Greco-Mormon: Background and Introduction

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I’m genuinely elated to announce this Monday, March 25th, 2024 the release of Greco-Mormon, a new chapbook under my fresh pen name August Janson. In its 43 pages are 12 poems written and edited over eight years, divided into two parts, with two longer sequences of seven and 10 poems respectively. The edition’s run will be 250, my largest self-produced printing to date. Orders will be fulfilled on-demand with the first 50 copies in a hand-stitched binding.

Greco-Mormon can be published in my Ko-fi store here for $10 (postage included)

My intention below is to give some personal and historical context to Greco-Mormon. Like a book’s version of special features, this isn’t necessary for an appreciation of the poems individually or the collection as a whole, but rather to serve a scant purpose for the critically curious, however long the coherence of the Internet lasts and while there are potential readers of American poetry with an eye on the present and an eye on the past.

Why the pen name August Janson: A brief genealogy

Although I no longer practice the faith I grew up in, when dug up and exposed to the stark sunlight of the Great Basin, my religious roots reveal them to be fifth generation Mormon. I was in the church from birth to 18 – technically from 8, the age of baptism and confirmation in the LDS church. I’ve never rescinded my membership and have walked other paths of practice since 18, but although I’ve lived longer not attending the church of my ancestors than attending, the resonance of its teachings, hymns, beliefs, customs, and the whole octave of its paradoxical culture still rings in my ears. To turn down the volume, I needed to distance myself by giving the poetic voice of these poems a new name – though, not entirely new.

I was born with the last name Janson. It was given to me by my biological father Phillip John Janson, who recently died in August 2023, and was preceded in death by my adoptive father Bob (who gave me his adopted surname, Burns, in 1990), and my stepfather Charlie, all to whom I dedicate the chapbook. The Jansons I descend from on Phillip’s side are Jansons of Sweden’s Stockholm and Uppsala Counties, rather than Jansons from Britain, Ireland, France, or Germany (see this 23andMe page for the commonality of the surname). Phillip’s father, my grandfather Alonzo (“Lonnie”) Delmar Janson was the grandson of Frans Gustaf Janson, whose journey to the land of Deseret began with the informal visits and home teachings by Mormon missionaries, in fact, the first elders sent abroad to the non-English speaking countries of Scandinavia.

The front cover of the chapbook with explanatory notes

The cover of Greco-Mormon, with a digital clipping of the route taken by Mormon pioneers from Nauvoo, Illinois to the Salt Lake Valley in Utah Territory in the winter of 1846, later known as the Mormon Trail.

The script below the title is the same in the phonetic alphabet Deseret (a term meaning “honeybee”) that was developed in 1854 by George D. Watt, the first English convert to the LDS church, at the behest of the second prophet and president of the church, Brigham Young.

The purpose of developing the alphabet was both theocratic and functional. Before statehood, Young was the leader of both the church and the State of Deseret, and the script served as a means of helping converts quickly learn English phonemes from non-English speaking countries – initially, from my ancestors in Scandinavia (Source: http://deseretalphabet.org/)

In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, Sweden had only just ceased enforcing religious laws of compulsory (Lutheran) church attendance, laws against religious conversion, and laws barring emigration. The first part of my pen name, August, is in honor of Maria Augusta Carlsson who married great-great-grandfather Frans. She had also converted to the early LDS church in Sweden and left her family to emigrate to the US to help “build the kingdom.” This is quite a historical irony, as Swedish converts who crossed the Atlantic and followed the Mormon Trail to the American West were leaving a native country that was gradually democratizing and pulling apart church and state – only to arrive in the theocratic bastion of Utah Territory where both were the same.

If Frans Gustaf and Maria Augusta hadn’t chosen to take their individual leaps of faith across an ocean, they wouldn’t have met one another across their adjacent hotel rooms in New York City in late September 1875, beginning a patriarchal sequence of marriages and birthings that produced me 110 years later. My Mormon and American story begins earliest with them, and so August Janson is both the subjective double and poetic object of Greco-Mormon.

The frontispiece to Greco-Mormon: Detail of carved sunstone relief sculpture from the original Nauvoo Temple (1841-1846) before its abandonment due to religious intolerance and destruction by arsonists (Source: https://history.churchofjesuschrist.org/content/museum/museum-treasures-nauvoo-temple-in-ruins-lithograph?lang=eng).

Greco-Mormon can be published in my Ko-fi store here for $10 (postage included)

The title of the chapbook: Mythopoesis and history

Yes, it’s a cheap and punny chapbook title that reminds you of school – so the following brief lesson by me, a certified teacher, has the historical and anecdotal information you’ll need to understand for the Greco-Mormon quiz you can unlock with the enclosed code you’ll receive after purchase of the chapbook (sarcasm detected):

The Greco-Roman period was short, close to the same amount of time between my great-great-grandparents and me (116 years – approximately how long it took the LDS church to get to its first million members). The Achaean League, the last alliance of Greek city-states, was dissolved by the Roman Republic after the Battle of Corinth in 146 BCE, marking the official end of Grecian sovereignty, as well as the tapering off of Hellenistic art and culture. The Greco-Roman period is usually demarcated at 30 BCE with the absorption of Ptolemaic Egypt and the establishment of the Roman Empire by Octavian. Technically speaking, the Greek peoples never again ruled over themselves until the Greek War for Independence in 1821, the year when Joseph Smith first claimed his theophanic vision occurred (there are multiple versions, suggesting a sculpted narrative by Smith).

