Interview #33: Jim Burns

Bedrock figure as little magazine poet & editor

A prolific poet, essayist, magazine editor and jazz enthusiast, JIM BURNS, born in the North-West of England 89 years ago, has been writing for over six decades, producing dozens of poetry chapbooks, critical essaysAll and reviews for the Guardian, Tribune, New Society, Jazz Journal and Evergreen Review plus innumerable small poetry magazines.

He has also been a pivotal contributor to the British magazine Beat Scene, penning countless articles since its 1988 launch, and has seen hundreds of essays and commentaries appear in 14 remarkable compilations, almost all issued by Penniless Press, stretching from Beats, Bohemians and Intellectuals in 2000 to last year’s Reviews & Articles, 2022-2023.

John Freeman, writing in the Global Tapestry Journal, described him as ‘a one-man counter culture’ and ‘a generous upholder of the fabric by which artists of all sorts can feel themselves to be nourished.’ LEON HORTON talks to Burns about his life and works…

Leon Horton: Jim, you were born in Preston, Lancashire, in the UK in 1936. What was your childhood like?

Jim Burns: Very much a working class upbringing, with an older sister and older brother and a younger sister, plus my parents, all in a two-up, two-down, toilet in the backyard, house. Almost everyone I knew was in similar circumstances so it didn’t seem unusual. Life for kids was lived on the street and in the local park and down by the river. No-one fussed much if we disappeared for the day.

LH: Did your parents encourage your imaginative side?

JB: Not really. My father had left school at 14 and joined the Royal Navy in 1911 when he was 16 and was there until 1925. My mother was from Whitehaven and came down to Preston in the 1920s when she was about 16 to find work. Her father was a miner and there was a lot of unemployment in the coalfields. They were good people, but didn’t have much time in their lives for the arts. We didn’t have many books in the house. But there was the cinema, the radio and the local library.

LH: You attended grammar school but are on record saying you didn’t do well in formal education. What went wrong? Or would it be more accurate to ask, what went right?

JB: I was at the grammar school from 1947 until 1952. But I didn’t really fit in and tended to follow my own interests rather than trying to pass exams. But I picked up some things about literature and history. There’s always something to be gained from any experience.

Pictured above: Jim Burns and his beloved books, from around 2014

LH: Do you recall when you first became interested in poetry?

JB: When I came out of the army in 1957. I began to realise its potential for expressing ideas and observations, and for humour and entertainment. There’s a nineteenth century novel called Pelham: The Adventures of a Gentleman by Bulwer-Lytton, and in it one of the characters wonders why people think that everything gloomy must be profound and everything cheerful must be shallow. Humour has its uses in poetry.

LH: You joined the army in 1954, I’m guessing to do your National Service. Were you a willing conscript?

JB: I wasn’t a conscript. I joined up for three years. Things were a bit difficult at home and I was in a job I didn’t have any interest in, so, as soon as I was 18, I joined the army, spent two and a half years in Germany, and that was interesting – a different country, different people, etc., new experiences. I’ve never regretted my three years in the army.

LH: It was in the army where, correct me if I’m wrong, you developed a love for jazz music and American literature. Is it fair to say that the army was, in some way, your university?

JB: No, I was interested in jazz from around 1950 when I first heard records by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. It was bebop that got my attention. I went to London in 1952 so I could visit some clubs where bop was played and, in 1953, I made a trip to Dublin to hear Stan Kenton’s orchestra which had modern jazz musicians like Zoot Sims, Lee Konitz, Conte Candoli.

There’s a quote by the American poet Gilbert Sorrentino when he said that bebop was his entry into the whole world of culture and it was mine, too, in the sense of opening up different avenues of music, painting, literature. I could follow those instead of the conventional routes.

Pictured above: One of a sequence of Burns compilations, Books, Artists, Beats from 2019

But, yes, I think of my army days as my university. American books and records were much easier to obtain in Germany and I read Faulkner, Hemingway, James Jones, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller and many others.

LH: Was this when you first became aware of the Beats?

