrecks
and slants of light –
Dwelling again, reiterating a central refrain alongside the image of the primal light that runs through the collection. The first “- our” immediately creates a sense of here but also elsewhere by running on from the end of Part 1, with the title in between.
We notice how dark it is
a dwelling place
for something in ourselves that understands
the beauty of wreckage
the beauty
of things unchanged
II URLICHT
- our
dwelling place:
a catalogue of wrecks
and slants of light –
The line is carried on in horizontal space but is broken in vertical space, not only by the line break but by a section title appearing midline. The word dwelling is repeated (and if repeated several more times before the end of the poem). Here the dwelling place is the dark but has “slants of light”. This sets up a certain fuzziness of imprecision – a dark with lights. This zone of uncertainty (and a port is a meeting place, or zone of mixing par excellence) is made more vague by the textures of light and dark that emerge in the poem.
here we have nothing to go on
or nothing more
than light and fog
a shiver in the wind
or how the sky can empty all at once
when something like music comes
or rather
something like the gap between a sound
and silence
like the ceasing of a bell
or like the noise a tank makes as it fills
and overflows.
An intangible sense of indeterminacy is marked by “light and fog” and a “shiver in the wind”. This in-between state is amplified sonically by the idea of a gap between sound and silence and (less successfully) by the noise of an overflowing tank. Indeterminacy is marked by the line-break and use of space to suggest indecision.
when something like music comes
or rather
something like the gap between a sound
and silence
like the ceasing of a bell
or like the noise a tanks makes as it fills
It is not just “like music” but “something like music”. It is not just “the gap between a sound/and silence” but something like it. The gap between sound and silence is already a fine interstitial point but this is doubled by being “something like” it. And this sense of gap is made more gaping by the blank space of indented lines that surround the word. This is a poem of gaps.
These gaps and liminal moments are brought to a head in the next passage.
How everyone expects
that moment when a borrowed motor stalls
half-way across the channel
and you sit
quiet
amazed by the light
aware
of everything
aware of shoals and stars
shifting around you
endlessly
entwined.
Here we are as the engine on a boat stalls. We are halfway between things (as we so often are through The Asylum Dance). The sound of the engine is fading (like the earlier bell) but it has only stalled, it will start again. The line breaks in mid flow (like the engine) and we are suddenly with the poet - suddenly aware of things in a way that only breakdown (and linebreaks) can induce. The inchoate swarms of shoals and stars are shifting – undefinable. The two-line break in vertical space at the end forces us to drop down through blankness between the words “endlessly” and “entwined”.
[1] Burnside J. Poetry and a Sense of Place. Available at: http://www.hum.uit.no/nordlit/1/burnside.html.
[2] Urlicht means something like ‘primal light’. It is also the name of the fourth movement of Mahler’s symphony number 2.