La Riviera
We stand in the humming hive, glowing in the blue light. She cradles a guitar and wears a round brimmed hat, like a gardener. For the rhythm, the drummer and bassist watch her shoulders. The guitarist watches her hands. She sings about the lovers she has craved, the work of adoration. She sings about vampires and cars. She sings about the startle of an emotion, as though a kingfisher had appeared in the middle of the room in the middle of the day. The crowd sways, stomps, bellows, and quiets. Outside, the river flows like something silken through the stone city, a thousand years old. The green lights of the taxis wander through the streets like fireflies. Inside, each new song makes the strobes flash new colors: what the eyes say, what the stars say, what the weeds say.
After Brainard
I remember the apartment with the yellow walls and the blue tiles. I remember the poet with the yellow manual typewriter in the park writing us a poem about the magnolias and the daffodils, the simplicity of spring. I remember reading a poem on the subway poster about someone taking a nap. I remember the black notebook I left on the airplane. I remember twenty questions that led to suitcase, paintbrush, knish, seal. I remember the painter who painted his subjects upside down. I remember when the dog fell through the ice at the edge of the pond, and I pulled him out by his hind legs. I remember searching for her lost keys with a flashlight in the grass. I remember the soprano singing Ave Maria in the arcade at the Bethesda Terrace, the sound resonating as though we were standing under the roof of her mouth. I remember the saxophonist at the Village Vanguard. I remember the first time I ate okra.
Clear
He tells me about parking by the ocean to eat his lunch. I imagine the water: sullen and explosive, like a young horse. The sky is low. Opened partway, the window lets in the waves’ crashes, rhythmic as a sitcom’s laugh track. He tries to conjure a chair and table on the sand because he likes the cold thinking he can do while sitting at a table. Instead he looks at the water and thinks of the tired face of his mother. The beer he would drink if he were drinking. The length of zeroes in a million. Still, the pill he now takes each morning has sifted like a snowfall through him, and if he feels any despair, it is as simple as a coin in his palm. At the tideline, a figure looks down at the ground. In the car, he eats his potato salad from the deli’s clear little tub. He thinks, I can’t become a different person, so I will continue to act the same. Or, he thinks, I can’t become a different person, but I can act differently.
A Conversation with Rick Barot
Matthew Tuckner
Thank you so much for participating in this interview, Rick! I wanted to start by asking you about the form of the prose poem in general. Tracking your development from book to book and considering the “During the Pandemic” series in Moving the Bones, it seems that the prose poem has slowly become one of your go-to formal tools. I know you recently completed a book composed solely of them. When teaching the prose poem to my students, I often use James Tate’s one-page manifesto “On the Prose Poem,” where he asserts that the prose poem is successful because it uses the “deceptively simple packaging” of the paragraph to hide the “little sliver of eternity” that only a poem can offer. Do you relate to this at all? What does the prose poem give you that other forms don’t? Why has it become such a staple in your writing repertoire?
Rick Barot
Tate’s notion of the “little sliver of eternity” inside the simple form of the prose poem is really lovely. And isn’t that sliver what every poem is for, ultimately? It’s the poem’s job to be the container for that paradoxically tender thing. Paradoxical in that it preserves a specific and fleeting human moment, but that moment also represents the relentless stream of the eternal. A poem is always a part that glorifies the ongoing whole.
As for the prose poem, my recent work in the form has a long, delayed history. During my MFA at the University of Iowa, I wrote a prose-poem sequence titled “Portishead Notebook.” It was the first prose poetry I’d ever tried writing, and I loved the dreamy lyricism I inhabited when I wrote the sequence. At the time I was enthralled by poets whose prose poems I loved—Killarney Clary, Robert Hass, Mark Strand—and I swore I’d write even more prose poems. As it happened, about 25 years passed before I returned to the form, and it was by accident. During the early months of the pandemic, I started putting down little bursts of imagery and language in the Notes app of my phone, trying to find a calm moment within each day’s maelstrom of uncertainty. Because the Notes app didn’t make lineation possible, I just went with the prose block as a shape to work with. This led to the “During the Pandemic” sequence in my new book. Working on the pandemic sequence got me interested in exploring the prose poem further, which resulted in the manuscript I just completed. There are 75 poems in the book, three of which you’re publishing.
