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February 16, 2022
Kim Burwick's Playlist for Her Poetry Collection "Out Beyond the Land"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Kimberly Burwick’s collection Out Beyond the Land asserts and explores our connections to nature in its nine-line poems.
Joseph O. Legaspi wrote of the book:
"Kimberly Burwick’s Out Beyond the Land is afloat, aswirl, awash in wind, rain, feathers, saints, petals, blue, and echoes. This collection of nine-line poems with their haiku sensibilities form an accumulative imagery of earthly delights and weathered weariness."
In her own words, here is Kimberly Burwick's Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Out Beyond the Land:
Julie Fowlis -- "Alasdair Mhic Colla Ghasda"
I was first introduced to traditional Gaelic music by my husband, poet Kevin Goodan. One night after a long commute home from teaching at three different colleges, we sat in our beat-up Saab and he played for me this traditional Scottish Gaelic Waulking Song. Outside it was snowing. Though exhausted, we sat in the driveway of our rented farmhouse listening to this remote language of the communal “Waulking” song which is the final stage in the laborious process of producing homespun woolen cloth. It’s a song only women sang in the mills when they were carding and working the wool. I didn’t understand the lyrics, and that was okay. I was captivated by the rhythm. It made more sense to me than ever poem I had ever read or heard.
The FatRat & Anjulie – “Close to the Sun”
My son was eight years old when I finished writing Out Beyond the Land. It was the first summer of Covid and he was attending one of the only day camps still running programs. The first week of August he fractured his collarbone. He was in agony. Still, during this relentless time of internal pain and virus-uncertainty, he kept singing this song. Somehow, the refrain’s easy rapture seeped into my head and heart. My environmental thinking was supercharged because of my boy’s constant singing.
M83 – “Midnight City”
Though fairly techno for my taste, this theme song is used throughout the Norwegian Netflix series, Ragnarok – a fantasy drama that deals with our environmental crisis while evoking the Prose Edda. In the series, some teenagers find themselves to be either Gods or Giants while simultaneously struggling with pollution and melting glaciers. The brilliant intensity of the actors coupled with the fierce dissonance in this music helped me with the confluence of the concrete and the metaphysical in Out Beyond the Land. Like many writers, I was trying to get at “the thing behind the thing” and this song was instrumental in that process.
Laleh Pourkarim (known as Laleh) – “Some Die Young”
Iranian-born, Swedish pop/folk star sings, “I will tell your story if you die / I will tell your story and keep you alive…” Admittedly, I was first drawn to this singer because of her amazing immigration story. Born in Iran, the daughter of an artist/journalist who was an opponent of the Islamic regime. She left Tehran at the age of one before fleeing to Azerbaijan. She finally settled in a refugee camp in Tidaholm, Sweden when she was nine. A few years later, she witnessed her father’s death as he saved a woman from drowning. The combination of her lyrics and this personal narrative puts me in a reverent state each time I listen. Without such reverence, I find it difficult to write.
U2—“Running to Stand Still”
I’ve always loved Bono – and this classic from 1987 is on the top of my U2 list. There’s a particular moment when he sings, “You gotta cry without weeping, talk without speaking /Scream without raising your voice” in which Bono’s voice and his lyrics form a double helix of severe earnestness. A flash of rapture that is important and unsustainable. This is what I am after in each poem.
Max Richter – Sleep
Honestly, I don’t have enough superlatives to describe German, minimalist composer Max Richter. In 2018 he performed the first open-air, eight-hour overnight concert – Sleep-- for an audience of people in 560 beds. The final movement would occur at dawn. Richter says, “When we’re sleeping, we’re not absent, it’s a different cognitive state…it would be interesting to make a piece to exist in that space. Not to be listened to but to be experienced.” I can think of no better example for how poetry should be experienced – in and out of different cognitive states. Richter is my guidepost in form and feeling. He’s willing to go so far beyond convention that we emerge reconnected to the world, more comfortable moving between known and unknown spaces.
Kimberly Burwick is the author of five poetry collections, including Custody of the Eyes, also from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her poems have been published in many literary journals and magazines, among them Bellevue Literary Review, Crazyhorse, Fence, the Mississippi Review, North American Review, and Terrain. Burwick resides in Idaho and is clinical assistant professor of creative writing at Washington State University. She lives in Idaho with her husband and her young son.
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