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Prolegomena to the Poetry of John Burnside Mr. Tom Bristow a Thesis

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Prolegomena to the Poetry of John Burnside Mr. Tom Bristow a Thesis A Cultural Study in the Poetics of Ecological Consciousness: Prolegomena to the Poetry of John Burnside Mr. Tom Bristow A thesis presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to The School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, The University of Edinburgh, 2007. I, Tom Bristow, was admitted as a research student and doctoral candidate in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, in January, 2004. I hereby certify that this thesis has been composed by me, it is the record of the research carried out by me and no other(s), and has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. Signed Date Thesis Abstract This thesis -- originally entitled “Reckoning the Unnamed Fabric”, both a cultural study of the poetics of ecological consciousness and the ecology of poetic consciousness -- investigates the post-Romantic legacy informing John Burnside’s (b. 1955) poetry from The hoop (1988) to The Light Trap (2002) as a case study. The thesis argues that a developing aesthetic form and movement in subject derive from Burnside’s increasing involvement with ecological thought and practice. This move to the poetry of the oikos begins with an investigation of the self through the reconciliation of subject with object (or human with nature), and latterly has moved into a sustained reflection upon the idea of dwelling. This thesis relates the chronological development across Burnside’s nature poetry to an aesthetic infused with religious iconography and language, which via an evolving motif-poem of ‘world-soul’ or ‘communal fabric’ increases in its secular and empirical inflection. I read Burnside’s elevation of historical materialism s a progression in Wordsworthian craft and as a result of the poet’s pragmatic reflection on dwelling; I argue that the poetic consolidation of the intrinsic value of nature as an active and guiding spirit promotes nature less as a place for inhabitants than as the site and point of relation. The argument responds to Burnside’s transatlantic perspective from which he questions what it means to live as a spirit, and what a poetics of ecology can achieve in respect to the human subjective lyric and the need to transcend the human into the collective. To address these questions, which are implicit in Burnside's oeuvre, I draw upon Heideggerian poetics and American post-Transcendentalist Romanticism. I locate Burnside’s poetics within philosophical, aesthetic, and ecological frameworks. First, Burnside’s poetry is primarily a poetics of ontology that understands the ‘I’ within the midst of things yet underpinned by epistemology/hermeneutics; second, Burnside exhibits neo-Romantic poetry that has engaged with Modern American poetry -- it is this fusion that I call post-Romantic; third, the ecological constitutes both Burnside’s political stance and his aesthetic-poetic stance. I read the latter as a reflection of Jonathan Bate’s notion of the ecopoem as the “post- phenomenological inflection of high Romantic poetics”, an idea which is most apposite when read in relationship with Burnside’s path towards the metaphysical inscribed in the historical. Acknowledgements Fellow post-graduate researchers at the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, all faculty at the Department of English Literature, presenters at the English Literature Graduate Visiting Speaker Seminar Series 2004-05, 2005-06, 2006-07 and delegates at the British Academy Embodied Values Workshops, the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), 2007-08, at the University of Edinburgh, are due my respect and gratitude. Further thanks should be extended to presenters and attendees at the University of Warwick Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature, “Poetry and Belief” Workshop, February, 2005; the University of Leicester Urban History Group Annual Conference, “Landscape, Environment and Human Agency in the City since 1700”, April, 2005; the second “Interactive Mind” Workshop, Edinburgh, June, 2005; the sixth biennial conference of the Association of the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE-US), the University of Oregon, June 2005; the Austrian Association of University Teachers of English (AAUT) “About Raymond Williams: A Conference”, the University of Vienna, May, 2006; “Romanticism, Environment, Crisis”, the University of Wales, June, 2006; and the fourth biennial conference of the Association of the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE-UK), “Discordant Harmonies: Ecocriticism in the Twenty-First Century”, University of Lincoln, September, 2006. Also thanks to the speakers at the eighth conference of the Scottish Association for the Study of America (SASA), University of Edinburgh, 2 March 2007; the fifth annual University of Dundee English Postgraduate Conference, “InVisibilities: Absence and Presence in Cultural Texts and Images”, June 2007; the University of York Department of English and Related Literature