Interview- Barker

An interview with Brian Barker

-by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum: Even though this poem emanates in large part from your childhood experience(s) with racism, there is a mature and reflective voice active throughout the poem. I often find myself negotiating this sort of perspective rather unsuccessfully. But here it works very well. How do you think this poem manages to navigate this rocky terrain so successfully?

Brian Barker: Thanks. I hope it’s successful. I think that when you’re writing about childhood that this is always an issue: how to negotiate the adult consciousness and the child’s perspective. Honestly, I’m not sure it’s possible to capture the child’s perspective purely since there is always the mature and reflective voice, or poet, behind the scenes shaping the poem. The question is how much of the latter to let filter through, how much you’ll let the adult, the poet, onto the stage. With this poem, I knew that there was a certain complexity of emotion and thought that I wanted that would be impossible to capture with just the child’s perspective. I’m thinking mostly of the more meditative parts of the poem—the meditations on defeat, on poverty, on work—and moments of high lyricism or irony.

So the challenge is how adult consciousness can punctuate the poem, or surface within the child’s perspective, without it feeling contrived or heavy handed. My model for this was, and is, Elizabeth Bishop’s "In the Waiting Room." Part of the power of Bishop’s poem is that it establishes a kind of vulnerability through the simplicity of the child’s perspective—"It was winter. It got dark / early. The waiting room was full of grown-up people, arctics and overcoats, / lamps and magazines." But the poem also needs the long-view of the adult to describe the shock, the out-of-body experience the child feels when she realizes, among other things, her own smallness and the largeness of humanity: "I said to myself: three days / and you’ll be seven years old. / I was saying it to stop / the sensation of falling off / the round, turning world / into cold, blue-black space." Bishop’s poem needs both the child and the adult. It becomes an issue, then, of striking the right balance, finding the right tension between the two views. Bishop does it masterfully. I hope that I’m a fraction as successful in "Crow Gospel."

AMK: I’m curious how much of the poem is, in your mind, a retelling of experience or a transmission of memory. How much of the poem is, in fact, about this "juxtaposition?" How dedicated do you feel this poem is to "the truth?" Did it concern you as you wrote the poem that readers might question a young boy intelligent enough to ask God to "please Hoss, hollow me out before they do"?

BB: Good question. I’m not sure we can separate the two. Any retelling of experience depends on the transmission of memory. For example, we know that if three people witness the same event, there stories of what happened will most likely vary somewhat, and those variations will probably grow over time. That is to say, I see memory as something that is in flux or fluid. In this regard then, the parts of the poem that are autobiographical have been shaped by memory and time. How I remember things happening I’m sure is not how I would find that they actually happened if I were able to return to the moment.

I think that this notion of transmission of memory is separate from the idea of "the truth." That is, there are things in the poem that happened and I wrote them the way I remembered them. There are other things that happened and that I deliberately embellished in the retelling. And there are still other aspects of the poem that I made up entirely. All of this is to say, I guess, that I believe pretty strongly that the poet is not a memoirist or journalist who must write "the truth." The poet’s only fidelity is to the poem itself and not to how things may or may not have happened. I try to pay attention to the larger, universal truth or truths—what the poem is trying to show us about living on this earth. To get these you sometimes have to deviate from actual events, to get lost in the world of myth and imagination. As William Stafford famously said, "You must revise your life."

AMK: Finally, the poem often makes use of repetition. The crows, obviously, come in and out of the poem. Various characters such as the teacher and the clan member, the hands in the second section, the word "it" in the third section, "I" in the sixth, and, of course, "Defeat" comes up over and over. The first word to describe this repetition that comes to my mind is "refrain," but these don’t seem to work as refrains typically do. I’m wondering how you regard the use of repetition in this poem. Is it a musical element? A way to keep a reader engaged in a longer poem?

BB: In certain places in the poem, repetition is used as a kind of musical element, for rhythm and emphasis, as in the word "it" in the third section. But the repetition of certain symbols, ideas, and characters feels more tied up in the poem’s elastic structure and my approach to the subject matter. When I started writing this poem, I was completely paralyzed by the largeness of central subject matter: racism. Every time I tried to take it head on, it was like running into a cinderblock wall. So I started trying to think of ways to refract the subject matter, ways that I could come at it from an angle or angles. (As Dickinson reminds us, "Tell the truth but tell it slant.") This led me to make a few rules for myself that would keep me from moving in too straight of a line. One was that each section of the poem had to try to be different from the one that preceded it. Another, somewhat related, was to try to mix high lyricism and narrative modes. And finally, there would be certain concrete and abstract images central to the narrative—the crows, the mountain, defeat, etc—that would surface and resurface throughout the poem. By allowing these some fluidity to move in and out of the poem, I think I gave them the freedom to change, and I gave myself the freedom to move away from and return to the main story. In the end, I hope this approach helps to keep the reader engaged, but it wasn’t my initial motivation. As always, I was just trying to get the poem right for myself. Only later did I hope that someone might find something interesting enough about it to read the whole thing!