by Barbara Crooker
Cascade Books, Eugene, Oregon
2013
ISBN 13: 978-1-62032-940-5
Purchase GOLD on Amazon
An Email Interview with BARBARA CROOKER by Caroline LeBlanc
CL: Barbara, thank you for inviting me to review Gold on the Poetry Matters blog. The
interviews on your webpage, which I suggest interested readers consult, are informative
and enjoyable so I hope I can meet the challenge of exploring your work in a
new way in this interview.
While your
poems are full of gracious awe, they are not what I would call overly Christian
or religious, even though Gold is
published by The Poiema Poetry Series, which “presents the work of gifted poets
who take Christian faith seriously.”
Carl Jung said, “If our religion is based in wonder, our chief emotion
will be gratitude,” and that is what I find in your poems—wonder &
gratitude, despite the great challenges of your life, including a spouse who
abandoned you into single motherhood, a
stillbirth, caring for your autistic son and dying mother. The poems in Gold are spiritual and sensual,
often moving in ways that don’t readily seem to go together. Would you say something about how you think images
of sensuality, spirituality and religion are related and their place in poems? Also, what advice would you offer the “true
believer” in any system of belief –secular or religious—about how to engender
poems with passion without becoming dogmatic?
BC: This is a really great question. I’m glad that you noticed, but were not
bothered by, the lack of overt religious sentiment in these poems. I love the Jung quote, and also this one by
Wendell Berry, “Be joyful, even though you have considered all the facts.” For while it might seem that my life has
included more than my fair share of sorrow, the fact is, all of our lives are a
mixture of sorrow and joy. And they’re
intertwined—you can’t have light without shadow. To me, the fact that we live in these bodies
is something holy indeed, and our sensual lives are part of our spiritual
lives. I confess that I don’t understand
some parts of Christianity that want to deny the flesh, and its desires. It seems to me that in doing so, we would be
saying that part of God’s creation is flawed.
But God don’t make junk, as the saying goes, and in celebrating our
sensuality we are also celebrating His creation.
Now,
how to write religious poetry without being dogmatic or didactic? Ah, there’s
the rub. Political poetry, too, falls
into this category. I’m not ever sure
I’ve succeeded, but that’s what I’m aiming for, poems that are deeply
religious/spiritual, but not narrow and rigid or tied to any one religious
tradition. I am a practicing Lutheran,
but like to think of myself as a “Zen Lutheran,” as I borrow a lot from other
traditions in my own spiritual practice, particularly the Buddhist concept of
mindfulness.
The
other part of your question, “how to engender poems with passion,” speaks to
something I also wrestle with. I work equally
hard on all of my poems, often going through fifty drafts or more. But some of them are “dead on arrival”; i.e.,
they never get up off the page and sing and dance. Others arrive almost fully formed, and full
of life. In both cases, I try to bring
everything I know about craft to bear, but some poems rise up, while others
don’t. The ones in the latter category I
winnow out when I’m putting together book manuscripts. But back to “engendering poems with passion”:
I want my poems to touch other people,
to mean something to somebody. I don’t
want to write mere decoration or intellectual doodlings.
CL:
“Ambrosia” strikes which me as a good example of how you find a voice and tone
that avoids getting mired in or clichéd about the difficult subject matter of many
poem in Gold, i.e., your mother’s
dying process and death. “Ambrosia”
is a bittersweet celebration of life even as your mother increasingly leaves
this life. Images of complex, robust
foods suggest the equally robust woman who enjoyed them. Then lines
6 & 7 take us to “simple [food], a sun-warm/tomato or peace” and the poem
turns as you introduce us to an 85 pound woman, still robust in spirit, but not
in body. A woman who refuses to settle
for a bland life and, even in her diminishment, finds ambrosia. Would you speak about the craft of taking the
reader through intense suffering, without becoming maudlin, and into
celebration, without becoming trite or clichéd?
BC:
Well, there’s the rub again, how to write poems that deal with death and dying
without being trite and maudlin. Your
question is an excellent analysis of this poem; you are seeing exactly what I’m
trying to do. It’s taken me many years
to get to this point, to feel that I no longer have to apologize for my subject
matter, which is often domestic, and unafraid to sail on the knife-edge between
sentiment (which is earned) and sentimentality (which is not). I want to take it right to the edge, but not
fall in. I needed to write about our
journey, but I didn’t want to descend into bathos, and it seemed that food was
a way to keep it simple, yet profound.
