We caught up with Poetry School student Mark Burnhope to talk about Blakean influence, being a 'religious poet' and fever dreams. Mark was born in 1982 and studied at London School of Theology before completing an MA in Creative Writing at Brunel University. His work has appeared in a variety of print and online publications. He currently lives and writes in Bournemouth, Dorset with his partner, four stepchildren, two geckos and a greyhound. The Snowboy (Salt) is his debut poetry pamphlet.
He has kindly allowed us to publish his poem 'The Well and the
Ceiling Rose', which can be read below.
Tell me a little about your degree in theology and the religious element of your poems.
The Snowboy was published in July this year, and the word ‘religious’ has cropped up a fair bit ever since. I’m both slightly iffy and totally thrilled about that. I’m iffy about being called a ‘religious’ poet because yes, my first degree was in theology (2001-04) but ever since, I’ve drifted from ‘Theology’ as an academic discipline, more towards faith itself as an influence, or lens. I’m just feeling less of a need these days to argue the toss about doctrine. Give me poetic, open-ended exploration instead.
On the other hand, I’m glad to be seen as ‘religious’ for other reasons: spending a lot of time closely reading and writing poems can seem like a spiritual discipline. I’m sure that over the last few years, I’ve explored as much, if not more, by reading and writing poems as by thinking about theology, or church. My theological interests tend towards the progressive / emergent, as well as some liberation theologies. So many of this has been part of poetry, whether ‘inside’ a religious tradition or not (I don’t differentiate, we’re all just playing with similar ideas, themes and language materials).
Speaking of my own work, one of my interests is my place, as a disabled person, in a religious faith which prides itself on embracing brokenness but so often holds an ideal of bodily ‘wholeness’ as a dangling carrot to anyone who has enough faith. Hope can be a double-edged sword; the church is also pretty good at delivering disappointment, prejudice, marginalisation, outright rejection, if you’re deemed to be too humanly ‘flawed’. We love the idea of human rights, as long as it doesn’t infringe on our sense of God’s morality. I spend a lot of my time almost unbelieving, but unable to let go. Some of that gets explored in The Snowboy, whether through epistles to fictional characters, machines and built constructions, landscapes, fairytale, dream… I hope that it’s sad, angry when it needs to be, but also funny and light-hearted to temper the heavy stuff.
Are you still working in a workshopping environment post-MA?
I’m a member of the online poetry workshop / community PFFA (Poetry Free-for-all), to which I’m really grateful for giving me the opportunity to learn what I know about poetry from the comfort of my own home. More recently I’ve been taking a sort of ‘sabbatical’ from there, during which I’ve used social networking to meet and correspond with poets, some of whom I knew from PFFA. Facebook is a fantastic space for workshopping, critiquing, collaborating, both on practical work, and thinking about the writing process. I’d be lost without it, since although I did a Creative Writing MA – useful and inspiring but very much focussed on prose fiction, at least at the time – I haven’t done anything like a mentoring scheme... yet. All of that brings me, brought me, to The Poetry School. I took an online course on Form and Structure tutored by Andrew Philip (whose The Ambulance Box is a real favourite), and I’m so glad I did.
Of the poems I’ve read, illness and sickness, in a sort of Blakean sense is a huge theme. Is he an inspiration?
Very much so. I love Blake, not just for his poetry but also because my first love is illustration, and his work in both absolutely floors me. As for your question, Personally, I think more in terms of ‘disability’ than illness or sickness; but I know you can’t dictate that to a reader. ‘Disability’ and ‘illness’ have an overlap. To some extent you can’t have one without the other, and you’re always negotiating a path through a reader’s own assumptions, trying to explore new territory but sometimes reflecting their own ideas back at them. We can’t help it: pity, tragedy and triumph just won’t lie down. This is why, when I write about disability, I try to stay rooted in the social model of disability, which is inclusive, and more about outside ‘disablers’ in society than medical categories and ‘conditions’. That’s why I never really mention my own disability (Spina bifida and Hydrocephalus) in the poetry itself. I try to create experiences, not just rehash my own.