The Romans absorbed the lands and peoples of the Greeks but had also for the previous centuries been grafting the wisdom of Greek philosophers and their styles and techniques in the plastic and performative arts. This further differentiated them from their native Etruscan ancestors in the Apennine Peninsula, and if we subscribe to Virgil’s Aeneid as being more than mythopoeic nation-building, taking some truth in the origin of Rome with an Aeneas-like figure with errant Trojans [read: Anatolians] ending up along the Tiber, another instance of “Latin” cultural diffusion. I would argue that the Aeneid can be read as a precursor myth of Western expansion, with a people fleeing a city of destruction and journeying through the wilderness (of the Mediterranean Sea) to a new home – the same story at the root of the settling of Deseret and by my Mormon ancestors. End of lesson.

The back cover of the chapbook with a key to its constituent parts

  • Center-right: Scan of a copper postcard of a space shuttle launch, made using copper mined in the Salt Lake Valley at Bingham Canyon (pictured at bottom), the largest man-made excavation on Earth
  • In an arc: Three animals representing prominent Northern constellations: Taurus, Ursa Major, and Cygnus – one tamed, one wild, one free
  • Center: The Antikythera Ephebe statue, found in a Greco-Roman shipwreck in 1900, most likely sculpted by Euphranor of Corinth in the 4th century BC, which I’ve made to look like he’s “taming the ox” of the heavens, though it’s believed he actually held a sphere – perhaps a golden apple
  • Right: Clipping of a road sign in Texas for the Bonanza steakhouse, where my adoptive father Bob worked during high school, started by Dan Blocker, a TV actor from the show Bonanza (1959-1973), set during the era of Mormon migration and Western expansion

Extra-credit. A salient point that should affect the reading of my poems hinges around the testimony of members of the LDS church in the truth of The Book of Mormon as another testament of Jesus Christ, but more specifically, a factual historical record of the Ancient Americas. That history begins in the Middle East with a lost tribe of Israel led by the patriarch Lehi out of Jerusalem before it fell to Nebuchadnezzar. They then traversed the Atlantic to the Americas where they established a Judaic/Christ-anticipating (not exactly Messianic) religious civilization, like a Christian Aeneas or a New World Noah.

Regardless of one’s testimony, the archaeological record does not provide any abundance of hard evidence of such an origin story of the American people. The genetics of indigenous peoples who migrated to America across Beringia reveal Northern Asiatic origins between 25-10,000 BCE, not Middle-Eastern Semitic from the 6th century BCE. Technologically, the first peoples advanced enough of whom we actually have evidence of traversing the Atlantic to America are, in fact, 11th-century Scandinavians. Mediterranean vessels for many, many centuries before and after Lehi’s time had much too shallow of a freeboard (the distance from the waterline to the upper deck level) for transoceanic travel. Although according to The Book of Mormon, as with Noah in Genesis, Lehi was shown a way by God. For the true believer, the matter is one of faith, not fact.

Illustration of Ubbo’s Hall (the Norse temple to Odin/Freyr in Uppsala, Sweden) as described by Adam of Bremen, from Olaus Magnus’s Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus, 1555.
In 1087, around thirty years after the latest carbon dating at the L’Anse aux Meadows site, the temple was burned down by Sweden’s first Christian king, Inge the Elder.

Unfortunately, the fact of the discovery of the Scandinavian settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland has been hijacked as grounds for a land claim to all of North America by white nationalists of this continent, and as a further means of justifying arguments and actions in the past, present, and future for the harm and eradication of indigenous peoples. This contemporary and ancient darkness is addressed in one of my final poems, “The Exegesis of Jeremy Christian,” centering around a double homicide motivated by racial hatred in my adopted hometown of Portland, Oregon in 2017, a city that has been in the 20th century and now this one a sometimes clandestine, sometimes out loud, northwestern headquarters of the Invisible Empire.

So, at the deepest levels of my ancestry, there are mythic quakes from the stony pantheon of pre-Christian Norse gods; alternative Judaeo-Christian histories; and nearer the surface, craven eugenicist designs of erasure of native peoples by “settling” the American West (and conversion). The last of course isn’t particular to my line, it’s just the unabashed nation-building story of populating an “empty” America. Poetry that will surely outlast my own and might even, rightfully so, render it inert, is being produced by Joy Harjo, Sherwin Bitsui, and many others, against a lineage of oppression and alongside the fractured inheritances of their ancestors. How does a non-native poet come to terms with their past and the shadow it casts over the very reason for their being here at all?

Photo taken of the Oakland Temple (a place my friend Cailie thought was Disneyland as a child growing up in the Bay Area) under a red sky during the SCD Complex Fire between August and September 2020

Final considerations: Mountains and seas

My aim was to have Greco-Mormon stand like a website banner over the amalgamation of my origins: temporal/secular, eternal/religious, matriarchal/patriarchal, life in church/away in school & society. As I get older, geometry and geology, quantum physics, and political philosophy inform a lot more of my work in poetry, and one could use the analogies of layers of sediment or quantum states for the chapbook. The existence upon which the present is built, whether self or nation, only stands because it can do so in a hierarchy of accretion. In this sense, excavations might be more apt descriptor of my verse.

Among the poems of Greco-Mormon are fluctuations in pitch and timber depending on their level: grief, dads, religious violence, paradox, climate change, fertility, and faith. Faith is not a fact, but it is a facet of the lives of people who have shaped and influenced me. In the opening lines of Greco-Mormon, in my poem “The Happy Search,” I distill this with

Faith can move mountains

And so can bulldozers.

