Mark Burnhope is a poet, editor and disability activist born in 1982. He studied at London School of Theology before completing an MA in Creative Writing at Brunel University, London. His work has appeared in various magazines and anthologies in print and online, as well as two previous chapbooks: The Snowboy (Salt Publishing, 2011) and Lever Arch (The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2013). Mark co-edited Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot (English Pen, 2012) with Sophie Mayer and Sarah Crewe, and Fit to Work: Poets Against Atos online (launched April 2013) with Sophie Mayer and Daniel Sluman, books which won a Saboteur Award and the Morning Star Award for Protest in Poetry consecutively. More recently, he became co-editor of Boscombe Revolution alongside Paul Hawkins. Mark can be found living in Boscombe, Dorset, with his wife Sarah, four stepchildren, two geckos, a greyhound and, occasionally, one or two stick insects or mantids.
Species is his first full collection of poems, and is available here.
You've published two chapbooks ahead of
this, your first collection, but this already feels like something of a change
in direction, or rather a settling upon your preferred direction, in the way
that the poetry tackles disability issues head on. Would that be fair?
In a way. I definitely hope the book
represents my settling into a more confident interest in poeming the
non-normative body, embodiment and bodily experience. Disability is a focal
point for that, but also the ways in which it impacts and interacts with
sexuality and gender. My chapbooks touched on disability as part of a wider
exploration of embodiment. Maybe they showed me playing with these ideas in the
hope of one day doing something more conceptually coherent with them (Is that Species?
I hope so). Three of the Snowboy poems were epistles to fictional characters
who represented various aspects of my own embodiment (there are three more of
those 'To My...' poems in Species). Poems like 'Wheelchair, Recast as a
Site of Special Pastoral Interest' and 'Milo Won't Go in the Water' referenced
disability in a (slightly) more clinical manner. But I was more nervous of the
pitfalls then. An early draft of 'Wheelchair, Recast...' was my very first
attempt at using the wheelchair in a poem, and I still transformed it into a
monolithic landscape sculpture. It was still an irreverent symbol, a half-joke.
Lever Arch, my second chapbook, was partly
inspired by Larry Eigner, whose poeming of the body through his Cerebral Palsy
has massively influenced Disability/Crip Poetics in America. When I discovered
that, and the disabled poets collected together in the online journal Wordgathering and
anthology Beauty Is A Verb, I wanted to play with that sense of making poems
using my 'hidden' bodily experiences: anxiety, neurodiverse thought and speech
patterns, spacial recognition, memory, and particularly (in the case of Charles
Olson's 'Projectivist Verse', Black Mountain poets, and particularly Eigner)
breath and white space. So Lever Arch's approach to disability was
more the aesthetics of disability than what the medical dictionary,
and the medical model of disability, fixates on.
I'm more interested in disability as a
social phenomenon than a medical one, though one arises from and impacts the
other (when terms like 'social construct' fall into the wrong hands it's a
problem): barriers caused not by our 'wrong' bodies but by a society which,
instead of taking responsibility to alleviate struggles between us, blames us
and makes us responsible for the 'mistakes' of our impairments. Maybe I'm more
confident in that as an obsession now. That we 'other' humans into 'species'
based on what we deem to be 'natural' and 'unnatural' is more clear than ever.
There's also a conscious effort to include poems that came out of my disability
activism and political protest against David Cameron's government, particularly
Iain Duncan Smith's 'Welfare Reforms'. There are still poems about grief and
loss after my wife Sarah's miscarriage ('The Snowboy' poem was an earlier
attempt at that). It's all generally explored in, or alongside, or in the
middle of, that natural history context.
I don't revert to self-mocking jokes about
disability as easily as I used to, and when I do, it's angrier. The failings of
so much contemporary white and non-disabled satire are rife: it so often draws
together the privileged to laugh at subjects they feel are socially
transformative, but ends up playing out as a kind of identity tourism meant to
enrich their experience without affecting ours in any crucial way. The upshot
is that there is no upshot: the status quo is maintained. Liberally-minded
people are made to feel proud of themselves for thinking of those below them,
again.
I don't know. Maybe the biggest departure
(surely the biggest risk) was deciding not to include any poems from my
chapbooks. I hope that gives readers a sense of culmination, if not change
as such. In those senses, yes, maybe I've started with as clean a slate as
possible. In many ways I feel a need to take stock, even start again.
Tell us a little about the writing of the
book - first collections are often a "Best Of so far", but this feels
much more coherent. How much of it was written with the collection in mind,
rather than as occasional poems slowly accumulated into a book?