I’ve
also realized, in doing readings from this book, that there are more poems
about food than I noticed when I was putting the book manuscript together. I think perhaps it was because there was
nothing that I could do to take away my mother’s suffering, to stem the tide,
to stop her decline, but what I could
do was cook, or bring her what she was craving, like Dunkin Donuts and Peeps.
And so I did.
I
was actually afraid, when I started submitting this manuscript, that editors
would look at the subject matter (dying mother, grieving daughter) and turn
away, but, in fact, two presses offered me contracts.
CL:
We enter “Goddess” through women’s art & fashion, jumps from
ancient love goddesses to a modern embodiment, moves to the more obscure
“Enheduanna, the first poet,” whose words connect the poet to “the fabric of
time.” In the middle of the seventh
line, the focus turns to your own and your friend’s loss of your personal mothers. Then the poem returns to goddesses, this time
Persephone and Demeter and the reversal of their archetypal relationship that
your losses are. Yet you and your friend
are sisters of sorts in this “unmothered” state and from “black caftans” the
poem travels “across town” where cherry blossom petals wrap the earth and
transform into a ballerina’s silk ribbons that are “strong/enough to keep her
on her toes/as long as she needs to remain en
pointe.” All in eighteen lines. Other poems in Gold take us on similar twists and turns.
“Goddesses”
moves from institutions and monuments, to mythology, to personal loss, to
nature out of which an image of true strength evolves. On your web page,
Shirley Stevens discusses your use of metaphor, and writes that James Geary
“maintains that metaphor breaks up common relationships and reorganizes
uncommon combinations.” Would you tell us about how you have arrived
at a point where you can combine images that could easily be no more than
fragmented lists into metaphors, even conceits, that birth such organic poems?
BC: Again, what a terrific close reading you’ve
done; you’ve completely delineated what I’ve attempted to do. I’m not sure I can adequately describe how
I’m able to do this, other than I’m trying to write the kind of poems that I
want to read, whether it’s religious poetry that transcends merely retelling
what’s in scripture already (a pet peeve of mine in sermons!), or lyric poetry
that rises above a simple lists of images.
I’ve been working hard at this for about forty years, and one of the
things I’m always trying to do is “push the envelope,” go deeper, have more
layers, without losing my “ideal reader,” who I imagine to be my former
neighbor, Joan, a woman without a college degree, but who’s smart and
well-read. She says she loves my work
because for her, it’s like sitting down with me and a cup of coffee. I want to keep that connection, while at the
same time, I’m always trying to do things like enhance the music or the rhythm,
or, as in this poem, throw a lot of balls up in the air (goddesses, ancient
poets, the loss of our mothers, the cherry blossoms) and still have them drop
gracefully into my hands at the end at the end of the poem.
On
a more practical level, many years ago I started giving myself permission to
start poems with really awful prose, what Anne Lamott calls “the shitty first
draft.” I typically write large, edit
small, amassing as much material as I can, then chip away at it, until nothing
but the poem remains. In revision, I try
to put pressure on the language, mining for metaphor. I also believe in serendipity; this poem
began when I was part of a group reading at the National Museum for Women in
the Arts in Washington, DC, where the exhibit on Mary McFadden was also being
held. One of the other readers was Pat
Valdata, and we had that conversation about our mothers, plus we’d been in a
symposium together previously for the Mezzo Cammin Women Poets’ Timeline, where
she’d presented a paper on Enheduanna. I
was staying with another poet, Rosemary Winslow, who organized the reading, and
she and I walked the Tidal Basin in the rain, gasping at the cherry
blossoms. All of this became material. .
. .
CL:
As an older woman, yet not so old MFA graduate with a limited background in
literature, I am drawn to “Weather Report” and “Very Long Afternoons” where you
write about those voices that “[screech] not
good enough” and the feeling of being “late out of the gate, plodding in
the back.” Clearly, the struggle continues despite your
many publications and prizes. And, as is often the case in your poems,
someone else’s writing and nature offer ways to move beyond your angst.