These two lines are on their surface a statement about the Holocene and the terror of our earth-shattering Anthropocene, the accumulated mass acts of the industrial reshaping of the surface of Earth, a scale of activity that turns the parable of Jesus into a grim irony. They aren’t against his teaching or the power of faith, but that there are different levels of truth, of ruin, of miraculous occurrences. “And so can” doesn’t nullify the parable but adumbrates it, lining the former image with an absence made by its opposite – brute force.

Temples in the LDS church are called “Mountains of the Lord” and mountains have long been spiritual symbols of the connection between the earth and the heavens. Without the stonemasons of the British Isles, the spires of the Salt Lake Temple would never have risen above a transformed desert landscape. However, the real strength of one’s faith ought not to be anchored in anything material but in consciousness itself, the unseen. A mountain was a fitting multi-layered image to begin the chapbook, and it’s the start of a constant interplay between the heights where I was born (Provo, Utah sits at 4,551 ft above sea level) and the sea to which everything eventually flows, like particles of cremation ash.

I still carry around one strong belief: that successful poetry should speak to you from a deeper level, plucking strings that resonate with acoustic forms behind or beneath our purely sensory-based faculties and culturally informed optics. Poetry that works touches a place where memory and reality mingle, where language can be less opaque and like an agate, more layered and translucent. This belief is based on my own reading, writing, and teaching of poetry. After 35 years of reading, 25 years of writing, and 5 years of teaching poetry, I’m wrestling with myself toward this aim all the time. We might forget that so many science experiments are failures but poetry is no exception. Often enough in both cases, mistakes count and can even produce a different result than hypothesized or expected.

What previous generations of Americans have believed and expected, and especially what Christian Americans of all denominations were or still are proud of, ought to make current generations blush with shame and curdle with righteous horror. How we address, process, and integrate the terrible truths of our lines of blood or adoption is a question that plagues me as the lingering effects of a pandemic virus. I don’t feel I have a choice to deny such an embodied question that exists with my climate grief, pain from the loss of my faith, and dwelling with the sins of my fathers. Has this or does this question lead me to a barren or fertile ground for bringing up poetry? Well, Greco-Mormon by August Janson is one form of an answer.

Greco-Mormon can be published in my Ko-fi store here for $10 (postage included)

September Announcements

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Chapbook

Capping off the multi-month marathon I dubbed “Tuesday’s for the Poetry” as a capstone to the quarter-century of poetry composing that I completed on my YouTube channel (Nights 8-25 available on this playlist, the first seven available as reels on my IG – request to follow!), I am now offering in limited quantity FOR SALE for $5 each (postage included), the remaining 25 copies of my first self-published chapbook, Haiku Composed on an English Tour!

This title was actually featured in one of my first posts on this, my official author website, back in March of 2015. Only 25 of the original 50 were assembled and handbound, so these remaining 25, whose covers and title pages have remained in my possession for over 15 years, are now being printed and staple-bound, waiting for their first readers! If you would like to purchase a copy from me, please Venmo me $5 at Gary-Burns-10 and email me your postal address at poet-educator@garydaleburns.com. Once payment is confirmed, your unique, hand-numbered copy of Haiku Composed on an English Tour will be assembled and mailed!

Substack

As one chapter ends, another begins. My next regular project will be producing weekly newsletters via Substack. I am carrying over the name of the poetry recitation nights, Tuesday’s for the Poetry, and you can subscribe (for free at first – paid subscriptions with added features coming soon!) at https://garydaleburns.substack.com/. The first newsletter is released this coming Tuesday, September 5th. If you are already subscribed to this author website (through email) your subscription has been carried over. I look forward to meeting new readers and writing shorter works of prose on a variety of topics on poetry and more!

– Your poet-educator, G.D. Burns

Renewal Through Loss: Narrative and Value in Lodge 49

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“We are so proud to have had Lodge 49 on our air…This wonderful show gave audiences fresh and unforgettable characters in a world that did not exist anywhere else on television.”

– AMC execs’ statement announcing the cancellation of Lodge 49 two weeks after its Season 2 finale on 10/19/19

1. Is this too little, too late?

The English poet Sir Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016) gave 15 lectures as Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 2010–2015. In one of these memorable deliveries of dry wit and drenched knowledge, Hill remarked upon a theme he returned to many times in his critical work – namely, that we live in a cultural age in which “everything that is of value is thrown away with everything that is trash.” This ‘everything’ in his statement was primarily focused on poetic and literary output, but it might not be a stretch to extend this assessment to film, music, and television as forms of art that are also prey to the wasting disease of our contemporary situation. Most of us are unfortunately wired to assess the value of something new based on the raucous shrill of our social media feeds. At the time of the beginning of this writing, no one could get enough of HBO’s House of the Dragon, and just the other week, the Succession series finale, and next it will be…White House Plumbers? Maybe not, but something else will come along, dressed in gold, and promptly melted down after the gilding tarnishes.

It’s engineered that way. Consider: one year’s hit, last year’s award winners, and this summer’s blockbuster — how many of them remain long in your individual, let alone cultural, memory? One passes and another takes its place. As soon as most of them are here, they’re gone. Critics and advertisers (is there a difference today?) assure us that we live at the apex of television, the height of musical ingenuity, the zenith of cinematic excellence. Entertainment, like many technologically-enhanced activities, rides a wave of human progress. Never mind if you can’t recall or remember that show or film you’re trying to remember to your friends — another will come along to be consumed, buzzed about, and then tossed away to make space for the next, and, apparently, better media than before. Some of us, like Hill, suspect otherwise…

I highly doubt that if he were alive today, Sir Geoffrey Hill would think much of my utilizing his insightful and biting criticism to apply to the passing away of Jim Gavin and Peter Ocko’s Lodge 49 by AMC, canceled in its second season and soon to disappear from Hulu with no DVD or Blu-Ray releases for current (or future) fans. This post is an attempt to sing a song of praise in Hill’s poetic vein — and I do think the seasons we have of Lodge 49 are deserving of it for its narrative, themes, and characters, who yes, have not existed anywhere else on television, as the rich fools at AMC mention above. But more profound than the futile call for the renewal of a dropped show is our need to recognize that we have an obligation to be selective of what we give our attention to, and furthermore, to ask ourselves: can we give it meaningfully? If we are routinely duped by producers of entertainment landfills, by oligarchs of late-stage capitalism, or by the rule of austerity of attention which perpetuates a seen-and-done level of engagement, how do we escape a steady slide into consumer and existential cynicism?

