Questions for Wendy Barker Interviewed by Mo H. Saidi
Wendy Barker is poet-in-residence and a professor of English at UTSA. She is the author of Nothing Between Us: The Berkeley Years, a novel in prose poems (Del SolPress, 2009) and numerous collections of poetry, including Poems from Paradise (2005), Way of Whiteness (2000), Let the Ice Speak (1991), and Winter Chickens (1990), as well as three chapbooks, Eve Remembers (1996), Between Frames (2006), and Things of the Weather (2009). Mo H Saidi: As Poet in Residence and Professor of English Literature and Language at The UTSA, what future do you see for poetry in America? Is it a dying art, like classical ballet? Wendy Barker: Poetry in the United States is more vigorous than it has been in a century. It’s just changing forms. Of course fewer people can recite Frost’s "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" than a few decades ago, but the abundance of venues for spoken-word poetry and open mics coupled with the proliferation of creative writing programs and journals (both in print and online) testify to the vibrancy of the art. True, sales of poetry collections don’t compete with memoirs of media stars or politicians—or an umpteenth biography of Lincoln—but then, the most interesting films aren’t usually blockbusters, either.
It has been said that American poets write more about their own personal perspectives and feelings than about the realms of American life and that American poetry is not as accessible as European or Latin American poetry; do you agree? Suppose I do agree that much poetry by U.S. poets, especially from the 1950’s, is written from a personal perspective, and I think that may have to do with the emphasis on the individual in our culture. We can also be biased against using abstractions—against making general statements—and perhaps that value may cause many Europeans and Latin Americans to invalidate our work. I wonder if those of us living in the U.S. are more prone to see—as Adrienne Rich argued—the personal as political. I think that, perhaps as inhabitants of a democracy, we tend to see the individual life as a touchstone for the universal human condition. The French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature. Sadly, no American poet has won this prestigious award in the last one hundred years . Why do you think the Nobel Committee constantly bypasses American poets? Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, but I tend to discount the importance of the prizes. We all know how many factors enter in to any judging situation. I can’t help but wonder, though, if one reason poets from the U.S. have been bypassed might be a low-grade general resentment against our country with its privileges and power. However, we should also note that the American expatriate poet T.S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize, as did Joseph Brod sky and Czeslaw Milosz, both poets who held American citizenship. Let’s talk about you. You have received NEA and Rockefeller fellowships and won the Violet Crown Book Award twice so far. When did you write and publish your first poem? Why do you write poetry: for your students, your literary colleagues, or yourself? As I say in Poems’ Progress, I have been writing since I first learned to write my name with a fat pencil at the age of five. I’ve been an addict, in love with language. But I didn’t realize until I was about thirty, in 1972, that most of my secret writings were drafts of poems, at which time I got myself out of teaching high school and back into graduate school. The first poem I felt I really finished was "Practice," which was published in the California Quarterly in 1978—thirty years ago!
The poems in your prize-winning volume Way of Whiteness are long and rich with imagery. In the title poem you quote William Carlos Williams, one of the leading imagist poets of the twentieth century in America. How much were you influenced by American poets of the last century? Thank you for the kind words about those poems. I was heavily influenced by Williams. But also Stevens, H.D., and Frost—Plath, Roethke—the list could be a long one.
You write in Poems’ Progress that poetry provides you a way of waking in the morning to mystery, to a kind of harmony you do not experience otherwise. What is your favorite time of day for composing poetry and why? Any time, any day, any hour, all day, all hours. Any chance I get.
Together with Saranindranath Tagore you have translated the poems of the Indian Nobel Prize-winning poet, Rabindranath Tagor. How has this endeavor influenced your poetry? The collaboration with Rabindranath Tagore’s great-grand-nephew Bappa Tagore has influenced me in ways that are as difficult to describe as they are profound. Attempting to enter the mind of another poet from an entirely different culture with a language that expresses concepts entirely unfamiliar to Westerners bent my mind in ways impossible to reverse. Just as one small example: Bengali has single words to express numbers far greater than "trillions." There is a sense in that language of the vastness of a chronology and a scope of universes beyond us, of a vastness almost impossible for most Westerners to contemplate.
In the poem "Was It When" from your collection Between Frames you say "Even slicing lemons took / a mustering of resistance," and later, "I occupy more space / than you can imagine, / and as for you, you stay put." It sounds like you feel squeezed between the walls here. Who is threatening your turf and how did you manage to rise successfully above your troubles? In that poem I was conscious of trying to talk about people’s belligerent attitude toward their turf—using as a metaphor the cardinal’s song whose "chirr" we think of as a pleasant sound but which is actually a way of announcing territory. The "I" at the end of the poem was, I thought when writing the poem, the cardinal—I was being ironic, showing how even the birds I wanted to hear were actually announcing their turf. But now, looking at your question and the poem again, ten years after writing it, I But now, looking at your question and the poem again, ten years after writing it, I realize how insightful your question is—I was in fact speaking about my own sense of not having a territory of my own, of not being entitled to occupy very much space. And to explain that would take pages, hours, days, months—perhaps a book?
It has been said that your poems in Poems from Paradise are "possibly the most sensuous and erotic love poems" -- Do you agree with this comment; are you a modern day Sappho? I sure don’t want to compare myself to Sappho!
Thank you very much for your time.
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