The title of this collection of essays refers to Osip Mandelstam’s famous phrase - “the noise of time” and the book opens with Mandelstam, whose criticism of Stalin’s regime led to his imprisonment and eventual death. Burnside emphasizes poetry’s public role not so much in promulgating specific political positions, but in articulating an inclusive vision of “world culture.” I had expected this book to be more of historical survey but instead, it is a highly personal selection of readings, emphasizing the theme of poetry as a way of articulating a hopeful vision for humanity:

“These poets, to whom I have had some repeated recourse, are rarely optimistic, but they are, nevertheless, creatures of hope, and this is what makes even the least political of them actively dissident, in the best sense of the word. For, unlike optimism, hope is always an act of courage, even when it is contradicted by every rule of logic. Add to this that optimism is a personal concern, while hope is general – and truly inclusive. Optimism speaks of the individual or her kin; hope speaks for the species as a whole.” (9)

Burnside further argues that poetry is a way of making sense of the world:

“And though poetry as a discipline needs no external, and certainly no societal justification (any more than astronomy, dance or singing with others does), I will argue that, as music-making is a way of making sense of noise, of giving noise order, so poetry is a way of ordering experience, of giving meaningful order to lived time.”

Burnside’s selection of poets ranges from the canonical (Rilke, Frost, Levine, Heaney) to the obscure. The chapters occasionally focus on single poets but they are more often geared toward themes, such as the chapters on animals, marriage, translation, children’s verse, or music.

One of the chapters that I found most interesting was the chapter on Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas, which explored the difficulty of these poets, or the ways in which their poetry approaches the limits of what can be expressed. In reference to passage from “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower,” Burnside writes:

“What Thomas is saying, in short, is that he is capable of utterance, but will not descend into mere exegesis. He will not bend the given world into some logical, or merely pleasing, shape; he will not seek an easy resolution, poetic or otherwise; he refuses to make the poems more accessible, or more pleasing as surfaces.”

From a twenty-first century perspective, it’s hard for me to see Dylan Thomas as particularly inaccessible. In the intervening years we’ve had Charles Olson and Steve McAffery and L=A=N=G=U=A=N=G=E poets and every manner of poet that refuses to bend the world into a logical or pleasing shape. It’s curious to read Burnside’s footnote, which quotes reviewers who railed against Thomas’s cryptic turns of phrase.

In this discussion, Burnside also highlights one of the most famous instances of the debate between poetic obscurity and poetic populism – the correspondence between Hart Crane and Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry magazine. Crane’s letter to Monroe is a fascinating document, in which he defends his poetry against the charge of obscurity:

“When we shed our schoolroom approach to the poem and experience it fully, with all our faculties, rather than searching for its ‘meaning’ as if it were an instruction manual or a shopping list, we shall begin to appreciate fully an art form that is, in Randall Jarrell’s words, ‘life itself.’”

While this book lost a bit of momentum for me in the middle, as the chapters started to feel a bit more miscellaneous, I found Burnside’s readings generally sympathetic and compelling. I liked the way the author stitched little bits of personal anecdote, fragments of an unwritten memoir, alongside his readings and reflections. I wished for more of the personal at times, or a better sense of how these poems impacted the author’s own craft and thought.

Burnside’s mention of Dylan Thomas’s “Poem in October” evoked a memory of my own. Chicago, 2003. It was at this period of my life that I considered it one of my goals to get my friends to make art. I had thrown a going-away party for a friend, DD, who had slept over on the couch. In the morning, the sun was streaming in the windows, I made coffee and for reasons I cannot remember, I put on a recording of Dylan Thomas reading his poems. DD woke up, smoked some pot, and started painting an impressionistic representation of the apartment building that I lived in on a slat of carboard. Above the top, he painted the words that were intoning over the speakers, “Brimming with whistling blackbirds.” Something about the juxtaposition of the morning light, the hangover from the night before, the apartment building in Ukrainian Village, and Thomas’s words inscribed across the sky has always remained lodged as a poignant memory. I kept DD’s painting and I think of that morning before he went back to the West Coast as a strange moment just between two segments of my life.

The Music of Time ends with a return to the argument that poetry constitutes a kind of “world culture” that provides the tools of hope and connection despite the ever-present wounds of historical injustice. The discussion of Kim Cheng Boey, Joy Harjo, and Terence xwHayes in the final chapter argues for a cross-cultural poetic tradition that acknowledges and transcends the forms of exclusion that have so often accompanied the notion of tradition. Burnside’s book makes an impassioned case for poetry as a way of making meaning out of the chaos of everyday life.