|
AN INTERVIEW WITH RICK BAROT
Craig Beaven:
This is Craig Beaven. It's January 25th, and I'm in Washington D.C. on
the campus of George Washington University talking with poet Rick Barot
for Blackbird.
Thanks for meeting with us, Rick. I really appreciate
it.
I guess I wanted to begin by responding to something
you wrote to one of the editors of Blackbird in an email. But before
that, I wanted to just give our readers a little bit of history. Your
first book is The Darker Fall. It won the Kathryn Morton Prize.
It was published by a highly reputable press, Sarabande Publishing. It
was selected by the esteemed Stanley Plumly, and you've held the Stegner
Fellowship at Stanford. But when the review came out in Blackbird,
you expressed surprise at seeing the review, and you said something to
the extent that you thought that it had been published and then disappeared.
And I was wondering if you could talk about that because it seems to
be a pretty common thing in the art form. There's this anticlimactic
. . . there's this build-up of years of toiling, and then publishing
sometimes can just be like dropping it in the Grand Canyon or something.
It just disappears.
Rick Barot: Right,
and you don't get the echo. I think it's become a trend that a lot of
books, whether first books or second books or third books, don't get
reviewed anymore, and so you wonder, how are these books getting out
there? I know that the book is selling well enough, and so it makes me
wonder, how's it doing that if it's not being reviewed? So in many ways,
in terms of the usual reviewing channels, the book hasn't had much of
a life. But it . . . what I said was perhaps a little bit facetious because
the book has had a life in terms of a readership, but that readership
hasn't been accessed or they haven't accessed the book through reviews.
That's interesting to me. I don't know what that means, necessarily,
about how the life of a book proceeds without the review.
CB: So the book
is out there living and breathing and having a life, you think.
RB: I think so.
CB: That's good.
That's reassuring because often you hear poets lamenting there's no readership.
RB: It is out
there. I think part of the reason why it has, it's had a life of its
own is because I've been giving a lot of readings in the last year. That's
one of the things that Sarabande is so great about. They help their [writers]
get out there and do readings and promote the book. And so . . . I would
say that I've given at least twenty-five readings all over the country
in the last year, and so that has really helped.
CB: I was reading
through the book and I was thinking that the most pronounced motif in
the book is the evocation of, not landscape, but something much more
specific, like street corners, rooms, apartments. And the listing of
place names becomes almost incantatory by the end of the book. If you
read it all the way through you get all this geography. I was wondering
if you could talk about that as a poet, like what about landscape, or
what about these places that seems to hold kind of a mythic power, if
it's mythic at all.
RB: Maybe this
is a high-minded answer, but this is something I've been thinking about.
The idea of the romantic lyric has to do with an "I" that's
situated in a landscape of some kind, whether that's urban or natural.
And so in many ways, the "I" of the book is undergoing some
sort of post-romantic journey through the poems of that book. Therefore,
the staging is very important and very foregrounded in terms of the urban
spaces or the natural spaces or even those in-between spaces. I'm not
really sure why I've been enamored of those places, but perhaps it's
one way of thinking about it, that in the lineage that I find myself
it's a post-romantic world.
CB: So it's sort
of like how the self of the poet gets expressed is going to be via this
landscape or via this . . .
RB: A lot of
it gets displaced onto the landscape. If you're trying to figure out
or imagine an interior place, the coordinates of your interior life,
what do you have? How do you map that? You go out there and see what
the world has to offer you as mirror for those things. It is a narcissistic
activity, looking at these things. But what happens is that the self
becomes effaced in the delineation of objects which are outside of itself.
CB: There's a
line in your book from the poem "Battersea Bridge," and I think
this sort of sums up where you write, and I'm paraphrasing: "Is
there a more human habit than this, to stand here looking out, letting
our natures yield to all we see, so that the streets . . . begin to stand
for our longings?" So it's the landscape and self relationship?
RB: Absolutely.
