One of the first books of contemporary poetry I ever read was Ghost Machine by Ben Mirov, selected as the winner of the 2009 Caketrain Chapbook Competition by Michael Burkard. A little later I read the poem “The Selected Poems of Michael Burkard” in Mirov’s book Hider Roser:
Sadness is a kind
of purity that Michael
Burkard uses to
drain the darkness
from his
fingertips. When droplets of rain
fall from the
branches into the water
below it creates
concentric ripples moving
outward into
everything and cannot be stopped.
Michael Burkard is
thinking about this poem
he won’t write
until hours in the future
as he sits in his apartment, feeling like a ghost.
I knew almost nothing about contemporary
poetry, except one thing: Michael Burkard was on the list of names. I bought
his book Unsleeping and dove in.
***
When I gathered all my Michael Burkard
books to start writing this, I noticed something: although I never got to meet
Burkard in person, 4 out of 7 of my books have his signature in them. I didn’t
specify that when I ordered them online; I just went to bookfinder and got
whatever was in decent shape and wasn’t too expensive. The listings didn’t
mention that the books were signed. Of course I am happy to have these
copies—what a thing, to have a poet’s book that you know they have actually, at
some point, touched—but a very small voice in the back of my head couldn’t help
asking why the poet’s signature (at least the not-wildly-famous poet’s
signature—I’m sure signed copies of, say, The Man with the Blue Guitar
or some Beat stuff probably go for big $$) is not encoded in the market as a
desirable thing, in and of itself. It’s hard not to overread this as being
symbolic of one of the more general conundra of poetry publishing: just as
online resellers are indifferent to the poet’s autograph, perhaps the smallest
glyphic stand-in for their individuality, there’s always the risk that being too
singular as a poet might relegate your body of work to a margin, i.e. might not
make it legible or circulable according to the received vocabularies of the
market.
Fortunately, I think most poets operate on an entirely different logic of reading than this. For example, here are Kazim Ali’s remarks, in a statement by Nightboat after Burkard’s passing:
Nightboat President Kazim Ali remembers
that “Michael was an original, what people call a ‘poet’s poet.’ He was so
present in life—his poems weren’t ‘artful,’ they were real living art. It was
Jean Valentine who first told me to read Michael Burkard, and I have been his
reader ever since.”
Although the appellation “poet’s poet” may suggest a kind of insularity or insurmountable nicheness to Burkard’s work, it’s the last part of Ali’s comment that interests me most. The word-of-mouth network of poets enthused enough by other poets’ work to recommend it to their students, to their friends, to anyone who will listen—that’s better than gold. And Burkard’s work will long be circulated in precisely this way, which is how I found it: inside another poet’s book.
***
Here’s the first poem in Unsleeping:
Harlem
Two copies of
Denis Johnson’s
Jesus’ Son, write song
instead.
The way the woman
has her hand
up to the back of
her head and
what with me
without my glasses
her gloves look
like they could
be brief eyes. The
man with her
doesn’t want to
write, I assume,
but maybe he would
read one of
these if I walk up
and in a non-
worrisome way tell
myself to be
a lyric or a
phrase or a brain
and bring my hand
up as in a dream
ends do. Sea-light
is my vacant
lot among these
evening buildings.
Everyone to do.
Love you are like
a mile in the
day-sky which has
just shut down.
Love I bring home
one book to you
from a blue car
from somewhere.
This poem feels beautifully representative of Burkard’s oeuvre, for several reasons: first, there’s the crunchiness of the proper names (the title, Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son), how they already place and particularize the reader’s experience from the jump of the title and the first two lines. Then we have Burkard’s sometimes-scenic, sometimes-passing, sometimes all-enveloping use of character: “the woman” and “The man with her” become sites for the poet’s projections, wonderings, perfectly incisive descriptions (“brief eyes”!). But lest we get too comfortable with the idea that this poem is “about” those two people, line 14 launches us into a kind of reverie: “Sea-light is my vacant / lot among these evening buildings.” This sentence is classic Burkard: it is a sonnet in syllables, enjambed with a clear musical sense of the aural symmetry between “Sea-light” and “vacant”. It puns, to my ear, on “lot” and on “evening,” the former by playing with the fate-inflected construction “my [...] lot” (Sea-light as [universal] destiny? As a specter of death?) and the latter in the sense of “evening” as both a time marker and as in “evening-out”, like when the buildings in a particular neighborhood were all built to code, all the same height against the twilight sky. This ambiguous, dreamy moment launches us into the beautiful cinquain that closes the poem, with its little internal rhymes (“to do. Love you”, “day-sky [...] Love I”, “you from a blue”) and parallels (“Love you [...] Love I”), ending with a recapitulation of the first image of the two books. The speaker had two books and gave one away to Love, keeping the other.
