About
I’m George Burns and I’ve been writing poetry for more than 40 years since I started going to workshops led by Robert Bly at Asilomar, a retreat center on the edge of the North American Continent and the Pacific Ocean in California. I’ve been a high school drop-out, a soldier, a lover, a husband, father and grandfather, a hippie, a writer of the great American autobiography, a fork-lift driver in a cannery, a failed MBA, a semiconductor analyst and owner a small business in the semiconductor industry (which produced the best fab database ever). I finally sold the business and retired in 2008. I have been extremely lucky: many of the kids I grew up with landed in jail and have died of addiction. I could have been them.
In my forty plus years of writing poetry, I’ve been published in poetry journals, won awards and even had the good fortune to have had a book accepted for publication (If a Fish, available from Cathexis Northwest Press and from Amazon.)
I have had the great gift of being alive for 80 years now and I’m looking at these 80 years as a big box of a Christmas presents of unbelievable things and transformations that cry out to me to be written about. We are nothing without words. Just imagine for a minute that words suddenly disappeared. We wouldn’t even know our own name. Civilization, from the pyramids to Wal-Mart and McDonalds, would be a pile of sand. I look on poems like a telescope or a microscope that allow me to see flowers beside the trail and galaxies in the sky and in the human heart and mind. Growing up and living in the United States, I’ve witnessed unbelievable destruction of great ideals and of human hearts and souls and I will write about this.