For a long time now I've known that I'm
interested in 'concept albums'. I like to read a book with a sense that all the
poems in it add up to a larger conceptual whole, that the poet is trying to
tell me something. I don't think this approach is particularly in vogue, and in
a way, I get that: there's a danger that such books can repeat themselves, or
feel ham-fisted in terms of how much they're trying to instruct readers and
point them to that 'Aha! I get it' realisation of what the book's about. I hope
readers don't feel cheaply manipulated by my writing. At the same time, though,
I'm unsatisfied with books that feel like a 'best of my stuff so far', with no
organisational principle other than 'Which were my best poems?' This might be
to do with how my Hydrocephalus-addled brain works, but how do I prioritise a
criteria for 'Best' if I'm aware of so many possible ones? So many poets seem
to come forward with 'objective criteria' for pinning down 'Best', I really had
to find an emotional or conceptual onus with which to pick one way over
another, or I was lost. So my way was to discard questions like 'Which are
my best poems?', and to think 'What have I been trying to say all this time?' I
wanted readers, if possible, to be able to say I remember that book because it
was about... which was pertinent to my life at that moment. All of my favourite
books have stuck in my craw for that reason.
As far as how this was put together, there
are poems (particularly the Leopard Gecko sequence now called 'fragments from
The First Week of the World: the herpetological bible') which date back to
early versions written something like five or six years ago, possibly more. I'm
not sure, I don't date my drafts. I'm fairly prolific, and a lot of these poems
were started before, or written in parallel to, The Snowboy and Lever Arch.
But those each seemed very self-contained to me, and even when I first felt the
spark of the idea, Species took all that time to become a potentially-coherent
piece. For a start, I had to come to realise that all of the elegies to dead
pets I'd been writing (which I'd considered totally geeky indulgences) had to be
something that other people might want to read. I also had to realise they
symbolised quite a significant thread in my work as a whole: this central motif
of 'natural' and 'unnatural', 'domestic' and 'captive', 'familiar' and 'queer/alienating',
'heaven' and 'hell', 'life' and 'death', that sort of thing. Some of the later
poems I wrote, which are perhaps more explicitly about human experience, were
written as I was realising that I might be able to throw nature, queer and
disability poetries together as kind of a trilogy of concerns that talked to
each other about 'otherness.' I was trying this in the past. I hope it's more
fully-realised here.
Ultimately, I guess I don't care much for
poetry in a vacuum. If it doesn't draw strands together from our lives lived in
a particular society (and in terms of the UK at the moment, a society being
heavily engineered and conditioned to be anti-disability and anti-welfare), if
it doesn't seek in some way to give to or interact with that society, I'm not
amazingly drawn to it. With a few exceptions, 'poetry for its own sake' seems
like a non-entity to me. There's a sense of urgency, a need to want it to
matter, especially now.
Do you use other poets, workshops, forums,
etc. as sounding boards during the writing process, and if so, who?
I used the online forum PFFA (the Poetry
Free-For-All) for some years before I was first published in Magma in 2010. A
few forum members will recognise the lizard poems in Species, early drafts of
which I very tentatively workshopped there. Eventually I felt that although I
had met some great contacts and supports through online workshopping, I had to
go it alone. I had to more closely guard my work in order to make it something
readable before showing it off in public (I was a serial poster, a habit which
hasn't changed in social media circles), especially since my approach to
disability had to reflect my own living with it; there can be so many
expectations built in the minds of able-bodied critics about how the disabled
experience should be presented and written about to a 'wider readership' (which
I came to realise would not, in most people's minds, include me). For a long
time I felt the frustration of that without knowing how to articulate it, or
(more importantly) find a solution to it.
I was published in Magma after I got
frustrated with workshopping, sent some poems out on a whim, hardly expecting
to get them accepted. But that's what happened. Since then, I've met some
incredibly supportive writers who have truly grasped, I think, what I was
trying to achieve in my work, and helped me find and hone my various voices and
techniques. I'm guaranteed to forget someone so I don't like lists, but I feel
particularly indebted to Ira Lightman and Andrew Philip. We've often passed
poems back and forth to one another on Facebook (a social network site I love
and hate in equal measure!). Since co-editing Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot in
2012, Sophie Mayer and Sarah Crewe have been incredible influences to me in
terms of thinking about my subjects and concerns, my various political, social
and bodily identities, and how to channel those into poems through an
intersectional lens, queer and feminist poetries, body-positivity. These all
converse with disability in some great ways, and I'm trying to move forward
into a more intersectional practice. I feel like, if my poetry doesn't draw
together all the separate strands of embodiment and oppression in my lived
experience, it doesn't cut it anymore. Maybe even the lizards (I keep lizards
as a hobby, it's an obsession) speak to that.