I’m pretty sure I’m done with the prose poem form for now. But it was such a joy working within the form these last couple of years. Not having the assists in structure and pacing that you get from lineation and stanza, and also being wary that the prose block might lead to something merely prosaic, I became really excited about the variety of ways that one could generate formal textures in the prose block. Metaphor and simile became a primary aim for each poem. Unexpected syntax, exquisite imagery—these things became obsessively important to me. Working on the prose poem, I had to handle the old tools differently. This felt like being a new poet.
Matthew Tuckner
On a related note, I’m intrigued by the mimetic opportunities that this collection of prose poems has offered you. Of the poems Quarterly West has published, “After Brainard” directly borrows the rhetorical conceit of Joe Brainard’s I Remember. “After Amina,” published in Waxwing, is in conversation with Amina Cain’s book A Horse at Night: On Writing. “Here,” published in 32 Poems, borrows its temporal defamiliarization from Richard McGuire’s graphic novel of the same name. Is there something about the prose form that better allows for this kind of intertextuality?
Rick Barot
The intertextuality you’re noticing isn’t so much due to the prose poem form, but to my overall ambition for the manuscript. Early on, I knew I wanted to write a sprawling book that took in everything: autobiographical experience, intellectual and aesthetic experiences of all kinds, and the odds and ends of everyday experience that I could translate into lush little tableaus of language. I wanted a book as panoramically scaled as a mural you might see on the side of a warehouse. Or, the size of an epic painting by Cy Twombly that takes up a museum wall, so large and busy that there seem to be several dozen vignettes happening in the painting at the same time. Because I had so much space to fill up, I could make use of all that came my way. The things I listened to and looked at and read and admired—such as Brainard, Cain, and McGuire—got fed into the project’s reckless hunger. “La Riviera,” which you’re publishing, is about seeing Big Thief in concert in Madrid. There are poems about C.P. Cavafy and Emily Dickinson. There’s a poem about Twombly.
Matthew Tuckner
I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about the relationship between figurative language and clarity in your poems. I often look to your work to encounter metaphors and similes that use their vehicles to effectively clarify their tenors. Reading these three poems for examples, I found myself drawn to the description of water as “sullen and explosive, like a young horse,” or, in the same poem, the description of despair as “simple as a coin in his palm.” Do you have theories or rules that you espouse when it comes to crafting figurative language? How do you ensure a clarity of image in your poems?
Rick Barot
We can define clarity in a number of ways when it comes to poems, but most of the time there’s an implicit value given to clarity as a virtue. We prize clarity, and for good reasons. But it’s also the case that a lot of expressive energy can be produced when clarity is resisted or warped or withheld. I use a fancy phrase when I talk to my students about this distressing of clarity: functional distortion. Clarity and distortion are two stratagems among many that a poet can employ in a poem, using clarity in some areas and using distortion in others, in canny orchestration.
This balancing act between clarity and distortion was inspired by Reginald Shepherd’s essay “On Difficulty in Poetry,” which I’ve been teaching for many years now. In the essay, Shepherd usefully creates a taxonomy for different kinds of difficulty in poems—lexical difficulty, syntactic difficulty, formal difficulty, semantic difficulty, and so on. One of the things I learned from the essay is the implied notion that difficulty is a resource that a poet can strategically use in a poem. Probably because of the underlying importance of consensus in most workshop conversations—a consensus that demands that the poem at hand be legible to everyone in the room—we’ve come to think of difficulty as something that needs to be worked out of a poem. But it’s good to remember that difficulty can be an intended feature in a poem, not a mistake to be fixed.
