A generous and insightful review of my poetry book 'Paint Yourself' by a local St Werburghs Poet Chris Thirlway You can read it on st werburghs community website
Thanks Chris!
Paint Yourself - Poetry by Tom Burgess
Great places for watching the sun set: Narroways, Purdown and even the Community Garden. Tom Burgess invites us to do just that. He hopes that his poems collected in Paint Yourself may inspire us to gain freedom by engaging with 'the regular miracle of sunsets'. His ecstatic response ranges through countries and philosophies, rich images jostling with demanding ideas, colours with movement. The meditation moves through three stages, from Loosening through Breaking to Binding. At the beginning the scene is set with a newly-told myth of the sun's own history while at the end the poet resolves to carve his own path. A Journey into Sunsets inspires us to contemplate rather than just see and so to join its author on his way.
Edson Burton a wonderful poet (+ other things: More on Edson Burton) Reading from Lyrically Justified -Curated by Shaun Clarke, Featuring rappers, songsters and spoken word artists, Lyrically Justified is the UK’s “Streetwise Bible”. The book is available from Arkbound for £6.99
* Scroll down for my simple poem dedicated to all those at Standing Rock and written to Energy Transfer Partners.* I am extremely moved by the grace and power of the Standing Rock action. As though Wakhán Thánka is channelling these traditions and people - reacting to humanity's destabilising presence by sustaining a resurgence of perennial wisdom. Highlighting how disconnected and blind the prevailing status quo in the West is. I am struck by the parallels with the international brigade's in the Spanish civil war, where people from all over the world journeyed to fight fascism. My hope is that Standing Rock is a peaceful and better version of that, a movement in tune with the environment, championing connection and oneness, one that fuses the best of now with the wisdom of ancient truths. The tone is set by the power, resilience and beauty of these people. I do not want to speak for them but I do want to stand with them.
The world is getting smaller everyday
And anyway
The worst in me is also
Everywhere
So again I stare
At these words of
Expansion
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
Come and hear me perform some of my poems from a collection called Paint Yourself. It is being published by Arkbound - and is part of Launch for various authors and the Arkbound magazine boundless
Mystery isn't something that you cannot understand - it is something that you can endlessly understand. There is no point at which you can say, 'I've got it'. Always and forever, mystery gets you!
Richard Rohr - The Divine Dance
I relished taking part in the floating last week. To be given the reflective space to write in such a novel environment whilst collaborating with people from all over Bristol was a gift. We were swept up and guided by the artists prompts, the whole concept had a pleasing coherence, the in between space of the harbour was a landscape of history yet constantly being made new by the imaginations and activity of those who live here now. If the opportunity were extended to more Britolians The Floating could become a vessel for the writing of a new story, one of a more connected community. It could permanently offer trips though the harbour, connecting people with their City and challenging the existing limits we all place on ourselves, those around us and on the landscape - through writing and sharing and paying attention.
The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead. To love, to be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of the life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.
Thrilled to be joining in with The Floating as part of Bristol Biennial.
I will take part in an evening writing workshop aboard a boat on a journey with eleven other people in the Bristol harbour. Collaborative writing from the boat journey will then be published in an experimental way, along the harbourside, for other people to see over the week of the Bristol festival.
Curated by - Conway and Young with Amy Spencer About the artists Conway and Young have been collaborating as graphic designers and lecturers since 2006, with a long-term interest in the relationship between people, environment and learning - they use design to engage people in discussing and rethinking the social, political and environmental. Amy Spencer is a Bristol-based writer and creative writing tutor.
When I long to write I am least able. The need to condense an experience in words is most illusive the more intense the moment. When the feeling of wonder whirls most westerly, when I am swamped. Over spilling with a gratitude and longing, it is then writing rings reductive. Now, all the goodness of the universe envelopes me and leaves me breathless on a lake district fell. Great Gable to my face, Sca Fell on my back. Tent flapping in the wind, sky still setting stands. Simply stands. Stillness somehow soars. A sense of desire strongly sets in and roughly twists my inner parts. Twists them into the shape of a simple longing. I long for everyone to know love! Against the odds love, unlikely places love, unlovely people love. In an instant I am urgently grateful for the love that permeates my own life. Surrounded by it, I am cradled and rocked within a void. The hills heave a frozen cloak through the sky throwing incandescent frost light ardently. Heated rock that once flowed suddenly seems animated now, not indifferent. Here, I am vaulted by oneness and present in the joyful value of it. In fact for a moment I am connected. It is The Self melted in more.Though I know its the gaps, the scale, the reality of uncertainty that prised me open and created this. I don't seek to appropriate mass meaning out of thin air nor assign a one size fits all answer but instead I want to anchor the personally significant to some kind of bedrock, one I can share. The tension between personal experience and community rushes in with the wind. May I find ways to express the inarticulate. Seek opportunity to unfurl this longing in action. Find the simple faith to enact a beautiful and hope filled expression of life. May I fight for the purity that sometimes swells up within me. A purity living in each of us and waiting in everything, so goes my chosen belief.
Where I worry
Where glory
isn't
When wonder won't
Joy just stands still
Then
In prayer
Stare, at
Myself
No longer
I outraged a few people when I mentioned that I prayed the other day. Have worried a few friends like that too. Anyway, this time in panicked tones they asked me to clarify. It didn't fit. Yes it's true I don't like certainty, have a mistrust of it. A recalcitrant knee jerk is my impulse to the ambition of certainties dominion. I consider it a narrower of possibility. On the face of humanity certainty is too often grimace, too often violence. I am with Ben Okri on this, if the towers of certainty were ever to fall it would mark the triumph of Time over the 'insane arrogance of human certainties'. So it would seem that people often tend to merge prayer life with a certain life, from the outside a pray'er has certainty, or a suspicious desire for the feeling of it. Well the desire is not suspicious but human, that aside I know that prayer and certainty are not synonymous in my own vocabulary, nor am I trying to recruit or borrow existential guarantee's when I pray. No, for me prayer is something utterly different. It is a place I enter. I understand those who are disturbed by the narrowness of the word prayer and its fixed superstitious associations. Speaking personally I feel content to still use the word. For me it is wide enough still, offering us a way of talking about something we all do or rather a place we all go. The transcendent nature of certain moments, that over-spilling, when reaching lunges of undefined desire draw out an up welling of what feels like my deepest self. For me prayer is not about certainty, I ask for nothing and don't expect to be heard. Prayer is the domain I step into to abide in wonder, to transmit gratefulness, tap strength, cultivate kindness, own joy, know peace, tangle with desperation, explore pain and maybe melt into oneness. Before I step in to this place I don't know which of these will flow. I know some might find it unfair that I have appropriated such universal human experience and draped a religious word like prayer on it. Of course meditation is a word that might serve us. We could use mindfulness even, though if we do then it needs to draw from the great traditions of mindfulness across the religions, else the same pitfalls await us and we loose refined insight too. What ever words are used to explore this posture I have described let them all be shared, my word is prayer yet it is something more and it is everyone's. If they are to transform us (enhance community's) uncertainties sometimes need names.
Today I look at you and soar
Your sea rushes to my shore
Crystal eyes shine blue
You glow and shiver energy
I dream of future synergy
Again my love for you is new
I sing clearly each day
To keep depression at bay
Or at least that's what they say
But its them who wear white
Who like it when I fight
Feed me meds n don't give a shite
The smallness of bigotry
Rears his head for the kill
Savages our beautiful reality
Their words ring trill
They rely on the military
To uphold their morality