Daniel Sluman, whose Nine Arches debut
collection Absence Has a Weight of its Own deals with his experience as an
amputee after having had cancer as a child, has been a great ally in terms of
thinking about disability/crip poetics, the ways we might be more involved in
it, even try to shed more light on it in the UK, if we can. I got to know Daniel better over the time I
was co-editing Fit to Work: Poets Against Atos with he and Sophie Mayer. We
agree on a lot of things regarding disability, and even when we disagree, I
always come away from our arguments with a deeper, more nuanced perspective.
One of your main concerns seems to be the
poet's urge (well, everybody's urge, really) to name and categorise neatly. My
own feeling, increasingly, is that the very act of writing helps clarify for
you how impossible, and often undesirable, this is. Would you agree?
Yes and no. I do think part of my task,
personally, is to explore how, ultimately, labels are like birds: you'll be
looking at them through your binoculars, and they'll fly away before you've got
your camera out. And yet, we need them: poetry needs to always allow for
continual exploration, interrogation and renewal of descriptors and their
definitions while always insisting that we need to name. If there's any reason
for language at all, it's to embody experience in a vessel, the word, so that we
can take it from one place to another. Like an ark. Insisting that your 'names'
be set-in-stone if you like (especially if you need them to be set-in-stone to
be able to flourish in an ecosystem) this doesn't deny that evolution will
happen. We need both the 'now' and the 'not yet'.
In doing disability activism with other
disabled activists online, many of them intersectional feminists, I've become
conscious of the difference(s) between labelling others as an oppressive act, and
naming ourselves with 'self-identifiers', words and concepts that people who
have lived non-normative experience have had to find and guard closely in order
to both understand their experience, and articulate that experience to others.
Without those self-identifiers, we could never campaign for our rights. We
could never demand our equality unless we could first familiarise people with
our chosen labels and what they represent for us. 'Labels' and
'self-identifiers' are too often confused. In my experience, non-disabled
people particularly are so used to being told that labelling disabled people is
bad, negative, harmful (we are all essentially human beings!), they will often
have a knee-jerk impulse to neutralise and remove your self-identifiers, even
if you've explained why you need them: they perform the function of making you
visible in a world which would rather erase you. It's easier to get along with
you if it doesn't require me to understand you. But we can't rush to wipe that
slate clean between us.
In Species, animal taxonomy, and the
religious 'taxonomy' of social groups (finding its most gruesome manifestation
in Social Darwinism, eugenics, the execution alongside the Jews of the
deformed, and the economically unproductive 'workshy' during the
Holocaust), seemed like a way of handling all these concerns. Our neatest
human categorisations tend to result in the strictest, most trapping prejudices
and stereotypes. The book begins with an epigraph about the alleged division of
the Mosaic Law into three 'species': moral, civil and ceremonial. In part, it's
that arbitrary separation of the Levitical prohibitions into 'categories' by
Christian theologians which has allowed continual discrimination against LGBTQI
people to survive even in spite of other arguments. Evangelicalism,
particularly, is hooked on a seemingly endless number of binaries: 'gay' /
'straight', 'male' / 'female', 'sick' / 'healed', 'heaven' / 'earth',
'sinfulness' / 'righteousness,' you name it. Many discourses (queer, feminist,
crip, chronic illness and more) are trying to demolish these binaries and
replace them with spectrums. Of course, the 'spectrum' itself can be
problematic. No disability experience can be said to fall neatly onto a
horizontal line; there are too many variables and offshoots. I'm reminded of
the movie Donnie Darko, when Donnie (Jake Gylenhaal) gets angry
at his teacher for making him place different human experiences onto a
horizontal line beginning at FEAR and ending in LOVE. Given a choice between
the two, I would rather the 'spectrum' than the 'binary,' but is that not
another binary?
What I do think is that while so many
self-definitions must be written down so that they are able to be shared and
explored in safe communities, they also need to be open to constant upgrades
by, and within, those communities. I'm repeating myself, but words are never
just words, they're vessels: for stories, histories and experiences.
I'd extend that to poets themselves. The
various schools and categories that they get lumped into seem increasingly irrelevant,
and in the best possible way your poetry feels like an example of that, drawing
on very disparate influences and inspirations. Is that fair?