In the spirit of Rilke’s Letters
to a Young Poet, would you compose a letter to us, especially us older-
young poets, working to find our voice and place in the writing world?
BC:
Dear
Poets,
First of all, you can’t go wrong going back and re-reading Rilke; I think he’s said many, many wise things about the writing journey. Second, here’s a dirty little secret: the struggle always continues. You never feel “good enough.” But here’s the thing, you have to keep trying. It’s a journey, not a destination.
Let
me also recommend to you the virtue of persistence. I’m constantly stumbling over articles with
titles like, “How to Keep Writing After You Get Your MFA,” and I think,
“Huh? What’s up with that? If you’re a writer, you write.” Some of the MFA programs seem to offer a great deal of praise to
writers while they’re enrolled, but then they face the “real world,” where it’s
pretty much a constant stream of rejection, and it’s hard to keep going. One of the things I was writing about in the
two above-mentioned poems was the sense of self-confidence I see in new MFA
writers that those of us who haven’t come up in these programs lack. Or maybe I wasn’t there when these genes
where handed out. But I dwell in the
land of self-doubt. And then I keep
going.
So
let’s hear it for perseverance. There
are lots of people out there with talent.
But not all of them persist, keep going, and keep growing in their
craft. With autism (my son’s
disability), we try to extinguish “self-stimming repetitive behaviors.” With writing, we call this an asset—the poems
go out, they get rejected, you send them back out again. In time, you start to see their deficits, and
you revise. And then you revise
again. All the while, you’re constantly
reading, and you’re setting the bar higher with your own work.
And
you rejoice in the joy of “the made thing,” rather than looking for externals,
like publications and prizes. To quote
Raymond Carver, that’s just “gravy.”
CL: Unlike many of your poems, such as “Plentitude,”
which offer indirect political commentary, “The Burren” and “Stones,” two of
the last few poems in Gold, offer
more direct commentary on political correctness and injustice. “Stones” in particular calls to mind Eavan
Boland’s poetry and essays about the Irish famine. What went into this shift in the camera lens
for you? What are your thoughts on when to
use a more direct or indirect methods of commentary in one’s poems?
BC: I wish I had something pithy to say here,
that I actually controlled the
process of writing poems, but really, the material chose me (and thus the focus)
rather than the other way around. Again,
there was serendipity—I was in
Ireland, so I was immersed in the history of what I was seeing (I do a lot of
background reading when I travel). I saw
the young woman who looked so much like my friend Clare, and that flipped me
back into her sorrows. I’m pretty sure I
wrote this poem a year or so after
the actual trip, and that I was writing from photographs I’d taken. The European Robin incident (again,
serendipity) seemed almost mystical, and I very much wanted to have it appear
in a poem. I’ve been reading Eavan
Boland for years and I’m sure she’s an influence, although not a direct
one. Most of the material in “Stones”
came from the display material on the wall at the Famine Cottage site, which we
toured with a young couple from eastern Europe.
They were in tears, as they didn’t know anything about the politics
behind the lack of relief during The Great Hunger. (The “undeserving poor” of that time.) My background is Scottish and Italian, but
one of my Scottish forebears was evicted during the Highland Clearances and
ended up in Ireland just in time for the Famine, so that made it personal. But my left-leaning tendencies were shaped
during the protests on the Vietnam War, and although supposedly we grow more
conservative as we age, I don’t see that happening. Again, I’d like to tie this into my religious
beliefs; I’m a peace and social justice Christian who’s feeling hopeful again
these days, partly because of journals like Sojourner’s,
and partly because of the stance taken by the new Pope, Francis.
Anyway,
I’m not sure I’ve answered you vis-a-vis the close focus lens or the wide angle
one. I try and listen to the poem and
see what it wants to become; sharpening the vision seemed to be the right thing
for these two poems. Political poetry is
really tricky; you don’t want to be shrill or didactic. I hope that the imagery saves both of these
poems.
CL: You have said that you often revise a poem
fifty times before sending it out. And
that you send many poems out and get many rejections. But an amazing number of your poems have been
published and either nominated for and/or won awards. On a very practical level, would you please
share how you track you poems: their
revisions, submissions, rejection or acceptance and eventual publication?
