in conversation with Dan Burt

Sasha Dugdale: As readers of your memoir and earlier books of poetry will know, you cleave very close to the events and circumstances of your life in your writing. Does that mean that you began writing late? And is the muse for you an elegiac and retrospective one?

Dan Burt: I began writing late, almost too late. I was sixty-two when I first tried to write poetry, sixty-four before I dared show it to anyone. The answer to the
second is no, my muse is not elegiac.

SD: But the rest of your life up until that point? Was there any hint that you would become a poet? Were you writing at all?

DB: Yes, but only legal and business prose. From when I learned to hold a pencil I wrote nothing remotely literary, excepting two haikus for my undergraduate college weekly. For thirty-plus years after leaving law school in 1969 a pen was rarely out of my hand, but it scribbled nothing Calliope inspired. My compositions all were legal and business documents – memos, opinion letters, arguments to regulators, draft legislation, regulations, briefs and legal pleadings for courts, fiscs and international tribunals, contracts, corporate minutes to implement plans.

Though my subjects when I began to write were people, places, and experiences that had stamped me, lengthening charnel shadows had not driven them to mind. I wrote about my past to understand my present, but forbears and spots of time were not the spur to write.

Impostor syndrome was my muse. After first reading the Romantics at ...