We need to fight for art that sees more in us and asks more of us than plugging in and dropping out. Lodge 49, at its root, honors this struggle.

2. Getting Lost on the critical path

Why the cancellation? Well, steering clear of the Nielsen rating discussion, which is completely fractured due to our ever-mutating viewing habits, and ought to be totally reworked and re-standardized, most critics of the show who thought and wrote about it could be grouped under the “failure of optics” label — Lodge 49 was categorically described (I’m paraphrasing the league of writers at entertainment writing mills like Ready Steady Cut, Den of Geek, and RogerEbert.com) as “a show which cannot be described, but a good show: check it out!” But that’s not a hook. Neither is “quirky” or “fresh” – shit can be fresh. But also, we don’t want good – we want great, excellent, sublime, buzzword, etc.!

When the cancellation statement’s ink dried it really read with an outdated “low viewership” judgment and joined the ranks of Arrested Development and other critical darlings that have succumbed in the past two decades to critical dissonance. How then can we account for this lack of appreciation/engagement and the cancellation of Lodge 49? Was it the temporal fault of our changing climate of television and its (dis)appearance in the wake of AMC’s Breaking Bad and the ascendancy of Better Call Saul? Was it a fault with the show’s writing, with its unabashed focus on material debt, spiritual grief, and the death of the middle class? Or was it a fault of the critics and their own lack of objectivity and shirking of dutiful responsibility to a suckered public?

This author chooses to surmise that the answer partakes in all of the above reasons and that the tangle of quanta is as hole-ly as it is wholly – much like a donut.

“Collage 49”

3. At the donut shop – circular is curiouser

Stepping into the uneven soles of the critics, I claim that what made, what makes, Lodge 49‘s 20 episodes of high, shining quality, glittering out from the dung heap, is the key importance of the simultaneity of person/place in its structure. The title of the show is, after all, based on the quasi-Masonic inspired space where main character Sean “Dud” Dudley enters after his car breaks down just outside of its front door, the very door that the viewer ‘enters’ in the opening credits at the beginning of each episode. Furthermore, he is mistaken for someone else, another young man whom Luminous Knight Ernie Fontaine is waiting for “to do the carpets.” Throughout the show, people mistake each other for others and mistake themselves for who they wish themselves to be – or, who they are aiming to become. Carpets do indeed require cleaning, but Dud is there to clean spiritual carpets – in Lodge 49, these are the ones that have been lain down in its halls by its forbearers, a straight way lost, and in this manner can be understood as a microcosm of the inner life – the place where dreams were made, betrayed, and require some kind of renewal or redemption.

And so Dud, an ex-surfer who had just lost his father in the last year (remains not found, corporeal/spiritual existence unconfirmed) enters, invited to become a Squire in a space/place that he finds immediately familiar and yet completely new. Along with him, we find the common people who are trying to transcend their ordinary lives: Ernie, a salesman living under gambling debts and deadened dreams; Connie, who has rekindled high school love with Ernie but is losing her job with the extinction of journalism; Scott, Connie’s husband, a glorified security guard (harbor patrolman) whose purpose in life is to keep Connie happy while she suffers from an unknown disease; Blaise, a pot salesman/former student of every-which-Way who seeks the real substance among the distillation of his failures; as well as a small host of peripheral characters who make up the gradually thinning dross of middle-class America.

There are teachers, waitresses, and former industrial workers – and what they all share in common (if not the Lodge) is that the future looks bleak under late capitalism’s sky. Many characters work multiple jobs, are baited into pyramid schemes, try their luck at cards or betting horses, or attempt to climb the corporate ladder. What works well in the show with this circular cast of characters is that even though each of them spins their chances on Fortune’s wheel and sees where it carries them off, they suspect that there is something else – something missing. Call it the absence of God, a lack of meaning or purpose in the Universe, or a disgusting yet orderly fly in the ointment of chaos. For some, its name is alchemy. For others, the “True Lodge.” And for others still – Antarctica?

4.

A donut is delicious because of its vacancy in the middle – I’m sorry, but we’re tabling jelly-filled – or, okay, if you prefer, they represent organized religion or other systems that seek to resolve the reality of the something/nothing dichotomy of being. Don’t worry, I’ll stay away from Heidegger here – but as Dante put it (there we go!) in the middle of life, we are in a dark wood and have lost our way. Most characters on Lodge 49 are appreciatively middle-aged, perhaps another reason for its poor reception, and are having to face the reality of being over the hill or soon over it without much to really show for it, materially or spiritually. What Jim Gavin and Peter Ocko put forward is an artful – and simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious – approach to this dilemma of fulfillment/enlightenment: you can’t get there alone.