That poem, which is a sonnet, has two sort of ghosts behind it. One of
course is Whistler and his nocturnes, but the other one of course is
Wordsworth. I'm forgetting the title of the poem, but he's got a wonderful
poem, a sonnet, about standing on one of the bridges in London and looking
at it ["Composed Upon Westminster Bridge"]. He's got that other
great sonnet, "The world is too much with us; late and soon." I'm
not thinking about that one, but it's another vision by him, standing
on another bridge. That was in my mind somewhere when I was writing that
sonnet. Wordsworth was in there, and that line seems to me . . . it's
a romantic line.
CB: You seem
to be using the word romantic quite a bit already in the interview and
. . .
RB: I should
stop.
CB: One of the
questions I was going to ask you about, who you see as your models, or
who you read or how you conceive, what you've read that has sort of informed
your conception of poetry? In Plumly's introduction he says—I think
of the poem "Battersea Bridge"—he says, "postmodern
but romantic," and I was wondering, do you see yourself situated
in that way as a romantic or in the vein of?
RB: You know
what? I would love to say yes, but attached to my saying yes, I am a
post-romantic poet, attached to that is a whole lot of baggage that I
would be uncomfortable with.
CB: Right.
RB: Which is
the baggage that you're a strictly conservative, traditional, un-ironic
writer or perceiver of the world.
CB: Right. That's
certainly not the case with the poems in The Darker Fall. I
guess getting back to the idea of place, obviously you're here in Washington,
D.C., as a visiting writer, and that's a long way from home. One of the
poems in the book is called "The Exile" and the stance of the
speaker is of the exile. Can you talk a little bit about that, your relationship
to place and its . . . the idea of loss or desire of place? That seems
to be the driving emotion.
RB: You know,
Anne Carson has that great book, Eros the Bittersweet, where
she talks about the triangulation that happens between the beloved, the
lover, and then the third leg being the thing that keeps those two people
apart. For me, I wonder if place has some part of that, that idea of
triangulation where it's the self and then there's a perceived ideal
of the self and then there's the issue of place having to act as a kind
of fulcrum for those two things. Once again it's that romantic thing
where the place becomes the source of difficulty, and yet because it's
an objective barrier perhaps between you the earthly person and you the
ideal, perhaps platonic person slash poet, and place gets in the way
of that because you have to navigate through the objectivity of that
. . . I feel that I've gotten away from the question.
CB: I was going
to ask about place, and then you sent me some of your new work, and you
have poems titled "West 16th Street in Iowa," and it's like
place is coming back, and again it doesn't go away. So it seemed to be
such a resonant part of the book or of your work, so I wanted to . .
.
RB: I'd never
thought about that, the idea of place. Maybe place is just another word
for reality. You know, it's one way of putting a frame on a particular
reality that I'm trying to describe in my poems, whether it's Iowa or
New York City.
CB: Moving along,
I guess I wanted to respond again to something you'd written in an email
to me. You said that you're "trying desperately to finish a new
manuscript." And I was wondering about that, when the composition
becomes desperation or something. where it becomes like it's no longer
fun or inspired? Like I'm putting a thesis together, and it seems more
mechanical than contacting the muse or anything. How does that work?
Does it become a job, does it become business or . . . ?
RB: No, it's
never a job because when I write a poem it never arrives when I want
it to. It always comes unexpectedly. It is always sort of like being
visited by the weather—you don't it's going to come. When I wrote
you that, I was basically talking about the fact that the second book
is predicated on a theme, the Echo and Narcissus story, and I'm writing
a lot of the poems with Echo as a muse behind the poems. And I've been
writing this book for more than two years now. And I'm getting impatient
with the theme. Not with the work, because it's not finished yet. The
reason why I said I'm desperately trying to finish it is because I want
to finish it before I get really tired of it, the work and the theme.
And I don't want to be repeating myself. That's why I just want to finish
it and move on to something else.
CB: Something
fresh . . . I was wondering if you could take us through the process
of a poem, from the moment the idea is received to completion. How long
does that usually take you? Is this a long process? Do you take years
on poems or do they come quickly? How does that work?