JB: They were just starting to filter through with On the Road and other things becoming available. I read Kerouac in a copy of New World Writing they had in the library in Preston, though I didn’t know it at the time because his story appeared under the name Jean Louis.

LH: Which Beat writers/texts were you initially drawn to?

JB: Kerouac, John Clellon Holmes, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Ginsberg (his work from the 1950s). But I also ‘discovered’ Kenneth Rexroth, an older writer with roots back to the Thirties. He had radical roots in the anarchist movement.

LH: Have events in your own life had a discernible influence on what and who you write about?

JB: Yes, very much so. A lot of my poetry has been shaped from my experiences over the years, in the army, at work, mixing with different people.

LH: You were first published in New Voice magazine in 1962. Has your poetry changed over the years?

JB: I don’t think my poetry changed a lot. I wrote about what I saw and heard and what people said. And sometimes poems with a political angle.

LH: Are you primarily a poet of the stage or the page?

JB: On the page, though I did numerous readings around the country and in Germany and other places. But I never thought of myself as a performance poet, despite having done numerous readings over the years. And I never wrote poems specifically for performing, though some poems lent themselves to being read aloud to an audience.

LH: You have written extensively about jazz music and your love for bebop, but how much, if at all, has jazz – its rhythms and beats – informed your poetry?

JB: Frankly, I don’t think my poems were influenced by the music I listened to. I wrote poems which were about jazz musicians and my experiences of listening to jazz, but I was never trying to catch the rhythms of the music in my poems.

LH: Many poets have performed and even recorded their poetry to jazz. You’ve previously said that you don’t think it really works, that you prefer to keep them separate. Have you never been tempted to perform your own work to jazz?

JB: No, I never had that experience. I respect those who did, but I didn’t feel I could do it, partly because the subject matter of a lot of my poems wouldn’t have suited that context. I like poetry and I like jazz, but on the whole not together. Christopher Logue did a reasonable job doing it with Tony Kinsey’s group, and the novelist and poet John Harvey has worked at it, but it’s not for me.

LH: In 1962 you saw William Burroughs give a reading from Naked Lunch in Paris. What was that like?

JB: A half-empty little club on the Left Bank. Burroughs was quite something in his sardonic way. But I was equally impressed when a young black alto saxophonist wandered in to sit in for a few numbers with the resident trio and I realised it was Sonny Criss who was living in Paris then. I knew his work from bebop records from the 1940s and early 1950s.

But the whole evening had a nice, bohemian feeling to it – the location, the audience, the general atmosphere. I did see Burroughs reading some years later, at Bernard Stone’s bookshop in London, and that was OK, but it didn’t have that special feeling of the Paris event.

Pictured above: A 2021 gathering of Burns’ writing, Modernists, Bohemians, Mavericks

LH: You launched your own poetry magazine Move, in 1964, which ran for eight issues. Who did you publish?

JB: Well, it was a mixed bag, because I wasn’t intent on trying to print poets with a Beat inclination. I wrote to a few people I knew – Anselm Hollo, Lee Harwood, Roy Fisher, Dave Cunliffe, Gael Turnbull, Andrew Crozier – to get the first couple of issues off the ground, and then stuff started to come in the post, and I just used things I liked. It was the work, not the label, that interested me.

Andrew Crozier guest-edited an issue which featured American poets from San Francisco like Robin Blaser, Richard Duerden, Jack Spicer and Ronnie Primack; and Kirby Congdon put together a little anthology, Thirteen American Poets, which was a supplement to Move, and focused on mainly Greenwich Village poets like Carol Berge, Taylor Mead and Jack Micheline.

Charles Bukowski was also there. Move was a slim, mimeographed publication, and we did just 200 copies of each issue, but it amazed me how it got around in this country and the USA.

LH: Tell us about your association with Ambit magazine. Was that a good fit for you?

JB: Very much so. Ambit had a wide circulation for a little magazine so my poems were seen by more people than they otherwise might have been. The editor, Martin Bax, encouraged me to write reviews and articles and I had a role doing that for fifty years. He became a good friend and I used to stay with him and his family in London.

