“Preservation in Poetry”:
An Interview with Mick Burrs

Steven Michael Berzensky (Mick Burrs) has published 30 chapbooks, including his latest, Under the Indelible (2009). Among his seven books are two edited by Catherine Hunter: the 1998 Saskatchewan Poetry Book Award winner Variations on the Birth of Jacob and a Saskatchewan Book of the Year finalist, The Names Leave the Stones: Poems New & Selected (2001). He co-edited with Allan Briesmaster Crossing Lines (2008), an anthology featuring 76 former Americans who have made poetic contributions to Canadian literature. Mick also founded the Annual Short Grain Contest while editing Grain (1988-91).

J.A. Weingarten is completing his PhD thesis at McGill University. He conducted this interview in December 2009 in Toronto.

You’ve just released a new chapbook. Can you tell me a bit about it?

It’s my thirtieth chapbook and it’s called Under the Indelible. We launched it at Hot Sauced Words here in Toronto. I’m thrilled with the book, because I found quite a few good poems that had gone unpublished for twenty, thirty, even forty years. A few of these go as far back as the late 1960s when I started writing poetry in Vancouver.

What prompted you to start writing during those early years?

It started at Simon Fraser University, where I was a teaching assistant. In 1966 I began going to poetry readings. One afternoon I sat down outside of a classroom and through an open door heard a woman reading poetry to a class. I listened and thought: “I have to find out who this is.” Of all people, it turned out to be Dorothy Livesay. I was familiar with some of her work, because when I moved from California to Canada in 1965, one of the first things I did was purchase A.J.M. Smith’s Oxford Canadian Verse and Ralph Gustafason’s Penguin Canadian Verse. Livesay was in both of them, and I loved her stuff. I started going to all kinds of readings. On top of Burnaby Mountain I first saw Robert Creeley, William Stafford, Lionel Kearns, John Newlove, and Al Purdy do readings. It was a thrill to see and hear all of these poets perform there. I responded to their poetry, the aurality of it. It inspired me and so I started jotting down some of my own poems, and two were published by Jim Brown in Talon magazine in September 1966.

Some of the poets you mention, specifically the Canadian ones, often write about history in their poetry. Your poetry, too, seems preoccupied with national and personal pasts. What is it about history that interests you?

First of all, I became good friends with Livesay. She helped me adjust when I moved to Edmonton in 1969. She was my poetry connection. She introduced me to other poets in Edmonton and encouraged me to join the first poetry group I was ever part of. While the group did not include Livesay, she gave it her blessing. But it did include Elizabeth Brewster, Doug Barbour, Stephen Scobie, and Sid Stephen. As I got to know Dee better (she told me more than once to stop calling her Dorothy), I became familiar with her socially conscious documentary poems like “Day and Night.” And she wasn’t the only one doing this type of poetry. There were more than a few Canadian poets writing individual poems or sequences of poems steeped in Canadian history. But all of this was influencing me in a really quiet way, at least at first. It really wasn’t until I moved to Regina in 1973 that something new began to appear in my poetry. You could call it an historical consciousness. It blossomed especially after I was hired to work at the Saskatchewan Archives.

What had they hired you to do?

My primary task was annotating the oral history tapes of the Metis people who had been interviewed by Carol Pearlstone for the Saskatchewan Department of Culture and Youth. It was my job to listen attentively to and take notes on these tapes. In them, I kept hearing over and over stuff about Louis Riel. I knew so little about him, but found myself intrigued: for one man to have so much historical significance! I decided to read some books about him, namely George F.G. Stanley’s Louis Riel and Joseph Howard’s Strange Empire. Then I thought of putting together a book of found poems based on the actual transcribed words of the Metis people on the tapes. So that is how Going to War: Found Poems of the Metis People was born. By the time I finished that project, I found myself writing many poems about Louis Riel. The longest one is “Under The White Hood.”

What inspired that poem?