***
It’s not unusual to see a poet’s work get freer and weirder later in their career, but one thing that leaves a deep impression when one surveys Burkard’s poetry over the years is that he has always had what Timothy Liu described as “a primary strangeness”—if you open Envelope of Night: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1966–1990, and turn to the very first poem included in it (from Burkard’s first book, In a White Light), here is what greets you:
I get lost in
their story.
It is in their
country, with orchids.
Burden: I am
alone. Burden: I ask to be alone.
I am no longer
blood crossing.
Or taking the lift
of the emptiness with me.
I like the way the pronouns in the first
line almost invite an empathetic switcheroo for the reader: if the speaker is
lost in “their” (whose?) story, maybe the reader doesn’t have to feel badly for
being lost in the details relayed by Burkard’s speaker (like what the “It” in
the second line might refer to, or what it means that the speaker is “no longer
blood crossing.”). The theme introduced, though, seems abundantly clear: I
am alone. Some species of orchids produce a solitary flower.
Later on in the same poem, Burkard’s speaker introduces a motif that has helped me tremendously as a guidepost in Burkard’s work, especially when the poems start to feel elusive:
[...] When I walk
into the fire
I don’t walk. The
fire is affection.
Which finds life.
I’ve forgotten the
other condition.
There’s a little
mask there.
(“I’ve forgotten the other condition.”
comes after an earlier line, “There are two conditions.”, like the two copies
of Jesus’ Son in “Harlem” and many other instances of the double chez
Burkard.)
The motif of the mask is one Burkard returns to many times in his poetry. In its momentary appearance in this poem in particular, the mask contrasts most sharply with “The fire”, “affection”, and “life”, all of which are presented in a logically connected flow (Descartes of the Meditations meets Bachelard of Psychoanalysis of Fire). The moment this flow breaks, and the speaker forgets the sequence of conditions they themselves have posited, the mask appears.
The mask, then, becomes a kind of non-symbol for the irruption of artifice, a kind of intrusion that, whenever we use language, we cannot help but introduce. In a poem in Unsleeping Burkard includes this line, which has wormed its way into my head forever:
“interesting”—1
of my mask words
You read this line, you think for a few seconds, and it becomes very easy to entertain the question of how many of your own words are mask words, and if there is any value judgment attached to that designation. Do we hide behind masks/mask words, so our true faces and intentions cannot be discerned? (Are we fundamentally cynical, suspicious?) Or are all words mask words, all our faces masks, presenting a front for interpretation by the world that is radically open to being wildly misunderstood? (& could this be the ground for a kind of common feeling in the face of language’s inevitable shortcomings, like the kind Richard Rorty—a similarly idiosyncratic American writer—theorizes in his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity?)
In his poem “Moon Thief”, Burkard writes:
“I don’t think the mask is less of a mask for not having a face / behind it.”
***
In “Le visage humain…”, a text for the catalogue of an exhibition of his drawings and portraits, Antonin Artaud writes about (here in Roger McKeon’s translation) “the human visage / such as it still looks / for itself”. I think the way Burkard’s poetry invokes masks and faces feels a bit like how Artaud admits,
I haven’t yet
ascertained
the limits within
which
the body of the
human
ego can stop.
I have moreover
definitely
done away with art
style or talent in
all the drawings
you will see here.
Burkard’s introduction to Envelope of
Night shares with the reader a few factoids that seem to fit well in this
constellation of face/mask/artifice/contingency/&c:
1. Burkard’s original title for his book Ruby for Grief was Renaming My Face.
2. Tomas Tranströmer once wrote to Burkard, “I remember when Monica [Tranströmer’s wife] and I were walking in the desert [outside Cairo, 1959] and saw a huge heap of stones that had something in it, some character. Then we realized it was The Sphinx, but seen from behind! I often have the feeling that your poems are the sphinx seen from behind and I would like to see the face of it more often. But a sphinx is a sphinx anyway and not an ordinary heap of stones.”
3. Describing his impressions from looking through drafts of poems he wrote in the ’70s and early ’80s, Burkard shares this reflection on revision: “I could see that in over-rewriting I had taken the pulse and the face away from many poems. Revision had served me well sometimes in the past, but I had an urgency now to give up revision as a form of rewriting. Rather now to use revision as I had once read in an essay by Denise Levertov as a way of seeing the thing again, to experience the thing again. My decision was to not rewrite...I frequently found writing whose first draft form I wanted to embrace.”
4. Despite the above, or perhaps in the form of the exception that proves the rule, Burkard writes that there is one poem collected in Envelope of Night he would revise: to the end of “Dear Z,” from Ruby for Grief, Burkard would re-add the initial closing lines he had edited out of the poem:
I don’t know
how lucky I am.
