Megan Burns : part five

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

Poetry is more akin to mantra or prayer than other written forms. A poem is a practice of love.

Megan Burns : part four

Why is poetry important?

I think it’s similar to why belief in something outside the smallness of yourself is important or why meditation is important. Poetry teaches us how to be and how to be in the world and how to see the world clearly. It teaches our bodies and minds how to hear and speak truth and that is powerful. And empowered beings are able to shift experience from suffering to joy. It is a healing modality both in practice and in performance.

Megan Burns : part three

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

That I have to work to make money and do other things that are not writing poetry.

Megan Burns : part two

How important is music to your poetry?

I do most of my writing via channeling, which for me a form of meditation where I try to be clear enough to pick up what is around me that needs to be manifested into words. Most of it is based off sound; I am listening to how a line wants to sound rather than what the line says as far as sense in a thinking mind way because I believe we are able to translate poetry in a different way in our brains than we do an article teaching us a theory or directions on how to build a desk. Poetry enters the heart more than the head and I try to hear the vibrational resonance of how the energy of the piece needs to be performed. I write specifically about music as well; there’s a section in my last book where I deconstruct Wuthering Heights and one of my methods was assigning a Bob Dylan song to each chapter and then reading the chapter listening to the song and writing through that sound and text mash-up.

Megan Burns : part one

Megan Burns is the publisher at Trembling Pillow Press (tremblingpillowpress.com). She also hosts the Blood Jet Poetry Reading Series in New Orleans and is the co-founder of the New Orleans Poetry Festival (nolapoetry.com). She has been most recently published in Jacket Magazine, Callaloo, New Laurel Review, Dream Pop, and Diagram. Her poetry and prose reviews have been published in Tarpaulin Sky, Gently Read Lit, Big Bridge, and Rain Taxi. She has three books: Memorial + Sight Lines (2008), Sound and Basin (2013) and Commitment (2015) published by Lavender Ink. She has three recent chapbooks: Dollbaby (Horseless Press, 2013), i always wanted to start over (Nous-Zot Press, 2014) and her Twin Peaks chap, Sleepwalk With Me (Horse Less Press, 2016). Her fourth collection, BASIC PROGRAMMING, was published by Lavender Ink in 2018.

What are you working on?

I just released my fourth book, BASIC PROGRAMMING, a book length meditation on attachment, family trauma, suicide and complicated grief. I wrote it in two years as an experiment in shifting my own grief and as a program to shift grief in others. The book I just started researching and writing in the last month continues some of that work addressing how addiction works, and not just addiction in the individual at the level of a particular object or behavioral symptom but as an aspect of being human: That we are all born into a world that teaches addiction to suffering as a way of being human. I’m interested in how this manifests in our current culture but also how this intersects with texts like The Upanishads in addressing how do we transcend suffering.