conference, “Real Things: Matter, Materiality, Representation: 1880 to the Present", July 2007; the first biennial ASLE-UK graduate conference, “Modern Environments: Contemporary Readings in Green Studies”, September 2007, the University of Glasgow; and speakers at “Poetic Ecologies: Nature as Text and Text as Nature in English Language Verse”, Université Libre de Bruxelles, May 2008. Warm regards for the support received are respectfully extended to the Royal Irish Academy, faculty at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Dundee and all staff and fellows at IASH, the University of Edinburgh. Final thanks to The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), who sponsored this research between 2004 and 2007. Contents Abbreviations iv Exordium: Context and Methodology 1 1. Framework: Post-Romantic Ecopoetics 54 2. Formations: Early Burnside 105 3. Developments: Towards an Ecopoetic 159 4. Dwelling: The Asylum Dance 212 5. Ecology: The Light Trap 268 Afterword: Terminus and New Directions 328 Works Cited 336 Abbreviations In addition to the Modern Language Association (MLA) documentation style conventions, I deploy the following abbreviations: Th The hoop, 1988 CK Common Knowledge, 1991 FD Feast Days, 1992 MOT The Myth of the Twin, 1994 SIF Swimming in the Flood, 1997 ANS A Normal Skin, 1998 TAD The Asylum Dance, 2000 TLT The Light Trap, 2002 TGN The Good Neighbour, 2005 AL A Lie About My Father, 2006 GS Gift Songs, 2007 Full publication details are to be accessed in the bibliography. I reserve the formulations ‘ch.’, ‘p.’, ‘pp.’, ‘pt.’ and ‘sec.’ for referencing internal to this thesis. Every great poet creates his poetry out of one single poetic statement only. The measure of his greatness is the extent to which he becomes so committed to that singleness that he is able to keep his poetic Saying wholly within it. The poet’s statement remains unspoken. None of his individual poems, nor their totality, says it all. Nonetheless, every poem speaks from the whole of the one single statement, and in each instance says that statement. From the site of the statement there rises a wave that in each instance moves his Saying as poetic saying. But that wave, far from leaving the site behind, in its rise causes all the movement of Saying to flow back to its ever more hidden source. The site of the poetic statement, source of the movement-giving wave, holds within it the hidden nature of what, from a metaphysical-aesthetic point of view, may at first appear to be rhythm. Martin Heidegger, “Language in the Poem”, 1953. Bristow 1 Exordium I. Initial Outline This thesis forwards an overarching framework to access the poetic output by John Burnside (b. 1955) from 1988 to 2002 as a progression toward the metaphysical and the ecological as a single move. As a study into the contemporary poetics of ecological consciousness Burnside’s anti-dualist position to reconcile mind and matter, and being and world is read as an attempt to reconcile the material and the spiritual. This disposition is illuminated by his belief in a contingent self and a non-contingent soul (“Iona: A Quest for the Pagan” 22) 1 -- the evident gap bridged by an ecology of mind. It is imperative that the reader keeps this duality within the context of its extension: this mind achieves a gathering of the self as a form of (dis)possession, where “[you] suddenly [see] yourself from outside” (25) –- an historical perspective and modality that offers consciousness as the site of interrelations and not the ordering of relations. This is a prerequisite to understanding the interdependent exchange between mental ecology and physical ecology, and it underpins the politics of representation (both of ‘I’ and of other) within the poetic site Burnside constructs. I read the poetry without recourse to Burnside’s short stories or novels for they do not share the same conceptual premise of inquiry into the limits of the lyrical. Burnside stipulates that his oeuvre is concerned with “healing” (Dosa interview 22), and that his prose works operate within the process of discovery and journey toward this, while his poems are works of attention (as a means); these are, he conceives, “different branching paths off that [one] road” (21). Burnside’s first novel, The Dumb House (1997) replays the experiment 1 Hereafter referred to as “Iona”. Bristow 2 of the Egyptian king, Psammetichus I to discover the first spoken language. Burnside’s prose develops from here to explore human-to- human relationships within specific landscapes and under certain historic conditions; the poetry remains interested in the idea of ursprache but evolves into an interest in written language. In chapter two I review Burnside’s interest in the formation of circuits of the brain in my exposition of the poems “Chain Work” and “Source Code” (CK ) and their associative lexis in information technology, reflecting upon the capacity to forge new links and reorganize self/object to adapt to new environments/learn new skills (‘willed’ dwelling). Each language places its own stamp upon the brain creating highly distinct neuronal connections, self-sufficient brain networks (Wolf).
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