John Burroughs, AKA Jesus Crisis

This article is part of a weekly feature we will be running for the weeks to come, highlighting one of our contributors here at Troubadour 21. It is our hope that we may give you a peek inside the lives of the artists who create the art and the poets who create the poetry you see here on the site.

This week we are featuring a poet out of the Cleveland Ohio area. John Burroughs was one of the first poets we published here on the site, and we hope you find his interview as interesting and informative as we did.

T21: How long have you been writing?

John: Since I was about five years old…. When my 1st grade teacher, Mrs. Hanson, asked each of us to pick one of the (then) nine planets in our solar system and write a paragraph about it, I ended up writing and turning in “essays” on all nine, along with stories about the ancient gods and goddesses after whom the planets were named. I had no idea this was unusual.

T21: How would you describe your style?

John: My style, if such a thing exists, is constantly evolving, a mish-mash of countless influences struggling endlessly against a compulsion to color outside the lines of those influences while remaining highly aware of the importance and usefulness of the lines and refusing to dispense with them entirely.

T21: Who is your favorite poet?

John: That’s impossible for me to answer definitively, as my favorite changes from day to day, from hour to hour, and from mood to mood. I have many favorites and they’re favorites for different reasons. Some of my dead favorites include John Milton, T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, E.E. Cummings, Ted Hughes, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, d.a. levy, William Carlos Williams and Hilda Doolittle. I have too many living favorites to mention — but I daresay a good third of them are from Cleveland and northeast Ohio. A top ten might include: Steven B. Smith, Kathy Ireland Smith, Wendy Shaffer, John Dorsey, Gina Tabasso, Christopher Franke, Cheryl Townsend, Roger Craik, Ra Washington, Kevin Eberhardt, T.M. Göttl, and Dianne Borsenik… but I’ve already mentioned more than ten and am still thinking of other folks I could just as easily include. At this moment (though it’s liable to change at any given time), the poet I’m most infatuated with is Fernando Pessoa. His The Book of Disquiet (translated from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith) is disquieting in its ability to read my current poetic and philosophical mindset. I don’t want to put the book down — but I feel I have to do so every few pages, lest my mind explode.

T21: What is it that attracts you to their work?

John: What attracts me to any poet’s work? It’s very hard to define sometimes. I’ve been known to experience a feeling like “I don’t have a clue why I’m drawn to this person’s work, but — damn it — I soooooooo am.” Other times, it’s easier to pin point — I love a certain poet’s wit or puns, another’s brilliant philosophy, one’s linguistic complexity and another’s ability to convey complexity and profundity in the simplest terms. It really depends on where my head is at any given moment. Pessoa is engaging me with his stunning insight and relentless honesty. A poet who sees things (including him or herself) clearly and can express it all openly, truthfully, and fearlessly is quite attractive to me. But so is one who can spin grand illusions effortlessly and/or methodically, using various literary tricks and/or devices with masturbatory delight. I’m also attracted to poets who can tell me everything without telling me everything — and poets I can chew like gum, over and over, always discovering another nuance to savor and never tiring of their flavor(s).

Photo taken by Dianne Borsenik

T21: Tell us something quirky about yourself.

John: I have preached from a Southern Baptist pulpit, been intitiated by a Nichiren Buddhist priest, served as a Hare Krishna brahmacarya, joined a Wiccan coven, been confirmed as an Episcopalian in prison and played organ regularly for Roman Catholic mass.

T21: Who is your favorite band and what is it you like about their music?

John: This is as difficult for me to answer as the favorite poet question. I could pretty much give you the same response — as long as I changed the names and took away the leaning toward Cleveland. It all depends on my mood and where I am in life. Right now I have Richard Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold in my car’s CD player, so that’s what I’m feeling most at present. But last week it was a mixture of Joy Division, Jane’s Addiction, Meat Beat Manifesto, Bauhaus, Bowie and Beethoven. Traditionally, my favorite albums have been things like Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper — works that are complex, feature diverse styles, tell a story (and tell it well), are intelligent, experimental, somewhat planned while making great use of the unplanned and accidental — works that make me want to listen and think — works I can hear over and over without losing my sense of love and awe.

T21: What are the major themes you deal with in your writing?

John: My work has touched on music, religion, history and pop culture…. But I suppose the biggest theme running through it all is me. Legendary Cleveland poet d.a. levy said “I have a city to cover with lines.” Another Cleveland poet, Bree, said to “write down yr city, give it away cheap.” And I take their words to heart, though I don’t necessarily identify my “city” as any specific geographical location. It’s more a metaphor for my life, my psyche, my unique experiences and ever changing immediate environment — even my computer, website, friends, haters and family. These are my “city” — they are what I write for, on, to, and about.

T21: When you are gone, what would you like the world to remember about you?

John: He cared, he tried, he gave us his soul, and he embraced and identified with ours. Emily Dickinson said,

To see a Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a book it lie.
True poems flee.

I hope to one day be a “True poem” — and to be remembered as such.

T21: Where, other than Troubadour 21, can our readers find your work?

John: Two of my chapbooks, Bloggerel and 6/9, are available for $5 apiece from Crisis Chronicles Press; 420 Cleveland Street; Elyria, OH 44035. You can find links to purchase them through PayPal on my website, www.crisischronicles.com. My third chapbook, Identity Crises (a collaboration with two other poets, Doug Manson and Bree), is available for $5 from Green Panda Press in Cleveland Heights (e-mail greenpandapress@gmail.com or see www.abebooks.com for details). My crisischronicles website features quite a bit of my poetry (particularly in my blog) — and if you still want more you can find it in both print and online journals like a handful of stones, Kaleidoscope, Images, Admit2, Hit and Run Magazine, The City Poetry, The November 3rd Club, CP Journal #5, Inner Voices, Rounding of the Stone, The Hessler Street Fair 2009 Poetry Anthology, Writer’s Digest’s Red Heart: Black Heart collection, The Cartier Street Review and others — as well as forthcoming in Polarity, Mnemosyne, the Angels with Broken Wings anthology, and In Our Own Words: A Generation Defining Itself, Volume 8.

T21: What do you think of the answer to the great question, as expressed by Douglas Adams in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?

John: The first thing that comes to mind is a question from a Grateful Dead song: “What would be the answer to the answer man?” I’m not sure we can ever find a definitive answer to anything — and it’s taken me many years to accept this. But as the motto on a shirt I bought in Maine a few years ago reads, “The journey is the destination.” So I embrace the quest and enjoy it thoroughly, knowing full well that there are probably as many answers to all life’s questions in my backyard as there are in and beyond the stars.

Troubadour 21 thanks John for his thorough, thoughtful and thought provoking responses. Please check out more of John’s work at www.crisischronicles.com