I believe that this is the real culprit of Lodge 49‘s unpopularity and the reason you should be bingeing it this week. The show subtly reveals the pressure points of the imploding myth of progress, as well as the pure-bred American cowboy fantasy of rugged individualism. It’s a kind of artistic response (the way that T.S. Eliot responds to Dante, and Hill responds to Eliot) to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. A recent article published in Jacobin by Anton Jager details the 20 years since the book’s publication, but the long and short of it is that the isolation wrought by wealth inequality, outsourced workforces, mass suburbanization, and diabolic political gaming has ensured the tearing down of the mythical flagship “American Dream.” The loss of the Dream is saddening, but the Impossible Dream of having and holding real partnerships, based on a True source of love, understanding, and meaningful connection, is more pressing and necessary.

Lodge 49 is simultaneously grieving the loss and dancing upon the postwar grave. Refreshingly, and with great humor and pathos, this dance of death is also for the reactionary counterculture of the ’60s. This is part of the real genius of Gavin and Ocko’s show. That mirage of seduction yet burning at the extreme West of our nation – in the glow of wildfires no less – is remade. Characters begin to recognize, and we along with them, that the real question and mystery of the cosmos isn’t nestled in the individual human heart, by material or spiritual alone, but in the negative space we hold and create amongst one another. There’s no hierarchy, no greater power, no divinity, but for what we renew through our loss. In a time of silent and soul-numbing grief, this show is able to plant a quiet seed of joy and hope that other possibilities of career, community, and family, may yet appear through the smoky veil of the present.

5. In summation…

Watch Lodge 49 before it leaves Hulu on the summer solstice. The timing couldn’t be more ironic. Thanks for reading – GDB

Tuesday’s For The Poetry!

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In recognition of, celebration in, and reflection upon 25 years of writing poetry (once this August arrives), I began two months ago on March 14th to recite the poems of my past on Tuesday evenings, each evening sharing one year of poetry. The first seven nights were on IG Live, my very first time using this service, but because of the limitations of ownership and control available to users through Zuckerberg’s monster Meta, I have moved the Tuesday evening recitations to my YouTube channel, a website that remains a halfway decent “location” for creators and communities on the Internet.

This Tuesday, May 16th, at 8 PM EST, I’ll be reciting the 10th night of poems, these from the year 2008, when I was 22 and 23. Tune in and join a small but growing community of interested persons in witnessing the evolution of a poet, unabashed and unfiltered, the poor compositions and the great, as I openly share the trace of poetic concerns that have developed and made me the poet I am today.

Poem in Chosen Family Zine #5

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This is quite late to be posting, but as this website is the authorial presence of the work of myself, Gary Dale Burns, I must make an effort to update any readers or visitors of this page with the not-so-new-news that in August of 2022, the editors at Chosen Family included my poem “Stacking Firewood in Hudson” in the fifth issue of their music/culture zine that was officially launched this year as a monthly.

Cover art by Hawley Hussey, Rosendale, NY, 1987

The editors are currently on break from publishing their zine, but if you are a mid-Hudson Valley native, be sure to give them a follow on IG @chosenfamilypresents for current news on performances by talented folk and the coming resurrection of the zine in springtime.

Looking Back but Through a Curving Beam of Light that Meets us Again at the Beginning

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We have the green around us grown full and we are feeling lighter, making plans, letting the masks slip (literally, figuratively) while a stronger variant and other strains roll-on. We will all collectively see before the summer ends a brighter light than the past solstice, up ahead, out of our antic haze. We are already buzzing with its glow, resonating with what looks somewhat familiar yet new and strange, and we take it to indicate a “post-COVID” future – while the pandemic’s tail elongates.

We speak of returns, to what was, in order to slow the whiplash; or we turtle inward with hesitation, uncertain if the wounds we’ve sustained will heal properly in the new air. We were excited and scared and we don’t know, we just don’t know – so some of us risk it to live with imagined impunity (never mind the elderly, never mind the immunocompromised). With autumn’s shadow soon to fall on our doorstep, things are even more uncertain – the shadow of the next wave, most likely.

You can deny it if you like, to ease the mind and body, but know that the remainder of this decade until 2030 will be gloomy. It’s the gloom through which you see a light that’s supposed to be at the end of some tunnel – not a tunnel of death, mind you, but a tunnel of life! You know it will be the most trying decade on planet Earth ever lived by our species, and also, that we did NOT pass Year One (or Two) of this pandemic with high marks on any scale of humility or sanity.

But don’t freak out – maybe freak out a little – more so, do not suppose that “normal” is what we are ever heading back to (please Higher Power, let that hallucination pass). We’re actually heading back to ourselves, our habits, our sleep, unless we take some of this wakefulness with us into the new but shadowy atmosphere. It could slip our grasp, this new reality, or, we could disconnect from the dream, going with Dud on this one:

In the past two years, I haven’t posted much on my website, and not much has been published IRL. I’m still grappling with the loss of my father and 5 other family members in the last 6 years. I’ve taught in two schools, soon to be three, but that’s for the application/interviewing process to determine. I’ve written many new poems, but none in the last three months, the longest dry spell I’ve had in my 24 years of the craft.

However, I did write/crafted two zines that were made from a group invitation/prompt with Reciprocal Works, headed by Katie Ford and River Wharton, a real gem of an experience in the rough times. That’s the true purpose of this post, if you got this far – and both are available for FREE to download below – one from the Reciprocal Works website (definitely check-out the other zines!) and one just through a public link to the PDF on my Drive.

Both are copyrighted and cannot be reproduced without my permission, but the permission to take them in and reply back to me with thoughts and feels are most welcome.

