Spotlight On Writers
Michael R. Burch
- Where do you originate from?
I was born in Orlando, Florida, in 1958, to an American father, Paul Ray Burch Jr., and an English mother, Christine Ena Hurt Burch. My father was in the Air Force and his next assignment was Thule, Greenland, where dependents were not allowed. So I and my mother flew to England, where we lived with her parents. I grew up speaking with an English accent, long since lost. Both my sisters were born in England, where we lived for years. We were a globe-trotting family, living in Orlando, Florida; Mattersey, England with my grandparents; Gainsborough, England after my father returned from Thule; Lincoln, Nebraska; Nashville, Tennessee; Roseville, California; Wiesbaden, Germany; Goldsboro, North Carolina; then Nashville again, where we finally settled down and I now live with my wife Beth and son Jeremy.
- What do you cherish most about the place you call home?
For me, home is where I can always go, will always be accepted, and will always be welcomed. Because I traveled so much in my youth – a new home every two years on average – and was always having to leave family and/or friends behind, I came to value the stability of a home perhaps more than people who take it for granted. I remember finding the departure platforms of train stations and airports incredibly sad, even the broken white bars on highways and interstates, disappearing behind my car when driving long distances. This sadness shows up in a poem I wrote:
THE PAIN OF LOVE
The pain of love is this:
the parting after the kiss;
the train steaming from the station
whistling abnegation;
each interstate’s bleak white bar
that vanishes under your car;
every hour and flower and friend
that cannot be saved in the end;
dear things of immeasurable cost …
now all irretrievably lost.
The title “The Pain of Love” was suggested by an interview with Little Richard, then eighty years old, in Rolling Stone. He said someone should create a song called “The Pain of Love.” I wrote the lyrics, which are still in need of a composer.
- What ignites your creativity?
I felt very lonely, depressed and alienated as a boy, like an alien who woke up and found himself on an inhospitable planet. But I was a reading prodigy; I tested off the charts and in the fifth grade my school created a reading class of one for me. While my classmates were reading normal fifth-grade fare, I was devouring the classics: Austen, Dickens, Hardy, et al. In addition to the books I read in school, I would go to the library, check out eight books (the max), read them in a few days, then repeat, repeat, repeat. When I discovered poetry by reading independently around age 12 to 13, I found something magical about poets who could make me feel things with just words, nothing else. I decided that I wanted to become an “apprentice warlock” at age 13 or 14. When I didn’t immediately rival Shelley and Keats, I destroyed all my poems in frustration and disgust. But I didn’t give up and 74 poems that I wrote in my teens have been published by literary journals, which may be some sort of record. I now have over 11,500 publications including poems that have gone viral, but not self-publications, which would put me closer to 20,000. I would say my creativity is ignited by reading so much poetry, and wanting to create similar magic, using nothing but words.
- Do you have a favorite word and could you incorporate it into a poetic phrase?
When I was young poet in my early teens, my two favorite words were bright and pale and I didn’t think a poem was finished until I had worked both words into it! As a matter of fact, I wrote a poem making fun of myself for my fetish:
PRODUCTION PLAN
Bright and pale, bright and pale!
Everything is bright and pale,
or so the lovelorn poets wail.
Everything is bright and pale!
Bright and pale, bright and pale!
How can perceptive pupils fail?
The world is coal or else it’s shale.
Everything is bright and pale.
New or old, hot or cold,
all the world must be steamrolled
into one ball that’s hastily flung
into production: diamond or dung!
NOTE: I am poking fun at my younger self in this poem. I am the “perceptive pupil” of the pun.
- What is your pet peeve?
My pet peeve is rules. As soon as someone tells me poetry has “rules” I deliberately break them to prove the “rules” are really just options. The alleged “rules” of poetry are mostly nonsense:
“No ideas but in things.” – NONSENSE
“Fear abstractions.” – NONSENSE
“Poetry requires concrete imagery.” – NONSENSE
“Poetry requires metaphor.” – NONSENSE
“Avoid didactic speech.” – NONSENSE
All these nonsensical “rules” can be proven nonsensical by reading the great soliloquies of Shakespeare and Milton, and by reading the magnificent direct statement poems of A. E. Housman, some of them entirely sans images and metaphors.
- How would you describe the essence of Michael R. Burch?
Now that’s a tricky question. I don’t know that I’ve ever thought about my essence, much less tried to define or explain it. I would say that my struggles with depression as a boy, teenager and young man left me very sensitive and sympathetic to suffering, and wanting to express that compassion in poems. Also, to persuade readers not to create unnecessary suffering for others, in such an already-difficult world. This led me to write and translate many poems about the Holocaust, the Trail of Tears, Hiroshima, the Palestinian Nakba (“Catastrophe”), the plight of the homeless, school shootings, etc. I’m not sure that compassion is my essence, but it’s a big part of who I am and what I do.
- Spotlight On Writers – Michael R. Burch - May 10, 2025
- Crocodilian, Shining Bright - March 29, 2025
- Late Frost - December 15, 2024