I kept hearing the hangman’s voice: “Louis Riel, do you know me? You cannot escape from me today.” A journalist, Nicholas Flood Davin, was present at the execution and recorded those words. It was the last thing Riel heard. The hangman was Jack Henderson, who had witnessed Thomas Scott’s execution. He volunteered to hang Riel almost as a kind of revenge. Those words and the haunting image of the white hood over Riel’s head, rather than the standard black hood . . . those were the things that struck the strangest and deepest chord in me.

So you were drawn to Riel early on in your career?

Definitely. When Coteau Books commissioned me to do my first book, Moving In From Paradise, the great majority of poems in it were about Louis Riel.

When I read that collection, I get the feeling that you have an ambivalent, but still sympathetic, approach to Riel history. Would you say that is accurate?

Yes, I think so. Riel was a poet, and a dreamer, so that made it easy for me to identify with him rather than with Sir John A. Macdonald. Then again, I just don’t believe in war as a valid means of resolving problems. I empathize with how Riel and Dumont and the Metis were maltreated by the Conservative government under Macdonald, because it seems like a rebellion that really never needed to happen. The Metis leaders out west were genuinely trying to express their legitimate grievances to Ottawa. They were constantly being ignored. I usually identify with people struggling to survive under such difficult circumstances.

But if you identify so readily with ideas of survival and poet-figures, why do you sound so ambivalent in “Under the White Hood”?

Because when I identity with someone like Riel, I can only identify so far. I tend to see more than one side to anything and anybody. That doesn’t mean I agree with all of the sides on a matter. For instance, some people said Riel was crazy. But I don’t believe that. Just as Riel didn’t see himself as insane. He genuinely wanted to establish a culture distinct from the rest of Canada at that time. I identify with the Metis and Riel in part because I understood them better emotionally than I did Macdonald and the federal government. But that isn’t to say Riel is historically unambiguous. Human beings are naturally ambiguous and we should treat them as such.

In another one of your poems, “Subversive Activities,” you say that dreams are the most subversive activities. You have a similar tone in “Under The White Hood” and in your later poetry, too. Do you think that dreams and visions inform history?

Dreams are very important to me. Ever since I took a dream workshop course in 1972, I’ve recorded my dreams in elaborate detail whenever I can. I literally have boxes of dreams. One of my chapbooks is called From My Box of Dreams and another is called Junkyard of Dreams. I connect with dreams on many levels – psychological, symbolic, spiritual – and have even written short stories based on my dreams, especially my most anthologized one, “Baruch, the Man-Faced Dog.” Inevitably, when I think of historical characters, I sometimes add my own dream sense to that person or event.

Dreams and history are analogous concepts, then?

Yes, because if you were not at an event, then your understanding of that event is blurry at best. You can only go by testimony and other people’s stories. This is why history continually evolves, because stories evolve. And I believe it is the dreamer in each one of us who contributes something to that necessary and inevitable and ongoing evolution.

Michel de Certeau talks about that kind of self-inscription in history, that history and current events are rarely different things. So how do you balance self-inscription with historical facts?

While I always try to be historically accurate by doing research, I am constantly discovering that there is invariably some important data to which I simply don’t have access. I admit that shortcoming. Nonetheless, when I am quite shocked by a particular piece of news or history, poetry wells up in me. Like the time a newspaper clipping was pinned to my apartment suite door informing me of the murder of Pat Lowther, a good friend and a good poet. The shock of such things forces me into poetry, so that I can deal with them. My poem, “Missing Persona Report,” is another example. It was inspired by an article that my friend Andrew Suknaski handed to me. It was about how the Soviet government had recently dug up Babi Yar in Kiev, the memorial site where a massacre of Jews had taken place during World War Two. The Soviet government then allowed a television station to be built on the same sacred site! It was Babi Yar where my great-grandfather may have been buried at the end of the nineteenth century before my grandfather (who I was named after) and his family emigrated to the United States in 1905. How could I not identify completely with this disturbing article? This is how well my friend and literary provocateur Andy Suknaski knows me. He knew the idea of history being ripped down and new history being built up would rouse me.

That idea of “ripping down and building up” sounds similar to what you said earlier about history as an evolving plurality.

