Gerald Burns

(Click to hear Gerald reading from "The Slate Notebook")

Toward a Phenomenology of Written Art*

The two essays which comprise this book -- “The Slate Notebook” and “A Hermetic Journal” -- are concerned with the ideas and problems Burns encountered while simultaneously working on long poems: how it matters that written art is written, the relation of medium to creativity, why writing something down makes it more real, how verse might engage the question of magic more directly, and what magic as an activity is.
http://www.unl.edu/tcweb/fowler/burns1.jpg
Gerald Burns, Harvard, 1962


Gerald Burns was born in Michigan, attended Harvard, Trinity College (Dublin), and Southern Methodist University. His books of verse include Boccherini's Minuet, Letters to Obscure Men, A book of Spells [first third] (Salt Lick), and Longer Poems (Dalkey Archive). He has authored another collection of essays, A Thing About Language, published by S.I.U. Press.

*McPherson & Company. Please telephone or fax toll-free (1-800-613-8219) or e-mail (bmcpher@ulster.net) to receive complete terms and discount information.

"Among my recent enthusiasms is the critical work of the late poet Gerald Burns."

(From "A Silent Interview with Samuel R. Delany,"  by Rudi Dornemann and Eric Lorberer)

Delany quotes the following lines by Gerald Burns:

"Some writers know a great deal about how words should come at a reader; others study the ways words come to a writer. The second is likely to please passionate readers more, if only because the first is more likely to be vulnerable to literature as rule book, a catalogue of other men's effects. What saves him sometimes is reading very little. The second, whether reading or writing, is likely to pay less attention to the book of rules than to grass and how the ball looks coming at you, and the oddity of lines painted on a field. What he explores is the act of writing, as his readers explore the act of reading. There is nothing contemptible about traditionalist writing, but its readers are more likely to ignore the act of reading as part of the experience of what is read. In the first-quarto Hamlet Corambis asks, What doe you reade my Lord? and Hamlet says, Wordes, wordes. In the Folio he says, Words, words, words. It's not only funnier, it's truer, to his and our experience. The scribe may hate his pen as the painter his paint, but in another mood he will imitate Van Gogh and drink ink."

David Fowler, 2 November 2002.
dfowler@unl.edu