***
Perhaps part of why Burkard’s work is so intimately connected to the face/mask relation, as well as the first-draft/rewrite relation, is that it can feel very important to attend (through revision or other means) to the visage we point toward the world when we barely feel like we’re a part of it:
My whole life feels like a story. As if it is written by someone who is able to live only vicariously. I know the charge, the withdrawal, the utter inability to just be. If shoulders bruised from looking over one's own, mine would have a continual bruise.
This snippet from My Secret Boat put me in mind of St. Bernard de Clairvaux, to whom purportedly Jesus revealed that it was actually the wound on his shoulder, from carrying the cross, which was his greatest unrecorded suffering. Burkard was one of our very profoundest writers of the private sense we make of the world when it seems to refuse to make sense without a little help—as here, from Pennsylvania Collection Agency:
there is one
moment and there is the next: and rain:
the sound of the
rain—I want to color it, give it something back
pale as it has
given so much to me:
[...]
it has somehow
come within me, as something almost dear:
have never
actually believed in a ghost—is this how the ghost
would feel?
***
Jean Valentine’s poem “The Poet” is dedicated to Burkard:
The Poet
for Michael Burkard
The gods are
quiet:
red and white
mask-like Anasazi
“faces motif”
faces
no mouth no nose
eyes closed
—or half-closed
like an infant’s eyes
that see nothing
and everything . . .
but you, your
ghost guide
next to you, I can
hear you, friend
on your
porch-stage, under your spare porch
light
playing the
under-history of this world
on the drums of
your empty upside-down shoes.
The “I can hear you, friend” in the ninth line is one of the most beautiful affirmations I could imagine between poets. And I think it says something that this moment of supreme tenderness succeeds a reference to the addressee’s “ghost guide”—beyond, or in concert with, the faces and masks of Burkard’s work, there is also an “under-history” of ghosts, and of love.
Two of Burkard’s poems that have moved me
the most are collected in his book Entire Dilemma. The first is “For Mary Hackett”
and the second is “Prayer”—I
won’t inset them here because I think it might be better to click off and read
them, removed from the sense of necessary forward velocity there’d be if there
was more prose just underneath. Take a beat and give them a read.
Burkard has described his relationship with the self-taught artist Mary Hackett, who encouraged him to take up drawing. What I love about Burkard’s poem to Hackett is that it feels like the perfect other side to the coin of the paranoiac face/mask strain we explored earlier: rather than the moon being a kind of cipher or poet’s symbol, Burkard’s speaker (even writing that phrase feels a little wrong, as I adopt the convention for writing about poems even though this particular text feels as naked a description of a poet mourning their friend as there could be) intimates that Mary “as much as told me (more than once) to say hello to her by saying hello to the moon.” Like in the early sketches of a child or someone just learning to draw, there is no hiddenness here: there is, instead, love of a friend and fellow artist, allowed to continue on borrowed light.
***
In Unsleeping there is a companion
poem to “Harlem”, entitled, “Harlem (2)”, which opens the second section. It
begins,
Two copies of Jean
Valentine’s
The River at Wolf. I am going
to leave one by my
coffee cup
for someone else
to find.
For me, Michael Burkard’s work has been a remarkable treasure trove of connections to the work of other poets and artists. From Burkard’s poems and acknowledgements pages I found out about the work of Sheldon Flory, one of Burkard’s teachers whom I’m sure I would not have encountered otherwise. I also wrote my own poem after Paul Klee’s Redgreen and Violet-Yellow Rhythms after reading Burkard’s tour-de-force of one (“The Anniversary” in Entire Dilemma). And in the wake of Burkard’s passing, I have read account after account by his brilliant former students about how much his work and teaching influenced their own, and how much it meant to them to have someone who listened to them and who believed, not only in their poems, but in a community of poetry that would readily welcome them.
I am glad to think this will be Michael Burkard’s most valuable signature, the way his poems and person together formed a candle from which were lit a thousand other poet-candles, with more yet to come in the form of all who haven’t yet had the good fortune of encountering his work.
The last poem of what I believe was Burkard’s last published chapbook (Strays Pack 8 from Foundlings Press) includes the lines, “...the sun / shines as if it knew // the destination.” I am incredibly grateful for the north star of Burkard’s poetry, all it shines on and all it has shown me. I think again of those closing lines of “Dear Z,” Burkard intended to restore. I think of how well they apply to the poet who, right now, might have their first copy of one of his books on the way.
Tom Snarsky is the author of Light-Up Swan and Reclaimed Water, both from Ornithopter Press. He has two books forthcoming: A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poems in summer 2025 from Animal Heart Press, and MOUNTEBANK in spring 2026 from Broken Sleep Books. He lives in the mountains of northwestern Virginia with his wife Kristi and their cats.