RB: It really
depends. I'll give you an example of both. The poem in the first book
that took the longest to write was a poem called "The Gecko," in
which I describe a friend getting a tattoo. And the poem is in three
stanzas, and altogether I would say the poem took about five years to
write. I wrote the first stanza and then I put it away. And then a couple
of years went by and I wrote the second stanza, and then I put it away
again. I knew what the poem was going to be about, but the issue I had
there did not have to do with not knowing what it was going to be. It
was more I was grappling with the issue of narrative. How do you write
a narrative poem? That poem taught me a lot about how to . . . just the
issue of information. How do you give information in a poem and still
have it be partaking of a lyrical aura? In a lot of the poems that I
had written before that poem, the lyric stance had always sort of taken
care of the writing. I wasn't interested in doing a narration that was
A plus B equals C, but in that poem I was describing a scene in a tattoo
parlor, and so the issues of narration were very important to me and
very difficult. So that's one poem that took a long time. It's not quite "The
Moose," but it's my moose. It took about five years. On the other
hand, there's a poem in the book . . . the last poem I wrote in the book
is a poem called "Aubade," which is a pantoum, and that poem
literally wrote itself in five minutes. I had all of these lines written
down already on a bulletin board that I have over my desk. And these
lines, which were discrete from each other, suddenly cohered into this
pantoum form. They all just funneled into this poem in one go, and I
didn't have to change anything. I think that all poets would recognize
those two extremes, the poem that takes you forever and the poem that
comes, you know . . .
CB: So did you
really celebrate when you finally finished "Gecko"? Did you
charge through the streets cheering?
RB: No, because
I had already lost so much blood along the way I didn't have the energy
for that celebration. And the fact is it's not even that good of a poem.
You write these poems even if they take forever, learning something from
them as processes. And that's something that I learned from that poem:
How do you write a poem that's narrative, that has a real narrative grid
underneath it, and make the lyrical push out of the narrative instead
of the lyrical constructing a shadow narrative out of the stance that
it's created for itself.
CB: More of an
overt narrative.
RB: Yes, an overt
narrative.
CB: Something
also noticeable about the work in The Darker Fall, beyond just
place, the evocation of place, is the use of sequence. Half the poems
. . . of the twenty-four poems, exactly half are comprised of numbered
sequences, and I was wondering if you could talk about the poems' need
for that kind of space and the poems' need to just go on thinking and
speaking, even when sections seem full and finished?
RB: Right. The
book is basically a sort of transcription of my apprenticeship as a writer.
And the reason why so many of those poems are in sections is because
I didn't know, or I didn't think I knew, how to write a poem by itself
in the sense that it could stand by itself. And so a lot of these . .
. some of these, a good number of those poems in sequences were written
individually without the thought of the sequence, and what would happen
is that I would write a short poem and think that it wasn't good enough
to stand on its own. Therefore, I would play around with putting it with
two or three other poems, just to see if the accumulation in the sequence
would somehow give these poems a weightiness that they didn't have on
their own. That's true of a sequence like, let's say, "Passage Work" or "Blue
Hours." Those are two sequences where those poems were written years
apart from each other, in very different moods, and yet they had enough
of the same, perhaps atmosphere, that I could put them in a sequence
and call the whole thing a sequence. And then there are other poems of
course where the sequencing was very deliberate, like "Eight Elegies."
CB: Yeah, I was
going to ask you about that one.
RB: Or "Bird
Notes," where I knew I was working with a lot of material that I
couldn't encompass into one poem, and I needed the sequencing as a kind
of . . . as an aid to myself.
CB: "Eight
Elegies" seems like it really riffs. They're not overt elegies,
or they don't seem to be overt elegies, but you have that kind of echoing
in the title when you go through and read. It almost seems like the speaker
is . . . the use of sequence there seems almost like the speaker's just
trying to say all this stuff to get it out and be released from a burden.
That seemed different than the way some of the others, some of the other
sequences work together.
RB: Well, "Eight
Elegies" was written very late in the manuscript, and at that point
I knew exactly what I was doing in terms of the sequencing. All the sequencing
I'd done before then was just me fumbling around trying to fill a canvas
with very different things. "Eight Elegies" was a very deliberate
canvas that I knew I couldn't fill just in one go, and so I made these
little pieces and patched it together.
