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In Presiding Spirits, we explore how a contemporary poet draws upon a poem from the past.  This time, we asked John Burnside if he would write a new poem for us suggested by any earlier poem of his choice.  He chose Seals from Notebook (1970) by the American poet Robert Lowell  (1917-77):

Seals

If we must live again, not us; we might
go into seals, we'd handle ourselves better:
able to dawdle, able to torpedo,
all too at home in our three elements,
ledge, water and heaven - if man could restrain his hand...
We flipper the harbor, blots and patches and oilslick,
so much bluer than water, we think it sky.
Creature could face creator in this suit,
fishers of fish not men. Some other August,
the easy seal might say, 'I could not sleep
last night; suddenly I could write my name.....'
Then all seals, preternatural like us,
would take direction, head north - their haven
green ice in a greenland never grass.

John Burnside described to David Boll how he came to write his poem:

My poem was written as the result of a marvellous synchronicity.  I was thinking about Lowell again, after years of not reading him that much, and I was thinking of this poem, Seals.  At the same time, I was re-reading some of Mark Doty's beautiful, elegant work - and I remembered the passage in Heaven's Coast, where seals first appear.  An odd coincidence.  I wasn't making any connections at a surface level - this was all happening under the surface - and then I took my fifteen-month-old son to the harbour at Anstruther, here in Fife where I live, because he likes to walk to the end of the pier and back, to see the little lighthouse there.  And the circumstances of the poem just happened - as simple as that.  The tide was very high, we saw a seal in the harbour, the first time Lucas has seen one close up.  I said the word 'seal' and he repeated it, gazing all the while at this friendly, doggy face in the water just a few yards away.  That was it.  The poem started to form in my head the same afternoon, and about twenty four hours later it was ready to be written down.  Every now and then, the world presents us with these unexpected gifts.

Another poem about fish

for Thomas Lynch

High tide;
     a seal in the harbour;
the water beyond the walls
                                            cursive and dark.

People come down to the rails
to watch and listen

drawn by a current
that runs to the edge of the world;

the fairy lights and rockabilly
fading at their backs
                                  the smell

of cigarettes and toffee
                                        and the shorefront's
blur of perpetual motion

paling against the fray
of a troubled sea.

And because he has heard the word
                                                             my son
repeats it when I raise him up and say

- pointing across the water -
                                                    'Look:
a seal'

'A seal' he says;
 
                         though not quite matching it
with what he knows from pictures
                                                         not quite

- the dog smile bobbing away
                                                  the air

a lattice of waves and movement
                                                       voices
blurring in the wind
                                   the fairground music

gusting across the water:
                                            sweetness
and light

and never beneath it all
                                        so much
as pulsing at its heart
                                     the shoals of fish

we know are out there
                                       strung across the firth

 mile-deep and still
                                  or turning all at once

beyond what we know
as language
                        and pledged to a moon

they alter
                    with each sidestep
of the tide.

John Burnside then talked about how the two poems are linked, and something of the background of his life and work:

I used to read Lowell all the time. I loved his work - still do.  For the Union Dead is wonderful, as is Waking Early Sunday Morning, and I wish I had the gift of writing poems that spoke so directly to the times, as opposed to coming at things in a rather roundabout way.  The work I love most is the later stuff - especially Notebook and The Dolphin. Single poems tend to stay with me, for example Harriet, born January 4, 1957. 

On a more fundamental level, I love any poem with the sea in it - and Lowell has quite a few of those.

Then a reason for choosing this particular poem is because it seems to say something - to me, at least - about how far a poet can move in a lifetime, from that early Catholic convert state, say, to this more open, more accepting world view.  I was myself brought up in the Catholic church, taught to believe in an afterlife, a heaven for the just, (well, the Catholic just, at least) populated by humans, (because, of course, animals do not have souls), broad enough to admit a wicked profiteer if he repented on his deathbed, but not so wide as to allow Socrates or Lao Tzu to enter.  I loathed this idea.

This poem by contrast is in part about transmigration.  Transmigration is a myth and I think the test of a myth is its beauty.  Or, to use a mathematician's term, its elegance.  What I love about the transmigration myth is not the idea that an individual man becomes a specific seal, for example, but the elegant way in which it tells a fundamental truth - that everything is interwoven, that all lives are one life, and this truth is expressed as a living, continuous process.  Imagine a world where people believed in the unity of all life - truly believed it, lived by it.  Would our environment be more or less polluted, if we didn't believe in a heaven somewhere else, or in a single, exclusive God, and worked on the basic assumption that here and now, this world, is 'everything that is the case'?  I love this poem because I can feel in it a vision of becoming, of flux, which is not only a beautiful myth, but is also an elegant expression of an essentially mysterious, unsayable process.  As Lucretius says, Omnia migrant.

So the poem seems ecologically rich to me, proposing a deep kinship between human and animal.  The most heartening thing that has happened in recent years is that a few poets and critics - the philosophers got there a little earlier - have once again begun to address the subtler and more complex questions relating to dwelling in and being of the world.  A great step forward in identifying the tradition was Jonathan Bate's invaluable book, The Song of the Earth, and now much more has been written.  Ecology is about how we all live, how we dwell on this earth, together, with other humans, with other life forms, with the terrain upon which all lives depend.  It's concerned with the moral basis of life itself.  How do we dwell meaningfully with others, without harming or exploiting them?  And for anyone who thinks this is all woolly-socked 'green' thinking, forget about it.  It makes perfect sense to see everything as interwoven, as one fabric of life.  It isn't mysticism; it's logic.  We reap what we sow, it's that simple.

You ask about any more general influences or affiliations.  I don't tend to think in terms of a few influences - everything is there, all the time, and we chance upon things, not 'by chance' at all, but by some inscrutable design.  If I were to isolate one significant factor in how I approach my work, it would be the Tao Te Ching, a sacred text which will never belong to the Harvard or any other Business School, no matter how hard they try to appropriate it.  Spanish poetry has been an influence.  Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams.  Art, definitely.  I have always loved Japanese art, especially the prints of Harunobu, Hiroshige, Hokusai, Kuniyasu and others.  I love Rothko, New York School art.  I love the great Norwegian painters, Munch, Sohlberg.  The photographs of Raymond Moore, of Richard Avedon, of Carleton Watkins and many others.

If I claim any specific affiliations, I think it would be to a number of American poets - Mark Doty, as mentioned above, Allison Funk, Linda Gregerson, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Mary Oliver and quite a few others.  And, of course, Thomas Lynch, to whom this poem is dedicated, and from whose work I have so much more to learn about the possibilities for generosity in the art of writing.

As for myself, I live on the coast of Fife, and this is the most important thing I can say about myself.  I sometimes travel to other places - I wrote quite a few poems in the sub-Arctic over the summer, in a place called Kvaloya - and this is also important in how I work.  All my writing - poetry and prose - comes, first, from the place in which I find myself, and from the day to day discipline of dwelling. I started writing in the mid-eighties, if memory serves, but my earlier work doesn't really interest me.  I think I have learned a little, and am moving on.  I have worked in various jobs, but they were only jobs.  Even when I worked in the computer industry for ten years, as a systems designer, it was just a job.  Writing is my lifelong discipline and, though I constantly fail to write what I had hoped to write, I am fortunate to have found it.