meet mark s. burrows
. . .writer & retreat leader, poet & scholar. . .
When you read anything worth remembering, you liberate a human voice; you release into the world again a companion spirit." Louise Glück
After almost a decade of university teaching in Germany, the capstone to a career as scholar and teacher in the US and Europe, Burrows returned home to the States in 2020 where he makes his home in Camden, Maine. He is no stranger to Maine, having summered here in earlier years, and his residence in Camden brings him home to the town his paternal forebears helped to settle in the early 1790s. The connection to Germany also runs deep in his lineage: his maternal grandparents immigrated to Chicago in the early 1920s from a town located on the eastern edges of the Black Forest. In some ways, his interest in German culture and his aptitude for its language has shaped his creative, intellectual, and spiritual life, rooting him in the literary, philosophical, and spiritual imagination native to that place.
Since returning to the States, he focuses much of his creativity on writing, devoting his energies to poetry - as a writer, editor, and facilitator of poetry retreats and workshops offered across this country and in Europe and Great Britain. He continues to edit poetry for the journal Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, and has just accepted a position as Poetry Editor for Wildhouse Publications (www.wildhousepublications.com).
His ongoing commitment to scholarly work turns his attention to exploring the intersection of spirituality and the arts, mysticism and poetics, themes that also shape his retreat leadership. His creative work as a teacher and spiritual guide draws large and diverse international audiences, in German and English, and his partnership in the Bonn Rilke Project--presenting multi-media performances of Rilke's Book of Hours with his colleague Gotthard Fermor, jazz musician Josef Marschall, and photographer Klaus Dieterich--has gained considerable acclaim among audiences across Germany. His long interest in Rilke's poetry led to his publication, in 2012 (revised paperback edition, 2016), of the original version of Rilke's Book of Hours, entitled Prayers of a Young Poet. This much-acclaimed edition, including some of Rilke's most beloved poems, marked the first English publication of this ground-breaking work in its first form.
As a poet, he writes with what writer Jay Parini recently described as "a profound awareness of nature and its spiritual resonances," a trait embodied in his most recent collection of poems, The Chance of Home (2018). A winner of the Wytter Bynner Prize in Poetry and numerous nominations for a Pushcart Prize, his poems offer readers what poet Christine Valters Paintner describes as "both invitation and gift--when you say yes, the treasures lay themselves out like a banquet for the heart." Poet Wally Swist characterizes his poems as "of stately simplicity and lyrical rhythms," noting that he "crafts a poetry that is resonant with what is reverential," going on to describe this recent collection as "a poetry of praise whih opens from within its own center, as does the lily." His poems have appeared in journals published in the US and abroad, including: Poetry, Image, The Southern Quarterly, Metamorphosis, The Christian Century, The Cortland Review, The Anglican Theological Review, Eremos (Australia), Weavings, Almost Island, Reunion: The Dallas Review, 91st Meridian, Oneing, AMOS (Germany), The Tablet, First Things, The Christian Century, and The Seminary Ridge Review, among others.
Burrows' academic research continues to span a range of interests, always returning to the generative voice to be heard in the medieval legacy of those we call "mystics": Hildegard and Julian of Norwich; Meister Eckhart and the writer of the Cloud of Unknowing; Dante and John of the Cross. As an historian of medieval Christianity, his research and writing focuses on the creative work of the mystics, visionaries, and poets who often found themselves living and working at the margins of "official" Christianity. Theirs was an adventurous and daring exploration of spirit, a journey both inward and outward that offers radical insights into the nature of love, the quest for the sacred, the boundlessness of human experience, and alternate voicings of tradition and experience.
As a translator of German writings into English, he brought a collection of short poem-prayers by the distinguished Iranian-German writer SAID into English as 99 Psalms (2013), and is currently at work on a collection of essays by SAID. He has also completed the first extensive collection, in English, of the German poems of Hilde Domin (1909 - 2006), and has published individual poems from this volume in various literary journals in the US and abroad. More recently, he co-wrote with Jon M. Sweeney two best-selling collections of short, meditative poems in English, inspired by the writings of Meister Eckhart: Meister Eckhart's Book of the Heart (2017) and Meister Eckhart's Book of Secrets (2019).
His teaching and writing interests focus on the ways in which literature, and above all poetry, carries and, in turn, is shaped by the spiritual quest. In particular, he is drawn to the way mystical texts engage modern readers with enduring questions related to human "be(com)ing." His work as a poet and teacher of poetry draws on his capacities to be present to the wildness and beauty of the natural world, with its unpredictability and startlements that awaken awe and lure us in wonder. As he puts it, "writing keeps me open to the flow of life all around me and within me, and startles me in those occasional moments of communion--and even, on occasion, ecstasy." He currently serves as Poetry Editor for the journal Spiritus: A Journal for Christian Spirituality (Johns Hopkins University Press), and as Associate Editor for Poetry for the journal ARTS: The Arts in Religious and Theological Studies.
In 2005, he published together with co-editor Elizabeth Dreyer a volume of essays widely cited in scholarly work, Minding the Spirit. The Study of Christian Spirituality (Johns Hopkins University Press), a volume that has been widely recognized as a ground-breaking volume of essays on spirituality by leading scholars in this emerging field of study. Other recent academic publications include his work as editor of the following volumes: The Prophetic Witness and the Reimagining of the World: Poetry, Theology, and Philosophy in Dialogue (Routledge, 2020); Breaking the Silence. Poetry and the Kenotic Word, co-edited with Jean Ward and Malgorzata Grzegorzewska (Frankfurt a.M., 2015), and Poetic Revelations, also coedited with Ward and Grzegorzewska (Routledge, 2016). He was also editor, with a team of translators, of a new edition in German of 100 songs from the Iona Community (Glasgow and Iona), Freut euch und singt (Strube Verlag, 2015; revised second edition, 2018).