Martin Burke: "...these pieces, whenever I handle them, cause a little turbulence in me. Which raises the 'problem' of a bio. Normally I would say a little about myself - that I am Irish, that I have been living in Belgium for twenty years and follow this with a list of publishing credits. But in the present instance this seems too little and too much, an evasion, if you will, of more deeply rooted facts which can only be handled by poetry. The process out of which these poems arose is an on-going one. Though it is also true to say that resolution, however partial and in whatever degree, is usually less dramatic than the original crisis. And so poetry can cope with the dramatic, but until there is further more deep-rooted resolution prose will lag a long way behind. I will leave it up to you to extract what you will from this explanation; so that it might become less an evasion and more a circle about the core. This is not a refusal on my part to comply with your request [for a bio] but a means of extracting the essence of the situation." - Martin Burke read Martin's poem |
From A Walled Garden: Seven Fragments 1 Morning. Half-light After-shadows on the grass. The night-beasts are gone though their presence remain with the half-life of a radium as I approximate observance of a formal covenant with the day. as if in articulation truly lay the roots of healing. Have I willed myself here? In what tongue do I speak? The self a pool I have bathed in too freely espousing what its tides decreed with diligent ardour and covetous ways until I no longer know the measure or rule which multiply determinations wrought long ago and elsewhere from here where the after-shadows scuttle with the breeze. 2 Like seeking like, and in poetry's core a compatible force Blake entered into Milton's heart with arduous courtships and ravishing ploys that darkness might yield to numinous dark, the will not usurp what the spirit inspired -be it blade of grass or the vision complete- but speak in its own true fashioned voice of all it had seen and espoused; and it was superb a beautiful action scrivened in light still working its determinations on the pool of poetry: a vivid tableau alive in the world I would espouse where it is splendid, enduring, and clear; The courtships I planned of those sweet allures to which I came submissive and believing! What I have been by faithfulness and treason now measures out my pace of contemplation. 3 Ah Dante, you must surely know this state: brightness suspected in every move you make towards its possible location and grace; the failure of finding it there, the urgency to look elsewhere, then look again where you have looked before; and neither simple joy nor pure despair can compensate for the slow and measured shuffle of your pace. (I do not seek to minimize the fears of hell you journeyed through though I envy the safe theology of three fixed states, a given guide and guarantee of passage through its rounds of fire and ice. The journey is more complex now, a gulf which multiplies its states and as for guarantee there is only that of effort a sword we must negotiate our passage across on the thin side of the blade. 4 For I have been too free with weaving dreams have been -still am?- some weaver's child who intended to shoot the colours of day through the nets of night, to spin some insubstantial stuff to a weave to clearly display the hues of heaven to the cloths of man, as if under compulsion to weave! So where does the tale and the thread end? Not in my hands - origins are older than that and my hands are far too young in the world and the world is much older than they; yet the word-wheel still spins the thread which weaves each new story which ends in your hands, halts in your mouth until you speak it and then somewhere someone else begins as if all had not been fore decreed- No Godly outrage, no howls in the dark, As if what's been changed can be changed again or at least be blessed redeemed?- by utterance! Substantial ambition yet it was the dream which did the weaving though I freely conspired with the spool. 5 Beauty" said Pound (meaning poetry) (poetry being beauty in the mouth's attire) "Beauty is difficult" whereas "Be! and it is" is divinity's charge- articulation with a healing force poetry should take its spur from, but what if all the words bow down to silence and its issuing source? Then difficult, urgent, the word it speaks waiting in the word unspoke, and by whatever name and in whatever guise difficult but persistent; the more so when an age and not just one tribe or chosen folk seek to live by vague purgatorial fires of 'What is Be?' 'What is Is?' while it persists difficult but beautiful, a skyward leap the soul provokes back into beauty back to its source, the answer in the act and nowhere else. 6 The absence of a healing calm is our presiding pain. The lawns compose setting and limit but we know that what maintains us is neither these dimensions nor its laws. Blake still enters Milton's heart some weaver's child resets the loom as memory remembers the yearned-for delight and holy! holy! cries the soul making a skyward leap expecting buoyancy and force to elevate and maintain it there before it falls back to the sea like one haughtily aiming for the sun- though for a moment nothing is pre-known or dictated, Blake is forever entering Milton's heart -and not just uniquely once in history- and the tableau remains precursor of the next move I must make. 7 Willed or not willed I have awoken, I am here, this place- ground zero where a heart implodes the spirit rises seared by flame in the after wind ravishing all? Dream, given truth, apprehension of that portion of the Fable we live out and in? The more I near its active core the more I know the dark is numinous. copyright 2001Martin Burke |
Martin Burke |
Martin Burke: "...these pieces, whenever I handle them, cause a little turbulence in me. Which raises the 'problem' of a bio. Normally I would say a little about myself - that I am Irish, that I have been living in Belgium for twenty years and follow this with a list of publishing credits. But in the present instance this seems too little and too much, an evasion, if you will, of more deeply rooted facts which can only be handled by poetry. The process out of which these poems arose is an on-going one. Though it is also true to say that resolution, however partial and in whatever degree, is usually less dramatic than the original crisis. And so poetry can cope with the dramatic, but until there is further more deep-rooted resolution prose will lag a long way behind. I will leave it up to you to extract what you will from this explanation; so that it might become less an evasion and more a circle about the core. This is not a refusal on my part to comply with your request [for a bio] but a means of extracting the essence of the situation." - Martin Burke read Martin's poem |
