Avery Burns’ latest poem In the Margins is an accretive sequence dealing with the unmentionable. The poet actively resisted writing a poem following both surgery and later radiation treatment for cancer. As time passed, the initial push to write to poem came from a vivid dream conflating a faceless doctor discussing cells being “in the margin” post-surgery and a book on cancer simply titled One. The shadowy mimetic structure of the poem evidences the poet’s ongoing lyric preoccupations of minimalism and vocabulary restraint.
Drawings by Giulio Lacchini.
Avery Burns’ latest poem In the Margins is an accretive sequence dealing with the unmentionable. The poet actively resisted writing a poem following both surgery and later radiation treatment for cancer. As time passed, the initial push to write to poem came from a vivid dream conflating a faceless doctor discussing cells being “in the margin” post-surgery and a book on cancer simply titled One. The shadowy mimetic structure of the poem evidences the poet’s ongoing lyric preoccupations of minimalism and vocabulary restraint.
Drawings by Giulio Lacchini.
Avery Burns is a poet, empty nesting in Lafayette with his wife, Rhodesian Ridgeback and eight chickens. After moving to the Bay Area in the early 80’s, he threw himself into the poetry scene with gusto, including editing a magazine in the 90’s called lyric&,co-editing a magazine in the ‘00’s called 26, and running the Canessa Park Reading Series in San Francisc for 15 years. Highlights include getting a blurb from Robert Creeley for a book that was never published and sitting zazen at the Hartford Street Zen Center in order to meet poet/monk Philip Whalen. Avery’s most recent book is In the Margins (Magra, 2022). For the past several years he has been posting minimalist sonnets on Instagram #averyburnspoet almost daily.
