Featured Poet: John Burgess

Introduction

I've written poetry since I was a teenager, but only got up to the nerve to read at open mikes in 1997. It's really helped my writing. You can tell right away if a poem connects/works when you read it out loud.

I've written and read haiku for years (both in Japanese and English.) The best haiku, I think, transcend by directly reporting on the mundane-the form is merely the given. I stared in the late '90s to count syllables or words in my poems to get to 17 (the 5-7-5 haiku count). I've written some long poems that I've broken and numbered into 17 section. It was OK, but it didn't feel original enough. The poems shown here are all 10 lines long. It's an arbitrary measure I chose to explore.

I came to 10 through the binary idea of 1 and 0 being able to code incredible complexities. It also allows for a lot of different groupings of lines (4-4-2, 3-2-3-2, 2-2-2-2-2, etc.) Th 10-liner has allowed me to combine rhyme, line break and couplets with a strong sense (from my punk days) that you should spit out what you've got to say and get off stage. Like most open-mikers, the poems I first read at open mikes were long-winded-so I've come to this only through experimentation at the expense of people who go to poetry readings. In short, the 10-lines format has helped me focus on the one idea I want to communication-get in and get out.