Preface to a Work on Masculinity

Trying to Wield the Jesus Stick: A LOST Fanzine

Thanks for reading – GDB

Robert Alan Burns (1959-2020)

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The following post was placed on my Instagram and Facebook feeds a few weeks ago in order to alert friends of the passing of my father, whose memoir I’ve been reflecting on with previous posts on this blog. His obituary is being printed in his hometown paper, The Victoria Advocate, tomorrow, Thursday July 23rd 2020, and I felt it was appropriate to post these words here before continuing (at an unknown later date) the memoir project which I will be finishing in his honor. – GDB

A week ago my father Robert Burns died of a heart attack in Portland, Oregon. He was 61. Yesterday morning my mother and I returned from settling his affairs, or beginning that process, and mourning & remembering him with my sister who still lives in the PNW. We’ve had many health scares in the past decade, each one shocking the system, but none of them really prepared me for this. The whole experience has been surreal and I stayed clear of posting anything until the end of the journey. But now I wanted to share with friends, many of whom may have met him, some lessons I carry with me from his time as my father.

First of all, our relationship was fraught with issues. We did not get along for many years. He formally adopted my brother and I after marrying my newly divorced mother, coming into my life when I was 5. He was overwhelmed taking on parenting two growing sons, then having a daughter a year later into this new marriage, straight out of a first one gone awry. He was often an angry and frustrated man, physically and verbally abusive, making one feel small and insignificant. Also, he stood 6’3″ at his tallest, near and sometimes over 400 lbs., so he was an imposing parent we usually tried to avoid. Times were good when he was employed and on anti-depressants, and bad when he didn’t have either. It was hard to see beyond my own nose about him and it took many years to step back and view him like a bust of frozen music, his past and person in-the-round.

Although a stubborn and prideful man, he was also humble before his God and generous towards strangers. A Christian who often quoted the converted Saul, it wasn’t until after his divorce from my mother that I began to see behind the monstrous figure I had so feared. I found there a man in pain, wounded by abuse he had suffered in his adoptive family, and privately haunted by his financial failures and self-sabotage. I also began to know and understand his vulnerabilities, those in particular that plague the psyches of the Boomers, but which can be entryways into grief and soul work. I listened and was able to forgive, working on myself in the process, and am very thankful we shared the time to do so.

The last decade, after intensive therapy, late diagnoses, and slower life in care facilities, we were able to bond as two adult men with a shared history as father and son. I had never felt closer to him, and I feel like we had more path to walk. He trusted me as a typist and editor for his memoir, which will continue now that he has passed, as he wrote the final pages before his fateful visit to the emergency room. Oddly enough or fittingly before I drove out to the Finger Lakes to meet my mother last Wednesday, I checked my mailbox and found the final pages of his memoir stuffed into the manila envelope I had self-addressed a month earlier. I finally took a hard look at it in the backseat at a rest area parking lot and broke down crying. Tears might be the origin of baptism, but I don’t know what kind of world I’ve now been brought into by them. It will take time to find out.

It saddens me I will no longer be able to call him or call him back, to reminisce about lines of movies and television bits which stuck in our brains, to tell him I love and care about him, or send him another book. I am at a loss for truer words, but I will have his to remember. I hated him, then I loved him – he was my father.

R.I.P. RAB Born: 2/59 Died: 6/20

What It Was Like Grading High School English During COVID-19

G.D. Burns1 Comment

The grades are in, the paperwork signed, the end-of-year meetings attended, and the books and materials needed for summer work taken home. From behind masks at the school building, from a screen at home, I’ve (mostly) said goodbye to my colleagues and my students. It was a strange, confusing, maddening time, and revealed much about what are reasonable and unreasonable expectations of students and parents during a time of crisis.

The last day we were in the building all together was March 13th, a Thursday more than three months ago, the end of a four-day week. Our new superintendent was looking forward to the bonding and professional development of that Friday’s Superintendent Day. But it was cancelled and we were soon navigating an increasingly shifting and complicating line of procedures to follow and rules or guidelines to stick to with attention and alertness. The school building was closed, but we were still employed. It was like following trail posts on an expedition through a wilderness which had suddenly sprung up out of ground we thought was so cultivated and tame. Our sense of direction, muddled, and our patience and values, challenged.

Through it all, we yearned, yearned to return to a paideia-stasis, to imagine this was only a passing stretch of territory. Many of us aimed to “make up” for the lost time in our classrooms with packets and packets of mailed or delivered work, with Zoom meetings day-after-day near the same time they would’ve been in our classrooms, or with an undiminished rigor of instructional videos. The gauntlet brings me to last week, when the deadline for grades was Tuesday afternoon. As I sat through both Wednesday and Thursday until the early morning hours considering, re-considering, calculating, and re-calculating, the fate of some 70-odd 9th, 10th and 11th graders taking English at a rural, upstate, public high school in New York, I wondered: Who or what was this all really for? The reaper hanging his scythe over all of us.

But the grades needed to be, despite what current research shows about the relative value of grades for students. The letters and numbers given by teachers for student work are still so strongly believed in as a true measure of their ability, performance, or mastery by ourselves, parents, and the students. It is one of the more slippery subjects to take up with colleagues and administrators, as this belief is firmly rooted in them as well. As our 4th quarter finished up, marks were entered and students were not a-u-t-o-m-a-t-i-c-a-l-l-y passed into the next grade because of this crisis. They were assigned work, they were expected to do it, were given opportunities for help and support, and it was collected either digitally or from a bus route pick-up coordinated by our principal. For my part, I pulled way back on the final quarter. Only 2 works of literature were read and only 2-4 assignments were given, depending on the grade level. This amounted to roughly 20 minutes of work in English each day.