But yes, some poems deal with sickness, and when they do, that’s often when I sink into metaphor, or more mysterious symbol, fever dream. That stuff is pretty Blakean. I like Blake because he played around with visionary prophetic / esoteric symbolism – as did Yeats, etc. – but was interested in music, nursery rhyme, and dream as well. All of those things suggest themselves, for some reason, when I think of ‘sickness’. There’s something about sickness which reduces a fully grown man to a child. I mean, whatever ‘The Sick Rose’ is about – infidelity, the defiling of erotic experience, whatever – it also says fever dream to me: the night-sweats, claustrophobia, despair at the fact that the bed has become a prison. Where you once saw love there, now there’s just this strange and ghoulish vision of a parasitic worm to keep you company. My poem ‘The Well and the Ceiling Rose’ was written during a high fever, after I’d had a strange dream, no doubt brought on by the illness. I can’t remember when this was, just over two years ago maybe. I just remember that I knew it had something to tell me. I got up in the morning, bones creaking like hell, dragged myself to the living room, and wrote the whole thing down until I thought I’d captured it emotionally, and then spent the next however long trying to figure out what it meant. I’m still not sure.
I’d like for you to talk a bit about 'Wheelchair, Recast as a Site of Special Pastoral Interest' – it’s so active in its description of an object that restricts movement, what were you trying to say by this?
Reading my poems live, I’ve learned (I think) that over-explaining a poem for someone else can kill their own experience of it. So I want to say that the poem isn’t trying to ‘say’ anything other than what it says. But in case that sounds arrogant or vague, or both, this poem combines two things I’m really interested in. One is ekphrasis: the translation of one art-form into another. One day, I was sitting on my sofa, staring at my temporarily-discarded wheelchair, wondering how I might write a poem about the disabled experience very explicitly, but without either of the extreme clichés: heroism or pity. An almost impossible thing to do in poetry, I thought at the time (Wilfred Owen’s ‘Disabled’ makes me shudder); but I wanted to try. I wanted to view the wheelchair as a sculpted object, and comment on it as if I’d simply walked into a gallery and seen it there. I wanted to respect the wheelchair as an object by itself, without me in it.
The thing about a sculpture – any kind of art, really – is that it ‘says’ everything and nothing about a subject. But the things one could say about disability are quite colossal, so that’s why I also brought pastoral poetry in to help. I’ve always loved contemporary pastoral, with one ear towards nature and landscape, and the other towards the social, historical and human contexts lying beneath or behind it. The pastoral looks both at landscape as itself, and as man-made ‘stage’ on which the painful, hilarious things of life have played out for centuries. In traditional pastoral, there’s an awful lot of idealised myth-making. And there’s music in a play, hence Bach’s appearance in my poem. I hope it’s a serious exploration of ‘social / medical’ context, if you want to see it that way, but a bit of a ‘slag-heap’ of fun and frolics as well.
As for that restricted movement you ask about: the poem makes a wheelchair into this monolithic structure in the middle of a landscape (if you’ve heard me read, I might’ve called it the Cripple of the North). You could say that these built structures are rigid, but it also seem to be moving – by the sky reflecting in their steel, or whatever – or literally moving, through time if not space. Not only that, there were once installation artists, factory workers, who built the objects, and they ‘moved’ from flat design to living completion. And after they were ‘given life’, then you had everyone who was going to enjoy thm, work on them or even climb and play on them. And not only that: these sculptures, like The Angel of the North or Stonehenge, lodge themselves in our memory long after we’ve visited them. They’re mythical and meaningful simply by existing, and having our ideas projected onto them – like the wheelchair. Maybe these massive installations are able to ‘move’ over time and space in a far less restrictive way than any human body. Maybe our environments both free and restrict us, and we can’t escape from that tension. We’re bound to the ground, all of us, moving left and right, forward, but never ‘up’ as we’d like to think. Maybe that’s what I’m saying in the poem. But maybe it isn’t. For a (possibly more helpful) reader’s perspective, Jane Holland has just reviewed The Snowboy on her Raw Light blog, and happens to have written very well about this poem.
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The Well and the
Ceiling Rose
the well sinks further
seemingly into the earth
when the moon is full
My brothers stole me from the house and hurled
me down the well. The moon was full and round
as hearts are full and round when pumping blood.
my mother's flush face
my father's burning-coal hearth
midnight dripping wax
There was no blood. It
isn't cold, I told
my mother and my father when they found
me in the morning down the well. I'm
good.
my brothers dried me beneath
the beams and the ceiling rose
