Negative Poetics and Immanence: Reading John Burnside's "Homage to Henri Bergson"

Abstract

"Homage to Henri Bergson" is the lyric sequence by John Burnside (b. 1955) first published in 'The Red Wheelbarrow' (2004), the post-graduate magazine of the Poetry House, St Andrews University, subsequently in 'Goose Music' (2008), the ecopoetic collaboration with Andy Brown. The poem is less than one hundred lines lines long -- shorter than sequences in 'The Asylum Dance' (2000), almost exactly the size and shape of Eliot's "The Hollow Men". The context for this poem within Burnside's oeuvre is threefold: (i) the influence of the poet's interpretation of Wallace Stevens (ii) Burnside's anti-dualist epistemology which endeavours to harmonize reason and revelation via an ecological-metaphysical poetic compound; and (iii) the contour of the shift in output following 'The Myth of the Twin' (1994) and preceding the publication of 'Selected Poems' (2006). Taken in reverse order to develop an ecocritical perspective, I examine the virtue of Burnside's demonstration of what might constitute a pre-categorical understanding of how things are in the world. To assist this, I read negative poetics as an understated form of rhetoric, arguing that language can assist reconnection to nature. Don Paterson has classified Burnside's output as "radiant meditations [upon the] transparent natural world numen" (26); to Burnside, events within the unfolding world offer the possibility of representation, which in turn inspires verification outwith the introspective (phenomenological) and evidential (historical) paradigms.