Clint Burnham
Biography
Clint Burnham is a Vancouver writer and teacher. After being denied entrance to a creative writing program in the 1980s, he began to study poetics. After attending the New Poetics Colloquium in 1985, he began to study poetics. His first “chapbook” published was a critical study of Toronto small press publishing. His second “chapbook” published was divided into two autonomous texts: a series of short bits of dialogue, and a series of descriptive, propositional statements. These were based on a three-year period in his youth in which he lived on a military base that was divided between domestic and foreign colonizers. His first “spiney” book was published in paperback and hardcover simultaneously and was a study of a prominent theorist from the foreign colonizing nation and was published by a university press. His second “spiney” book was published as a paperback monograph and as part of a five-part hardcover volume simultaneously and was a study of a prominent poet then living in the domestic nation-state but originally from another foreign colonizing nation (by now in decline, also a minor participant in the military base mentioned above) but now living in the first, world-historic, hegemonic, Imperial (if not imperialist) foreign colonizing nation, and was published by a private publishing house. His first “spiney” book of poetry was published by the same private publishing house, where a friend he had known since graduate school was an editor. The cover photograph of this book, taken by his companion, is a now impossible perspective on a skid row building in the city in which he now lives, a perspective now impossible because of a social housing project named after a city in the foreign colonizing nation. He has often visited that foreign colonizing nation: 14 times since 1993, and freely admits to having read poetry and critical theory published in and/or written by citizens of that foreign colonizing nation. He also has visited other foreign colonizing or formerly colonizing nations, often to look at cultural products those foreign colonizing or formerly colonizing nations have taken from their former colonies or just countries they happen to have sent cultural agents to. He has lived in three different residences in the city in which he now resides (see above). His present residence is in a “house” built in the previous millennium and surrounded for the most part by buildings built in the previous millennium but increasingly buildings built in the present millennium, such as a grey and black 15-unit building across the street, are appearing as the region is undergoing one of its periodic “booms.” As in “boom ‘n’ bust.” When first arriving in this city he was able, because of the unfamiliar dialect many English speakers spoke, he was able to write fiction that drew upon said dialect and its contortions and permutations and which, combined with a fresh vista and the circumnavigations and circumlocutions in which he immersed himself, and a lack of steady employment, he was able to write said fiction, which was published in two forms, first, a collection of stories that drew for its title on a “soft” form of hazing/torture he had undergone while a member of the domestic nation’s military forces, stories that also drew upon oedipal memories stirred up by his mother’s recent death, but mostly that drew upon the aforementioned dialect and contortions and permutations and circumnavigations and circumlocutions, which is to say the content arose out of the form; while writing these short stories he also wrote a “novel” the first summer he arrived here and proceeded to lose it for ten years until his companion, looking for a bootleg copy of a “Landscape Manual”, found the manuscript and it was duly published. The photograph on the cover of this volume was a collaboration between two local artists and showed a “mix tape” which, because of the eclipse of said technology, has led some readers to suppose that he had “taped” conversations featured in the novel, which is true only in an imaginary or allegorical sense. His most recent work of poetry features a wide range of work that had originally been “published” in such forms as posters stapled to telephone poles in a light-industrial neighbourhood, a light-industrial neighbourhood in which he lived with his companion until their child was born in the months before 9/11, 9/11 being the week that he and his companion and their child moved into their present residence, although not exactly, as at that time (beginning the week of 9/11) they lived on the top floor of the house and, after 18 months, they moved to their present location on the main floor, facing in one direction the black and grey 15-unit building built in this millennium, and actually, at this time of writing, not yet open for purchase, perusal, or speculation, although a large-ish sign declares it would open the month before the time of this writing and in another direction a renovated building also completed in this millennium (the basement suite having already been bought and sold once and now on the market again for ca. $600,000 and built by the same company which built the black and grey 15-unit building); other forms in which work in that recent collection of poetry was originally published include as haiku mailed one a day for a month to a local poet, in online and small venues, in a university-published journals, etc., etc.
Sample Work
“AMIIGAF,” from Rental Van (pdf)
“Chicken Fallujah,” from Rental Van (pdf)
“Dim Son” (pdf)
External Links
Aaron Tucker on Rental Van (on the Danforth Review)
“The Reification of Theodore Wan” (at artfiles.ca)
“The Return of Postmodernism” (Western Front)
“New Presses, New Voices” (in the Vancouver Sun)