Poem in Memory of Poet Andrew Burke

 Belated Elegy

You and I were never close, and likely

thought we knew each other better 

than we could. But we were

familiar with each other, and earlier

spent time in company.

You attended our wedding dinner.

We visited you. In the later

days of my addiction, you were

‘on call’ on two or three or four

occasions. You stayed with AA forever. 

Once an addict... remember.

We published your local poetry

collection, Pushing at Silence. And after

we escaped to Cambridge, there

was an exchange of emails about poetry

and form, about where prosody

might make meaning. 

                                             We can barely

have drifted apart when we were

never really alongside each other.

I felt you weren’t there when I was publicly

under pressure — a bet either

way, rather than ‘all in’, but really

I was searching for something

you were in no position to deliver.

Mea culpa. The lateral drift continuing.

But there was much in common.

And there were moments of wry

humour. I valued your poems celebrating

the everyday, jazz, poetry, the earth... and simply

being. I’ve said little since your passing, 

and now this demi-hymn...

to a friendship of sorts, but of a very

particular sort, wouldn’t you say?

Or would you respond in some jazzy meter: 

read slower... read slower... read slower.

John Kinsella

and see Tracy's elegy for Andrew here.

A farewell memory for poet Andrew Burke

 By Tracy Ryan

Andrew Burke (left) in 2008, with Tracy & John

Nineteen-ninety

in memory of Andrew Burke

 

 

Frank: you were always that.

 

I’ll even admit things treasured but

never shared: the way my late ex-

husband nicknamed you Balzac

and it stuck till I almost said it

to your face, not because

you were prolific, though you were,

but for the half-walrus moustache

you had back then, & the nineteenth-

century boho longhair look,

though it was poetry, not prose, for you.

 

Now: the day I think we first really met:

Three teetotal poets out on a fortnight’s

well-paid country tour of schools, dodging

teacher happy-hours, though you’d

always sit over lemonade in a pub,

letting the dark side down,

trashing the writerly reputation.

 

Collecting me at Midland station, you

laughingly noted your then-wife had

asked around about us beforehand

(me & E.)

& been reassured I was pregnant

& E. was over sixty —

let’s not even gloss it.

 

But it was never like that.

 

On the wild drive through the Mid-West you played

track after track from your full set of The Poet Speaks,

E. upset & sullen in the back seat saying turn it down,

Plath is just not poetry; me, not long turned twenty-six,

wanting those poems blaring on repeat. Yee-ha.

 

You telling me off for over-and-over loud

Sinéad O’Connor on the hotel jukebox,

rooms damp and the tea-kettle full of ants,

asking nonetheless to read the MS

of my first book, and I let you, frail self

you slashed through with that rhythmic biro

till I heard jazz not mine, & arrogant, took on none of it.

 

But what I did learn from you: it mattered —

the way you wrote all detail, each day of the journey,

into your poetry, reprocessed every minute,

poems a mode of living,

regenerating.