The results: A little more than half of my students returned some or all of their work, approximately 45 out of 70 students.

Our board of education had the final decision about grading, but after they were delivered a survey sent to all faculty by our supportive superintendent. The majority of us in the high school desired to give a Pass/Fail option based on their academic effort. After deliberating awhile (I watched this live on Zoom) they decided that numerical grades would still be given, and that evidence of learning would be the language employed to answer the question “How are we going to be able to equitably grade students on an individual basis?” Their reasoning was that students who do continue to work through the crisis ought to be rewarded for their efforts, since giving out P/F marks does not either positively or negatively affect the final grade. In this case of course, they meant positively for the students who they were advocating for with their decision – the students who could do the work, do it well, and turn it in, i.e., less than half our students.

But why less than half? Working in a rural school, many students had unreliable Internet connections and/or a scarcity of devices. The specific board response, that all students who show evidence of learning will receive a final grade that can be no lower than the average of their first three quarters, was seen as fair and just and the bottom line when it comes to how we as educators were to evaluate our students. But it did not factor in students, from my reckoning as much as 35-40%, who lack not only the above but possibly at-home support, a quiet place to work, or even the time. At least a dozen of my students were put to work, likely helping their families during the crisis to bring in funds.

Regarding equity, my mentor put it best that the evaluation of a student goes beyond the rubrics in a grading policy. Luckily, another option was given (which I took up) to give an incomplete to a student who turns in nothing, then an additional two-and-a-half weeks to contact their teacher and get work in. I’ve heard back from two parents thus far – and then the grades will finally be given. A measure of success? Perhaps. Or maybe a measure only of the belief that schooling is real in a strange and deadly global mist which is muddling all standards, educational or otherwise.

Tertius Amanuensis: high school, pt. 4

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Bobby Hill Quotes_ QuotesGram.jpg

I believe I can remember the very week in 1997 when Mike Judge’s King of the Hill came on the air and into our living room. My father became enthused, loved the show immediately – his Texas accent all-of-a-sudden came out in imitation of all the characters who had a thick, prevailing drawl which colored their speech, even after the show’s episode was over. He affirmed out loud to us the truth of Judge’s representations of his home state’s proud culture and the people of the region he had grown-up around. He also laughed at the fun with which Judge poked at it all, a fellow Texan, who turned a critical eye on his own upbringing. He had stories to tell us about people “just like” so-and-so, just like the show.

We all liked King of the Hill, especially since The Simpsons had long been part of our staple after-dinner-family-time-at-the-TV. The FOX network knew it would ride that series’ rising wave of adult-cartoon popularity (and hey, it had Simpsons writer Greg Daniels co-running with Judge). Texas was on TV, and maybe I took it to give or purporting to give a window into my father’s past. Of course, this was while we were still living in Oregon, about to move to Western New York, and years before we actually all lived together in the damp, constricting heat of North Houston, among the people who were up until then only characters on television, and stories my dad told. That gave me new insight into what kind of environment ‘Bobby’ grew up in – but Bobby Hill on the TV wasn’t one of my dad’s stories. I knew he was actually one of mine.

Four months into this project, the window of his memoir continues to widen, maybe not much more than the 18″-24″ we had for a boxed television set. The stories are flowing, but I become more unsure of the perspective it’s actually granting me. His two chapters on his high school years are cloudier than the first three chapters – in the sense that they suggest shapes of experiences rather than describe them. They have less detail and are washed out, possibly from his own admission of the beginning of drug and alcohol use.

The relationship between his adoptive father and him heightens and becomes more complicated. For instance, there is a “nemesis” older boy that he is forbidden to fight with, someone who egged him on in intermediary school and who had moved on to Stroman High School, where my dad spent his first two years. So, on becoming a freshman, this boy was a junior, and the antagonism begins again. My dad doesn’t really explain why this is a wish he acutely respects of his father’s, whereas other demands of his time & energy by parental authority are challenged. Later, he does admit, that his physical stature always presented him with “social difficulties” (6’2 and 245 lbs.) but he doesn’t explicitly connect this problem to his family or friends – or his rival, who may just have been intimidated. It is a factor he cites with the opposite sex, whom he figures are intimidated by his size, which causes him to be “friend-zoned.” The memoir is a preoccupation with not receiving love and attention and not being free enough to choose – not that one gets to choose one’s body. What he is really receiving (or not receiving) is unclear, scrambled like snow, the image beneath a kind of phantom of psychic energy…

And here I am, again, summarizing and trying to tease out and explain how things add-up, why connections are or aren’t made, wherein the truth my father supplicates before manifests, or not, by the words he has written via the muse, spirit, inspiration. An excerpted sentence:

I was a miserable kid. I was angry and tired of the life I was living, and I know that not one soul cared. I have to be real and reflective about these matters.

Switching from the past tense to the the present in the second sentence is a chief example of the style throughout the memoir. Someone living with PTSD is often unable to know the one from the other, which is one of three of my father’s diagnoses.

Bobby Hill, in the above captured still, asks his father Hank the question “Why do you have to hate what you don’t understand?” I don’t actually know the episode it is from, as I searched through many screen grabs of Bobby, the very same nickname my father was given as a young man. But as I mentioned above, Bobby represented for me how unknown I felt in the shadow of my father. The man lacked empathy, writes how he was unable to develop it, but does not have much in the writing itself, though he claims that now, at 60, he has been able to develop it. I wish I could see that in this writing, instead of the hate which is turned towards that which he doesn’t understand.

It’s really self-hatred that isn’t addressed, but is the next step after a hatred of the life one is living. Internalized, how can one ever get away from that purgatorial cage? How does one begin to understand another if they are always potentially an object of hatred?