CB: When you're
composing, are there certain things you look for, certain conscious places
you want to take your poems? The book seems so unified, like such a coherent
whole, that I wondered if you sought out things, and are there poems
that maybe you love, that didn't make it into The Darker Fall?
Does that happen, you leave a lot out?
RB: Yeah. By
the time I put the book together it had gone through about three or four
permutations, and I would always take things out, even stuff that I had
just written very recently, before I had finished the manuscript, because
I was thinking of the book as a whole at that point. I wasn't thinking
of individual poems anymore. So if a poem, even though it was okay, didn't
quite fit the flow that I had in mind, I would . . . I got rid of it.
But it's interesting because the earliest poems in the book were written
when I was an undergrad, and so there is a full range of poems in there
from the eight or so years of my life when I was writing that book. Then
there are a lot of poems from the middle period, let's say, where I didn't
include it.
CB: So when you
say eight or so years, do you mean from when you began writing or from
when you began sort of consciously sitting down to think of a manuscript,
or how does that work?
RB: I'm talking
about from the very first poems I wrote.
CB: From the
first poem you ever wrote.
RB: Which were
in an undergrad class I took with Annie Dillard when I was a senior.
Those were some of the very first poems I wrote.
CB: What drew
you to poetry suddenly your senior year? Were you always an English major
or. . . ?
RB: I was conflicted.
I started college wanting to be a lawyer. I took a lot of poli sci classes
my first few years, and then I started taking more English classes. At
some point, I started to understand that just because I was good at something
and it was something that I enjoyed didn't mean that I could take it
for granted as being, you know, mere pleasure. Because I was always good
in English all through high school, I was always told that I should be
. . . I should pursue or think about writing. But it just came so naturally
and easily that I didn't think, so why should I therefore study that?
But the minute that writing and literature started to speak to my emotional
life as a person and not just something that I could do skillfully, where
it did seem to mirror what was happening inside, that's when I started
to take it seriously as something I could perhaps do and study more seriously.
Annie Dillard was very crucial in that. I took a creative writing class
with her when I was a sophomore, and as a sophomore, who's a good writer?
No one probably is. But she was so encouraging, and also forceful, that
she had me beginning to think that perhaps I could do something with
that. At that point I was just writing prose, but the encouragement was
everything.
CB: So when do
you start thinking of a manuscript? I mean, you're writing poetry, and
then when do individual poems, I guess, become a collection? Do you know
like at what point in the process?
RB: For The
Darker Fall it happened, I would say, three or four years after
I started writing poems. What happened was that I got a title for myself,
a book title, and it seemed to galvanize all of the elements which
were already there and helped me, gave me a sort of prescription for
how to proceed. And the working title of the book for about three or
four years was "City Entries," which is the title of one
of the poems in one of the sections. I think it's "Blue Hours." Having
that phrase in mind for years on end helped me to write the latter
half of the book. The idea of the notational quality of the poems,
having all of the sectioning, I got permission for that from the idea
of "City Entries," writing a diary. The idea of the city
itself became a big informant in the writing of the poems. You had
asked earlier about urban spaces. Having the caption before the picture,
it helps you to construct the picture. Eventually, of course, I understood
that the title wasn't the best title. "City Entries" wasn't
the best title, so I got rid of it. But it had helped me move through
the journey of the book as a sort of scaffolding.
CB: How did you
come up with "The Darker Fall," then? Was it sad to let go
of "City Entries"?
RB: It wasn't
sad because it was like a marriage that was very old and very boring,
and to somebody else it might have sounded good, but I was just tired
of it at that point. "The Darker Fall" was suggested to me
by a friend who read through the manuscript after it had been accepted
by Sarabande and by Stanley Plumly. I had an intermediary title. I had
submitted the manuscript as "Night in Hydrangea," which is
a very florid title, and Plumly wasn't too happy with that title. And
once he started not being happy with it, I started not being happy with
it. And so I gave the manuscript to a few friends, and a friend of mine,
Brian Teare, who's also a poet, picked out the phrase from the book,
from one of the poems in the book. And that's how it came about. I have
to say that if I had more time, and more guts, frankly, I would have
stuck with the title that I had then, which was "Night in Hydrangea."