Figurative language, whether it’s the small sleights-of-hand of my similes or the baroque metaphoric structures of Hart Crane’s poems, is part of the range of functional distortions that can intensify the reader’s experience of a poem’s story, a poem’s surfaces and depths. The poet W.S. Di Piero once characterized the still-life painter Giorgio Morandi in this way: “Morandi is a poet devoted to similitude complicated by unlikeness.” Metaphor, as I see it, is the unlikeness that brings the poem closer to similitude, closer to whatever truth it’s trying to apprehend.
Matthew Tuckner
If there is something that draws these three prose poems together, I would argue that it is a reflection on the particular textures (and burdens) of nostalgia. There is the litany of remembrances in “After Brainard.” There is the river in “La Riviera” that “flows like something silken through the stone city, a thousand years old.” There is the man in “Clear” who thinks “I can’t become a different person, so I will continue to act the same. Or, he thinks, I can’t become a different person, but I can act differently.” Considering this, I’m also interested in the reference to Svetlana Boym’s theories of nostalgia gestured at in your poem “Nectarine,” and the distinctions you make between a “lyric” nostalgia and a “perilous” nostalgia. What is the role of a lyric nostalgia in your writing practice and how do you keep it from boiling over into a perilous nostalgia?
Rick Barot
Svetlana Boym’s thinking about nostalgia, in her beautiful book The Future of Nostalgia, is worth parsing because it sheds light on some complicated things we’re grappling with these days—the social and political state of our country, for one. Boym proposes two kinds of nostalgia: restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia. She notes that restorative nostalgia “does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition,” also noting that restorative nostalgia “is at the core of recent national and religious revivals.” This is the kind of nostalgia that I referred to as “perilous,” because it yearns for an absolute return to the past. On the other hand, as Boym says, reflective nostalgia “dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity.” This kind of nostalgia revels in wistfulness and irony and “cherishes shattered fragments of memory.” Reflective nostalgia is full of lyric potential, and seems to me related to William Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry: “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”
A poet writes different kinds of poems for different reasons, and nostalgia can be one of those reasons. That’s certainly so for me. A lot of my poetry is driven by the need to inscribe experience—lived experience, imagined experience—into the concrete, hopefully lasting plane of language, when otherwise that experience would just fade away. Nostalgia can be an urgent part of this process, especially if you think of nostalgia as being an inextricable component of memory.
In the three poems you’re publishing, I can definitely see how nostalgia has a role in those poems. But to go back to our earlier discussion about the prose poem form: for me, the regular square box of the form is what gave the work of writing these three poems a thrilling impetus. Of course, a prose poem can take on various shapes on the page. But given the regular square shape that I’d chosen for all the poems I was writing, I then had to figure out how to create dynamic new arrangements within that square shape. Using the litany of Brainard’s “I remember” was one way. Capturing the modulating intensity of a rock concert was another way. And still another way was to draw a portrait of someone calmly thinking about the disarray of his own mind.
Matthew Tuckner
Lastly, your newest collection Moving the Bones came out last month. How does this new collection of prose poems both speak to and subvert the work in Moving the Bones? Do you consider yourself to be a writer of poems or a writer of poetry collections?
Rick Barot
One way of answering your question is to talk about two books that I’ve been reading. The first is Charles Wright’s Zone Journals. The book has an accumulating, diary-like energy, as though you were in front of a long scroll that depicted the changing of the seasons, the unfolding of a mind as it moved through time. This book has a wholeness that requires all its parts. I’m also reading Danez Smith’s Bluff, which feels like a gathering of poems sparked by a teeming variety of occasions and preoccupations. Each poem in Bluff has a stand-alone monumentality. I love both of these books, and they’re nothing like each other.
The manuscript of prose poems I recently completed is titled Shadow Machine. The book feels like an extension of the work I did in the pandemic sequence in Moving the Bones. Writing the 30 pieces of the pandemic sequence didn’t feel like long enough in that formal space, and so, I figured, why not write 75 more of these boxy little poems, and in a more headlong, amped-up way. Shadow Machine, though it’s comprised of so many different parts, does feel like an intentional collection, unlike Moving the Bones, whose individual poems I wrote without thinking about how they would relate to each other. A writer of poems or a writer of poetry collections: I’ve been both.