Yes. I would want to avoid sounding cynical and say about this shaky ground: no matter how solid something appears to be, it can always be altered, for better or worse. And some things just disappear. This is especially true in this country, because in Western Canada nothing is preserved! We tear down historical sites, like all the grain elevators, one by one. Poets and people who love poetry can see that these things are actually valuable, so we write about them and read about them. While we are not yet Shelley’s pure and “unacknowledged legislators” – we can turn ourselves into natural legislators with what I would call soft power. Poets encourage preservation through poetry.

How do you think historiographic poetry differs from other discourses, like historical fiction and textbooks?

I have to confess: “historiographic poetry” is not a term I am familiar with.

Well, your poems aren’t quite history, as you say. They seem more like poetic historiography, the history of history in poems. I think it sounds like what you do. As a poet dealing with history, you intervene. You don’t really construct or essentialize the past.

I can agree with that. My history poems should be factual in the most basic sense, but they can also benefit from having some imaginative element or elements. So, certainly, I critique as I create. As far as other discourses that do the same . . . I prefer poetry, because it lays more emphasis on open form, startling imagery, metaphor, and on what I call “soundfulness.” So a poem is the most open form I can think of. I think a poet can get inside of history and characters in a shorter and freer space than a novelist or strict historian could. When I sit down to write one, I never know how it will turn out. I also think that poetry can keep things from staying buried.

Earlier you mentioned that Suknaski often pushed you to write historiographic poetry. Has he been an important influence for you?

More than anyone else, he inspired me to go deeper into my roots. And he was quite persistent about it. He used to say: “Mick, you’ve got to write about your ancestry.” After a few years, I got tired of hearing it, and so I applied for and then received a grant from the Saskatchewan Arts Board to write a full-length manuscript exclusively about my roots, my family history, my ancestry. The result was The Blue Pools of Paradise. I dedicated it to him. It still means a lot to me that he truly helped inspire a particular stream of my work – not only by his words of constant encouragement, but also by his own example, especially in his Wood Mountain Poems. It is this book in particular that inspired many Canadian poets to write about family and ancestry.

What about some of the other poets you mentioned earlier? Have they had a similar impact on your work?

Yes, all of them in some way or other. Sometimes just with their unique presence and voice when they shared their works at the theatre podium, or in a pub. John Newlove inspired me, for instance, because he conducted his reading in the SFU Theatre as if it was a religious service. He had all the lights turned off. It was an extraordinary atmosphere that John had created with his podium setup and his own voice alone, that unique crisp way he wrote and spoke his lines. There was also Milton Acorn. Patrick Lane had me reading Acorn’s work. You could always sense that Acorn really influenced Pat, especially in the beginning. I was only able to find Acorn’s Jawbreakers in a local branch library in Vancouver. Before I returned it, I typed a lot of Acorn’s poems. I know that really influenced me. In fact, “Hitler’s Favourite Movie,” one of my poems, seems to have been nursed by some neat combination of Acorn’s style and Al Purdy’s in Cariboo Horses. I immediately sent it on to Milton Wilson and he published it in Canadian Forum. I truly believe I could not have written that satirical poem as I did if I had not first read Purdy’s Cariboo Horses and typed up Acorn’s Jawbreakers.

When you think back, after having your New and Selected collection come out in 2001 (The Names Leave the Stones, published by Coteau), how do you think you’ve changed as a poet?

I hope I’m becoming a better poet. I hope I’m becoming a more soundful poet. I want my poems to read well out loud. I’ve been writing a lot of sonnets the past few years. I call them “liberated sonnets.” I don’t like the pre-structured rhyming forms of sonnets. Much too rigid and artificial for me. I just ceased trying to do that and learned how to scatter any rhymes when they came. Also, I remain open to discovering new schemes sonnet by sonnet. I also write Word Sonnets, one word per line only for fourteen lines. It was a form Seymour Mayne introduced to me. So I keep experimenting with the sonnet form, something I can’t seem to stop myself from doing. I can’t be trusted to be an orthodox poet. I want to keep experimenting with many things. And I still write other poems: sequence poems and long poems and poems that do not rhyme at all. And I write poetic dramas. Just like you said of history, I think I’m just another evolving plurality.