CB: "Night
in Hydrangea," you like that better than "The Darker Fall"?
RB: I do like
it. It was mine. One thing that I have learned, actually, having published
that first book and working it out in a second book now, that is, that's
coming along fairly well, is that you need these necessary illusions
to finish the book, but the minute that The Darker Fall, I saw The
Darker Fall in between covers, I stopped understanding why I had
put things the way they were in terms of the sequence of the poems, the
ordering, or even the title of the book itself—it stopped being
material. What became important to me was the fact that I had these three
or four or five poems in the book that I thought had really spoken truthfully
about particular emotional and aesthetic and formal problems that I'd
been having, and so you know what, I'm writing poems, but during the
time that I'm trying to finish a book, I'm writing a book. But the minute
the book is finished, I forget that the book exists. I only care about
the four or five poems that I love. And it's always surprising to me—well,
it's surprising to other people—that my favorite poems in my first
book are not necessarily the poems that people would think of as being,
let's say, the most ambitious or being the big poems. It's never about
that. It's usually the smaller poem where I felt as though I had totally
captured what was in my mind and in my eye.
CB: So it's the
few, as you see them, the purest expressions . . .
RB: The happy
few.
CB: Yeah, those
are the ones we have to hold on to, right?
RB: But you do
need the illusion. For those five or six years when "City Entries" was
the title, I had it all in my head. The title was "City Entries" .
. .
CB: Yeah, you're
like getting shirts printed up, right?
RB: Absolutely.
And the cover art was going to be one of those Ocean Park paintings by
Richard Diebenkorn.
CB: Yeah, those
are great paintings.
RB: But it didn't
happen that way, and I feel no loss.
CB: I was noticing
that there's really little personal autobiography revealed, and I was
wondering if that's a conscious decision or if that's . . . or if that
comes out of just sort of a theory of poetry, or if that comes out of
just hitting the delete button sometimes and just taking personal things
out? Was that a conscious decision, or how does that work?
RB: You're talking
about the first book. The fact is, I, you know, I'm an Asian American
person. I was born in the Philippines. And anybody reading that book
is not going to find anything of that in there. The way I've been able
to explain that to myself has to do with the fact that it's a very important
content, that the issue of this Asian American identity, and I didn't
feel worthy of addressing that as yet. I feel as though my work is going
to move into that content a little bit more as I begin to be more confident
of my skills as a writer. But the first book, it's really just an exercise
book in formal issues and in issues of visual and descriptive acuity.
That's the way I think about it. This is not to belittle the book, but
it's a book where I'm learning how to write a line, how to write a stanza,
how to write sentences which are long or short, how to do those formal
things. And so I wasn't interested, frankly, in content in that book.
I was interested in exercising the writing muscle in as many ways [as]
I could. It was not a conscious pushing away of content by any means.
I was just more interested in the gestures that you could do with language,
with the writing. The issue of content had to do with form in that first
book for me. There are all kinds of things happening in that book that
have to do with long lines and short lines, and couplets and quatrains
and tercets, because that's what I was discovering when I was starting,
when I was teaching myself how to write poems. I would read, let's say
Seamus Heaney, his book North, and I suddenly understood what
it meant to write a short line. He was working with, I think, trimeters
in a lot of those shorter poems, and I started to ask myself: What does
it mean for you, Rick, to write a short line? And so I would write a
poem in a short line. Or I went through a phase where I was reading a
lot of Wolcott, and all of these wonderful pentameters were happening
in his work, and so I became interested in writing these pentameter lines.
Virginia Woolf is a huge influence in me, and she has this wonderful
thing in her diaries where she talks about how writing is putting words
on the backs of rhythms. I really lived by that when I was writing that
first book. I was interested in the formal aspects, in the visual aspects.
The liability, of course, is that there's a lot of sensibility in the
book, and in my 3 a.m. moments I wonder, where's the content?
CB: Well, thanks
for doing this with us. I really appreciate it.
RB: Sure. My
pleasure. ![](../../images/bug_print.gif)
|
|