Yes I think so. One of my very earliest
poet-obsessions was William Blake: painter, illustrator, poet, nursery-rhymer,
alleged madman, utopic visionary, punk, social justice warrior, anti-poverty
activist, theologian, occultist, esoteric spiritualist! You name it. If poetry
could be so apparently contradictory, I used to think, and bring together so
many aspects, I wanted to do that. I think life is probably always a set of
contradictions to some extent, but art so often tries to iron them out and
neutralise them. On what basis, I don't know.
As I got deeper into learning poetry I felt
a pressure to adhere to specific schools, nations, techniques and aesthetics,
modernism/post-modernism (binary alert). An anxiety of influence, maybe.
Seemingly everyone wants you to sign on a dotted line of some sort. Poets can
champion their own directions as 'the right way forward', devaluing and pushing
down others in the process. I have my opinions about what's 'greater' and
'lesser' regarding my practise, but it's all about what I want to say and
explore, and how I can do it best at different times, in different contexts. Various
poets from various traditions and schools, and none, have assisted me in
figuring that out, and I still keep finding them. What makes that approach
hopefully more coherent than it sounds is that I try hard to stay conscious of
what I want to say.
The poetries that stick, as it were, are
the ones I carry with me for any length of time. Early on it was the Romantics
(mostly Blake, easily my favourite Romantic), Confessional poets (particularly
Plath and Sexton), 'religious' poets (Gerard Manley Hopkins and the
Metaphysicals, especially John Donne, and contemporary poets like Gillian
Allnutt), the apocalyptic (Dylan Thomas), landscape and nature (Heaney and
Hughes). In the last few years it's been more political activist poetries,
Eastern European poetry (I love several Polish poets), poetries of social exile
and disenfranchisement through non-normativity. Surrealism, conceptualism and
visual poetries, Disability / crip and Survivor Poetics, queer and feminist
poetries, poetries of colour and race (particularly activist-poets like Audre
Lourde, who so amazingly drew together black, queer and feminist threads).
Basically, you name it, I'll tell you if I want it.
I particularly enjoyed the Abnominations
section - could you tell us a bit more about this form (Abnominals) and how you
came to write them?
Abnominals are a fantastic form invented by
Scottish poet Andrew Philip. When he introduced me to the form I went away and
wrote loads of them. Andrew describes the abnominal in his second
collection The North End of the Possible: 'The abnominal is a form I have
developed using only the letters of the dedicatee's name, each of which must
appear at least once per stanza. The poem, which is 20 lines long, should begin
and end by addressing the dedicatee in some way. The title must also be an
anagram of their name.'
The abnominal allowed me to directly
address various personalities who felt like representatives of the themes
throughout the book, including David Cameron, David Attenborough, Maurice
Sendak (Where The Wild Things Are). There are one or two more personal
abnominals, one addressed to my wife Sarah, another to our miscarried child,
named Evie-Lyn, who was only ever born in our imaginations. It seemed like I
couldn't explore 'otherness' across a book without looking at death as another
kind of existence, the possibility of a next life, and what happens when we
have to imagine a life that never literally was as we would have liked. Maybe
anthropomorphising animals, exploring animal gender, is similar to imagining a
child you never met, or even the self you would like to become. I don't know.
I also loved the abnominal's imposed
constraints. It's easy to be drawn to a default clarity of line and syntax time
and time again. The abnominal forced me to be more inventive with how
everything was expressed. They frequently devolve into a kind of non-sense
which can send the brain off in all sorts of associative directions, but which
can also encompass characters just through sheer sound and vocabulary play. The
abnominal stretched me: If I couldn't use a word because it had the letter 'L'
in it (a real problem letter for me; it kept popping up where it didn't
belong), I had to find a 'legal' word, or write the whole line again. It kept
me on my toes, so to speak. I'm very grateful to Andrew for not only
approving my use of the form, but reading, enjoying and encouraging me to
include the number of abnominals I did.
And the inevitable closing question - what
next? Do you have other projects in the pipeline?
I have a novel, which has fairly recently
become a verse novel, that I've drafted I don't know how many times over the
last nearly-a-decade. I want to finish that, but it needs more... something
(one or two secondary characters need more colour and purpose in the plot, an
end game, that sort of thing). So I'm going to go back to it. You might see it
one day. I have a few new poems in early stages, and possibly a concept, or set
of concepts, for another collection. For now I'm going to just sit back and enjoy
what feels like an 'end game' for me of sorts, at least to the first act. I've
written the book I wanted to write. What I do next is anyone's guess. I'm
excited by that. Maybe I need a hiatus so that I'm still around but the
pressure's off.