I did quite a few poetry readings under the Ambit banner. And met a lot of interesting poets and others who published in Ambit. Martin had an open mind when it came to poetry and literature in general, so the magazine never became an outlet for a particular group. I liked that and it influenced my thinking when I edited Palantir from 1976 to 1983.

LH: You were in the audience at the 1965 International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall, an event widely regarded as having kick-started the UK counterculture. Do you think that’s true?

JB: I’m ambivalent on this subject. It might have had an effect on some people, mostly in London, but the so-called counterculture was never something I thought all that interesting. It had its uses, for example being a period when ‘alternative’ bookshops flourished and I’ve always loved bookshops, and it seems to have led to a rise in an interest in poetry, for a time at least, so readings and all kinds of little magazines flourished, but beyond that it didn’t affect me greatly. My own interest was always centred on literature, and I saw the Beats as in the American bohemian tradition. I was at the Albert Hall primarily out of curiosity.

LH: I think my generation – I was born in ’68 – has a habit of mythologising the 1960s and romanticising the counterculture. Looking back, how do you feel about those heady days?

JB: I do think there has been, and perhaps still is, a lot of romanticising and mythologising about the 1960s and the counterculture. How far did it exist beyond some groups in London and some other major cities? I was in and out of London regularly so saw some aspects of it, especially the bookshops, but there was little evidence of a counterculture in Preston, believe you me. And frankly I doubt that the counterculture changed all that much. It was easily co-opted by business interests like record companies, publishers, etc. Nothing happened to alter the basic structure of society.

LH: Politics has been an important theme in your poetry, from ‘Fascist’ (1968) to ‘Power to the People’ (when New Labour came to power in 1997). What were your political leanings as a young man? Did you identify with the New Left?

JB: Agreed, I grew up at a time, the 1940s and early 1950s, when the class struggle was more pronounced. Politics mattered. My working class background inclined me towards the unions, the Labour Party, the Communist Party. I never joined either party, but I did join the union wherever I worked. The New Left was not something I was involved with. I’ve never been much interested in political theory. Practical matters mattered more.

LH: You have three poems (‘Negative’, ‘The End Bit’ and ‘The Trouble with Me is Irrelevancy’) in Michael Horovitz’s 1969 anthology, Children of Albion. Did you select those, or was that Horovitz? How do you think that book stands up today?

JB: From what I recall, I sent a batch of poems to Horovitz at his request and he picked out those you’ve mentioned for the anthology. It was very much shaped by his ideas about oral poetry, public performance, etc. It seemed relevant at the time, though it was attacked by most of the literary establishment. So, it’s a kind of important historical document in terms of non-establishment poetry in the UK, but, beyond that, isn’t necessarily a good example of what the poets could do at their best.

LH: What was your relationship with Horovitz like? Did you find common ground through jazz?

JB: I only met up with him now and then at readings, and in occasional written communications. I guess we were friendly enough, but I didn’t know him personally all that well.

LH: To what extent do you think jazz was replaced by rock’n’roll in the hearts and minds of the Beats? Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure seemed to have a strong streak of wannabe rock star in them.

JB: I really don’t know. I’m not sure how much jazz influenced or interested people like Ginsberg and McClure, as opposed to Kerouac who had a genuine liking for the music and knew something about it. Did Ginsberg and McClure just jump on a rock bandwagon they saw as a useful way of reaching a wider audience? It’s not a question I feel qualified to answer.

LH: As you said, you became the editor of Palantir poetry magazine in 1976. Were the 1970s a good time for UK poetry and little poetry magazines? Was it the beginning of the end of a golden age?

JB: Yes, I think it perhaps was a good time for poetry and little magazines, perhaps even more so than the Sixties. I had a regular column in Tribune, the left-wing weekly paper, which dealt with little magazines and small press publications, and there was never a shortage of material for it. But I doubt there was ever a “golden age” for poetry. Poets and little magazine editors are always scuffling.