I have finished transcribing and am collecting my thoughts for the final post.

Tertius Amanuensis: intermediate school, pt. 3

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reunion
Worf, you’re a daddy now

 

If you move an average of 2-3 years growing up, one begins to self-identify with a deeper and more transient nature than what our culture prescribes as the aim of one’s material life. After all, to be sedentary is to be rooted, to grow into a place, to invest time and energy and love and devotion to the cause of peace and to the idea of shared, communal space.

If there is a nomad within you where there is for so many others a stolid and principled settler, your movements in life aren’t periods but phases of huntings and gatherings for sanctuary, for shelter, for brief connections and the restocking of goods, before moving on to the next place, and the next, and the next – never quite at peace, never tied down, not really belonging anywhere. The latter was my experience as a child and young man – always the new kid, the odd face, the unknown variable in a formula of constants.

I look up from the pages of his memoir and think how this upbringing provided to me was so unlike my father’s own formative and sedentary years in southern Texas. Now that we are two decades into a new century of upheaval and displacement, I’ve simmered down my own frustration felt about being so transient. To be certain, 10 years of staying put in one place (Portland, OR) helped ease and soothe my sore joints, but I soon picked up again, headed back east, and have worked on myself towards a realization that I actually received some form of grace, an adaptation’s blessing, with my upbringing – though very tired and worn down has it made my spirit. In a world that will become more and more migratory, displacing its people like sand dunes, eroding cities with the oceans’ leaping tides, Global Climate Shift will wear down those who remain sedentary and never listen to that inner nomad.

It is now wearing down our material livelihoods with a current pandemic circling the globe. The planet demands we become more amenable to the compass, deep within. Where will it take us for survival – and how can examples from the past temporarily guide us while we find our way?

Meanwhile in the 1970s…

It feels kind of like paving-over his narrative to give a summary, if that’s indeed what I am proceeding to do in these posts, of those stretches of years which encompass each chapter of my father’s memoir. The preface itself was a sketch of 60 years with a fairly rough chronology; the private, Episcopalian, primary school years have few reminiscences before mentioning quickly intermediate, secondary, college and so on, in very broad strokes, “just the highlights” Bob has said over the phone. What is established in Chapter 1 is the main idea, which is all predicated on “the lack thereof,” from the hypothetical reader’s point-of-view.

These include but are not limited to: The lack of social and emotional skills, the lack of recognition of his intelligence, the lack of close friends, the lack of parents who took him seriously when he reported familial abuse, the lack of empathy, and the lack of trust in others.

As reader number one, I struggle to ask what I am left with, reading and typing out this personal record. Do I begin to find truth in Wordsworth’s line “the child is father to the man”? Something like this is what I tell myself, and I attempt to take a step back. This is like archaeology, and in that discipline, geology must be reckoned with first. There are layers within which the pieces of one’s identity are settled. Those layers have to be brushed away. But also, this is a story of his life, and few else can verify the details, as his parents are dead and friends are far-flung. I have to take him at his word.

It is as if an ancient Trojan were present at Hisarlik with Schliemann on his historic dig, saying “Disregard these other layers and those objects – here, these are the ones which tell my story.” No one but the bard Homer being able to confirm anything from that period, whoever they were, whenever the lines were set down.

I type again – the things which remain are what Bob composes as his life’s theme. He had the gift and power of intelligence, smarter than anyone else around him in fact, and this was used to help his purpose. This purpose, however flawed, fueled his life: he would make his parents as angry as he was, to bring their attention to him (which he claims was only involved in managing their own outward public perception, a symptom of Adult Children of Alcoholics, which is in line with the ACA’s Laundry List) and also, not to fall into the suicidal trap of self-hatred which he was feeling. In the ACA, anger is known as “emotional intoxication.”

My father attempted throughout his pre- and early teen years to shift this tendency to more healthy activities with efforts in scouting, choir, and church service, though each of these things acted as more of an escape. Two natures were at work within him – one that told him what he had was enough and to stay put, the other that he needed to leave Victoria as soon as he was able to, but at least with a high school diploma.

“There are things I have yet to put closure to.”

I believe in what my dad has felt, but I’m critical about his reasoning process and where it took him, which I don’t think he could have predicted. As an adult his own faith in the logic of his intelligence, and the conclusions they brought him to, made my mother nickname him ‘Spock.’ Indeed, Star Trek was often on the television at home, whether it was the syndicated Original Series, the 6 movies with the TOS cast on VHS, or new episodes of TNG, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. Yet, as a child, the Star Trek character I saw most in my father was not Spock the Vulcan but Worf the Klingon. Worf is a complicated but easily flattened character in TNG and DS9. However, many episodes are centered around his chief feature – Worf is a character between cultures, between the codes of his people and his duties to Starfleet. With this came struggle and friction, and it would be true to say that my father was also angry, adopted, and like Worf, from a family that by other’s estimation, ‘lacked honor.’

Because of these and other factors, my father was distant and didn’t show much affection towards me or my accomplishments, seemed bothered and/or upset at most anything my siblings and I did and was prone to fits of anger and depression. Worf’s son Alexander, who is introduced to him about the same age as I was to my father, is so intimidated by him, whom he barely knows him when they first meet. When Alexander eventually comes to live permanently on the Enterprise-D with Worf, he has a difficult time in his new environment and is likewise angry at his father.

I was too, all my childhood, and now, reading his memoirs, I become more aware of the patterns which are passed from the father to the son when there is a true lack of attention and conscientiousness of the self and others.