20th August 2009

Soulfulness is not the first term people associate with attorneys. So how does one go from being a nationally prominent attorney to becoming an up-and-coming, internationally known poet?

It helps, naturally, if you have a modest nest egg and drop out of the limelight for a while; but as most people would undoubtedly acknowledge, the basic skill sets for those professions reside at opposite ends of the intellectual spectrum. One requires strict conformity to society’s written rules, interpreted through careful, dispassionate, logic.

The other has at its core a willingness to fearlessly explore the dark continents of the psyche. It requires a vision to unearth and subsequently share whatever secrets or profundities that might be lurking in the innermost recesses of the soul.

To read former attorney Dan Burt’s words then, or to hear them spoken in his own voice, is to leave no doubt: here lies the true soul of a poet. And for that to be the case, it must be that, perhaps with his own spirit not fully engaged in the deception, that he just masqueraded for a time as a lawyer.

“That is absolutely right. Very perceptive,” he says. “I haven’t been a lawyer for 25 years. I did everything I could to avoid it.”

Mr. Burt, who divides his time between homes in London and Bar Harbor, is oft times referred to on Mount Desert Island as the owner of the imposing home with a tower of windows, looking out over the sea on Schooner Head.

“I really did want to change the world when I was young. But now I pretty much keep to myself,” he says.

While Mr. Burt sees his writing as a purely personal exercise, his work has begun to generate some excitement in poetry circles around the globe. He has been published several times in PN Review, which has been described as the most authoritative and entertaining poetry journal in the English-speaking world. His latest exposure comes in the July and August 2009 issue, in which reviewer Elaine Feinstein calls his work “strikingly ambitious.”

She writes: “His language is terse to the point of brutality; the verbs ferocious, often monosyllabic; his core conviction, formed by the history of the 20th century and a lifetime in a non-literary world, is of ‘the curtain falling on the Enlightenment.’”

In 2008 Lintott Press of Scotland published a collection of 21 of Mr. Burt’s poems in a book called “Searched for Text.” It is available at bookstores locally. Mr. Burt also has recorded a CD of his work in his own voice.

Born in south Philadelphia in 1942, Mr. Burt worked with his father, a fishing boat captain, and, for a time, in a butcher shop. He attended state schools and a Catholic college before studying English at Cambridge. He later graduated from Yale Law School and practiced in the United States, United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia.

Mr. Burt often is remembered for serving as Gen. William Westmoreland’s attorney when the top U.S. commander during the Vietnam era sued CBS News for libel over a documentary it did on the war in 1982.

He took up writing poetry seriously just five years ago. “That’s when I really began to work at the craft,” he explains. “I was not born to the position I have now. I’ve seen a fair amount of the world from the bottom. I work at it every day. I’m fortunate to have a fair degree of privacy.”

His approach is simple. “I care about seeing the world as clearly as I possibly can. I have a great passion for the scrim. I want to pull the scrim aside.”

Childhood, relationships, the Holocaust, and mortality are the primary themes of his work. He has drawn inspiration for several of his poems from Mount Desert Island, including a tableau in Northeast Harbor in “Blue Rinse Matron;” and from the seaside beauty of Acadia National Park near his home in “Beside a Cove.”

“I’ve never seen a piece of land or area more beautiful than Mount Desert,” says Mr. Burt, who adds he has looked far and wide in his travels through Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

His poems “Little Black Dress,” “End of the affair,” and “Tart” deal with his intimate relationships. “There are some things you have to write about because you have to finish them off,” he says.

Worries that humankind has not learned the lessons of the Holocaust still haunt Mr. Burt. “It isn’t just what happened to the Jews. In Europe the Holocaust was a shattering event for all.” He adds later: “How easy it is for people to slip into homicidal character.”

The way people clung to life in the Nazi death camps provides insight for Mr. Burt’s explorations of mortality. “We are a machine built for life not death,” Mr. Burt says. The last lines of his poem “Momentum,” state: “We cling relentless to breath. In the camps, few chose death.”

“I’m a hardcore atheist but an ethnic Jew,” he explains. “I am taken by the ferocity with which people choose to live,” he says. At any moment those that were suffering could have run and grabbed the electrified fence surrounding the death camp or attacked a guard which would have meant certain death by rifle butt or bullet. “We [as a species] have this compulsion to live. It is not something you have a chemical choice in so we should make the most of it.”

Mr. Burt harbors deep disdain for religions, saying that you cannot argue beliefs with another person and that those beliefs have been used to perpetrate despicable acts. “What can’t be debated is dangerous. Christianity is a murderous religion,” he continues. “Faith worries me. I don’t have any.”

Although he was born in the United States, Mr. Burt chooses to live most of the year in London. He is a British citizen. America puts a great deal of importance on conformity. The British are much more skeptical, he explains. “Electing Obama was a great credit to this country.”

When he is in Maine, Mr. Burt spends little time meeting people or attending public events. “I find it very difficult to be one of the boys,” he says.

That’s one of the reasons he stopped sailing in the International One Design racing class and purchased a J boat he could sail single-handed without a crew. “I’m really not into socializing,” he says.

As far as his own mortality, Mr. Burt says he does not want to fade away, trapped in a failing body in some clinical setting. When his time comes he wants to just head out in his sailboat, alone, and vanish over the horizon. “There’s a certain amount I want to write about and then, when it is time, it’s the long tack,” he says.

Now of independent means thanks to businesses and investments from his years as an attorney, and with critics beginning to recognize his writing professionally, it is the time, Mr. Burt acknowledges, to focus on that most uncapitalistic of pursuits – unearthing fundamental truth.

As a boy, Mr. Burt said he was oft told that in order to succeed in life he needed to varnish the truth. “I’ve spent the rest of my life unvarnishing the truth,” Mr. Burt said. “I can tell you it doesn’t make you popular. It isn’t a choice. This is how I see it.”

EARL BRECHLIN
Mount Desert Islander