Incidentally, when I edited Palantir it was never just a poetry magazine. I used reviews of all kinds of books, articles about anarchism, films, jazz, etc. Poetry was never an over-riding interest and I was writing regularly for jazz magazines, book reviewing for Tribune and doing other things. I did use work by Carl Solomon and John Clellon Holmes in Palantir but also a wide range of other writers.

LH: You contributed an essay to The Riverside Interviews: 3 (Binnacle Press, 1982) on Gregory Corso where you describe Corso’s best work as ‘fairly simple’. I’m going to stick my neck out and say that could be said of your own poetry. Fair comment?

JB: Yes, if by ‘simple' you mean straightforward and easy to understand. I like the old Shaker song which says, ‘It’s a gift to be simple’. Of course, the point about what appears to be ‘simple’ is that it’s taken a lot of craftsmanship to make it seem that way.

LH: You have been heavily involved with Penniless Press, launched in 1995, and still going strong today. Tell us something about how Penniless Press came about.

JB: I think there’s some confusion about Penniless Press. It was a magazine started in Preston by Alan Dent long after I’d left Preston. My only involvement with it was as a contributor of some articles. Later, Alan handed the title over to Ken Clay in Warrington, and he used it to publish books, including twelve collections of my essays and reviews. But I have no involvement in Penniless Press beyond that. Ken also edits the on-line Northern Review of Books and I contribute reviews and articles to that.

LH: Your other great association has been the UK-based magazine Beat Scene, brainchild of Kevin Ring, where you have contributed dozens of essays and reviews and acted as Deputy Editor. Why do you think the Beats still resonate today?

JB: Beat Scene and one or two other publications do a fine job in helping to keep the Beat flag flying, though a lot of the interest in the Beats seems to be increasingly based in academic circles. This is inevitable, I suppose. There are few survivors of the early days. And the focus is on what Ginsberg, Kerouac, etc. did in their day. Material that was once ignored, scorned, dismissed, is now studied in universities. It amuses me. I can’t read most of the academic stuff about the Beats.

Having been around when it seemed fresh and new and exciting, when I waited for the latest issues of little magazines to turn up in the post, or when I prowled the bookshops in London looking for them, I prefer to remember those days. Nostalgia, perhaps, but the work seemed vital then. And I often found the work by minor writers around the Beat scene of more interest than some of the stuff by major names. Academics are rarely interested in the minor writers.

LH: How do you feel about the current state of poetry?

JB: I have to be honest and admit I don’t have anything useful to say. I stopped writing about poetry ten or more years ago. When I reviewed regularly for Ambit and Tribune, and before that, when I edited Palantir, I saw a lot of new poetry, but I rarely see much now.

LH: You’ve published several essay collections, including Beats, Bohemians & Intellectuals (Trent Press, 2000), and Artists, Beats & Cool Cats (Penniless Press, 2014). If I put a gun to your head, which would you say are your most important works?

JB: My poetry collection, Laying Something Down, published by Shoestring Press and later reprinted by Penniless Press. Beyond that, I’d be stuck to pick out any particular collection of essays and reviews. Let the reader choose. I think the fact of my publishers being Shoestring Press and Penniless Press points to the economic nature of writing. But I’ve no complaints and chose to do what I’ve done instead of doing other things which would have been more profitable.

LH: What are you working on at the moment?

JB: Just carrying on with the essays and reviews. At the age of 89 I don’t feel any kind of pressure to do more than that.

Editor’s note: Leon Horton is a UK-based countercultural writer, interviewer, and editor. He is the editor of the acclaimed essay/memoir collection, Gregory Corso: Ten Times a Poet (Roadside Press, 2024), and interviewer of author Victor Bockris for The Burroughs-Warhol Connection (Beatdom Books, 2024). His essays and interviews have been published by Beatdom, Rock and the Beat Generation, International Times and Beat Scene.

See also: ‘Burns’ night out’, August 24th, ‘2022; Beat Soundtrack #3: Jim Burns’, September 11th, 2021