What are your thoughts about reading your poetry in Cobourg at the POW! Festival?

I am very excited to be reading at POW in Cobourg. Every now and again through the energy of a place and its people, who knows what comes first in that equation, something of major import for the arts happens. Maybe that place is Stratford Ontario, or Niagara-of-on-the-Lake, or maybe Glyndeborne in England, or the great reading or book festivals of the world, Dublin for example, but every once in a while a place and its people rise to create something that from that initial burst of energy, idea and need, grows into something important for the country and the world. I see Cobourg that way. It started with people commited to poetry and writing, and it is growing. I don't know whether people in Cobourg are aware of this or not, but the place is talked about throughout the country as a centre for poetry. But I must say you are very fortunate in having someone who cares for all this so passionately that it is continually fuelled. James Pickersgill is someone who is putting Cobourg on the map, embedding it in the literary landscape. I am flattered to be asked to participate and I wouldn't miss it for the world. This festival announces the Cobourg is a centre of creativity and energy.

What are your thoughts about participating in the POW! Festival
as a Poet In The School?

I am very pleased to be asked to speak and read and write with children and teens in the schools. The love of poetry should be fostered in youth. young people and children are receptive emotionally and are close enough to the roots of our being to appreciate, rhythm, beat, words and thought, and emotion all combined. They live in a world of popular culture that plays on their natural abilities and likes. Many have a passion for rap, spoken word etc., and place for all that in their lives. It is a good starting place for an even deeper love and appreciation of what words and the music of words can do. And quite frankly, they are embued with energy and optimism.
I enjoy being with them.

We are excited that POW! will function as a launch for your brand, spanking new book. Please tell us about your book and also a little about any other books you've had that "saw print."

What a happy set of circumstances. The POW festival does coincide with the launch of my new collection, The Grammar of Distance. Each collection seems to be a new departure, a new investigation, a revealing. In this book I look at relationships, father to son, mother to son, lover to lover, father to dauhghter. But I also examine the universal themes of history, an examination of who we are as human beings, meaning in terms of our place in the world. And some of these poems lean towards the metaphysical too - what is our relationship to time, to the eternal. But as abstract as all that sounds, I believe my work is accessible. I am never deliberately obscure. I want people to "get it". Though remember, this is poetry and poetry is not philosophy or story. Poems are encountered. It is what they become when translated by the audience or the reader that matters. It is what they become for you that matters.

As for other books, my last book, The Stone Skippers, was published in 2007. It was launched in Australia, the UK and Canada. I was very pleased with the reception it received. People have been very kind. The reviews have been generous and it was nominated for the Relit Award in 2008 for the best book of poetry published in the previous year by an independent press. It will be re-printed later this year. My only other book was a chapbook published in the UK called A Confession of Birds. So Grammar of Distance is my third collection.

At POW!, do you plan to solely read pieces from your book? Do you plan to read other work as well?

Mostly I will read from my new book. But poetry collections always come out a long way behind what a poet is working on now. I have some poems from another collection, A Weight of Bees, that I am working on and may try on my own ear by reading them for the POW audience.

How would you describe your poetry?

It has been described as "hard and succinct". I think that means that the poems are somewhat emotionally courageous. Well, I do try to go to those places that many are afraid to go to. Di Brandt says of my work that it is impetuous, inspired, wild, unadorned, unrepentant, desperate…eloquent… But the poems are not simply expressive of emotion. I would regard that as failure.

I suppose poems, for me, are a matter of life and death - at the very least, an act of utter immersion. Certainly I see them as a journey to the self's deepest places, and some of those places are dark indeed. I guess I am at that place where I know no one can save me from my life.

But they are philosophical as well. I ask the big questions too. But I regard the poems as conversations. I really am just trying to order things, experience and feeling, and trying to understand why we are here and who and how we are with each other. Art orders and reveals.

Maybe it is better to let others speak about my work. Jeanette Lynes, recently nominated for a Giller prize, writes "I admire the refusal to shy away from emotional excess, and the willingness to embrace all manner of the heartland's hazards and risks. I admire equally the willingness to tackle, head on, the sheer inescapable fact of our aloneness in this world, and our inevitable fallibility as humans - our brilliance at messing things up. Despite this, Burgham's vision is one of compassion, and poetry for him, is a seeing beyond the limits of our poor decisions." I do see my work that way, that ultimately it is compassionate.

Al Moritz writes that "the poems have a hardness and succinctness. This concision, leanness and directness, brings out the emotion in them, the sense of distance and space and wind-sweep both emotional and imagistic, wonderfully well. These are poems that stay with one" It seems self-serving to quote him, but all I want is for the poems to matter to someone else - "to stay with one". When they do, I am pleased and know they must hold some value.

When did you start writing poetry and what prompted it?

I was always interested in rhyme, rhythm, story. Even as a child. My grandfathers and great grandfathers were poets - loved poetry, so it was something natural to the house. I tried to assemble my first book when I was nine. I worked hard at it when I was in my teens. And I loved reading it for where it took me in my mind. But what initially prompted my love of it was the music of it. Later it was what it could reveal. It's power. And what it could do to and with memory and emotion. Poetic logic and meaning always seemed to embrace what was important and revealed something of what mattered.

I put it on hold during my life as an editor and publisher in Scotland and Canada; then as a developer of medical education and information programs. I was a business man supporting a family of three daughters. There was no time to sit down to the task of writing. But a business failure, and a related failure in my faith in my fellow man, prompted the need to write. It was all I thought of doing and could do as a rescue from that time. So for ten years now it has been my focus and my obsession. And I can't leave it even though I find the writing life a hell of a way to live. That's not a comment on financial compensation by the way. That's a comment on the nature of writing. It is hard. It is by far the hardest work, both mentally and psychically, that I have attempted. And socially it is isolating.

What inspires you to put pen to paper / fingers to keyboard?

The need to understand our place in the universe. The need to understand life in the face of inevitable death. The joy in playing with words and sound and rhythm. The fascination with what gets revealed. The mystery of the process. The sense of not being in control but of being a spectator, in some way, to something bigger than oneself. All these things inspire me to write.

Can you describe (a little) your writing process in creating a new poem?

Often it will come from reading a poem and being inspired by an image. Sometimes a painting, an emotion, a scene. It can come from anywhere. Sometimes a line just appears in the mind. But once the writing starts…as long as you can keep the ego and the self out of it, things begin to appear as thoughts, ideas, inklings, oddments. And they are embodied in images or by words. And then once you have something that looks as though it matters, the real work starts.

I can write that first iteration in an hour or an evening or a weekend or a week. But it takes months to make it right. And sometimes over hundreds of hours and choices of words, and feelings and ideas it changes and shifts and becomes itself. In the end, it is just hard industrial labour. Nothing romantic about that. It is just choices and decision-making over words and commas. And the risk is that nothing will come of all that at all and the thing is scrapped. There is nothing romantic about writing poetry.

The POW! Festival is built on the notion that poetry should not be relegated to an existence as "a niche art form" that the average person doesn't care about.
How do you respond to that?

Great. I am happy that POW! is serving the community and the world in that way. Poetry matters. And it matters to everyone if they knew how to approach it…or that it can be approached. The problem comes from the experimental poems and those that write obscure stuff deliberately. The problem also comes from those who pretend it is poetry when it is mere self-expression. Self-expression doesn't interest anyone but the person who is expressing it; whereas art is beyond that. It is the manner by which we can approach the meaning of our existence, the nature of our existence.
In some cultures it is recognized by the working man or woman as belonging to them. We need to make that true of Canada. Poetry doesn't change the world or feed the poor, but it does inform the inner landscape of the heart.