BC: In this digital age of Excel Spreadsheets,
websites that track these things for you, etc. etc., I'm as low-tech as you can
go--I use a very simple method of 3 X 5 cards. Each poem has its own
card, with a note at the top as to when and where it was written, plus a date
for every revision. Each journal I submit to has a card, with a list of
the poems I've submitted each time written on it. When I send a batch of
poems out, I enter the journal and the date on each poem card. Every
week, I note how long the poems have been out. When I hit 12 weeks, I
double-check the response time at the journal, and query if appropriate.
I've been at this a long time, coming up at a time when double-submitting was
frowned on, but I'm doing it more and more these days. When a poem is
taken, I put a little "p" with a circle on the journal card--that
gives me a sense of what this particular journal seems to like. But then,
I'm often wrong--in a group of five, I might have four poems I think they'd
like, plus a filler. Sometimes, they take the filler.
CL:
Do you have any other words of wisdom for our blog readers?
BC:
Only to read everything you can get your hands on. Gerald Stern has said you
should read 100 books of poetry before you begin writing. I’d add to this that then you should go out
and read some more. . . .
CL: Thank you, Barbara, for your poetry and the
time you’ve given for this interview.
Barbara Crooker is a widely published, award winning
poet. Her fourth book, GOLD (Cascade Books, 2013) was selected by The Christian Century as one of
the five best poetry books of 2013.
Crooker’s web page (http://barbaracrooker.com/)
contains the impressive list of her publications and awards, as well as a
number of older reviews and interviews definitely worth reading. Her poetry is frequently posted online and read on radio, including on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac. She is a consummate poetry writer, reviser
and manuscript submitter who wrestles with self-doubt and literary rejections
like the rest of us; a mature writer
whose poetry is rooted in her daily life.
* * * * *
The poems in GOLD are meditations on matter and physical existence as our mortal vehicles for engaging eternal realities such love, loss, mourning and remembering. These lyrical, narrative poems navigate human loss without sentimentality or bitterness. The cycles of nature, the transience of physicality is at the same time a source of the poet’s suffering, joy, comfort, and poems. Crooker seamlessly weaves personal with archetypal perspectives, connecting disparate images into richly layered metaphors—most in free verse poems that read as comfortable narratives with easy, conversational rhythms.
The fifty-five poems in
GOLD are divided into four untitled
sections. The majority of poems,
particularly in the first two sections, are elegies for the poet’s mother,
recounting the path from her mother’s diagnosis through her dying, and the
poet’s grief during the entire process.
Poems in the third section seek comfort and perspective in multigenerational
realties, art, current relationships and events that give the poet’s life
meaning. The fourth section expands the
focus on life’s hungers, injustices and paradoxes.
“Plentitude,” a
multilayered poem in the book’s first section, is an example of how Crooker weaves
images through skillful associations and turns in the text. The first lines invite the reader in with homely
images of warm sun, honey, “hands [that] curl/around a mug of tea,” both a
“benediction” and a “reprieve” from the poet’s stress due to her mother’s
illness and the lack of services for her autistic son. Her troubles, named but not dwelled upon, are
quieted by “the happiness that comes/from working again, even though
rejections/…[are] thicker than snowflakes”—the poet’s cue to turn. “Winter’s
waiting…its breath/on the back of the wind. This is a bit of respite/before the
storms roll in”—storms of life, death, nature, mentioned but contained by a
quick turn to the “blue/mountains [that] cup me in their hands,” just as the
poet earlier held her cup of tea. The last
two line of the poem are metaphorical mirrors its first lines, finishing the
poem’s imagistic bookends with a “lucent afternoon/ and a spigot of birdsong
[that] fill my bowl to the brim.” Many
poems in the book enact such imagery of embrace and nesting with these kinds of
turns and returns.
“Grief,” in the book’s
second section, turns allusions to the river Styx, the Greek afterworld,
earthly life and mindfulness inside out. For the poet, “Grief/is a river you
wade in until you get to the other side [i.e. life]…/[where] there are apples,
grapes, walnuts,/ and the rocks are warm from the sun. ” In Greek mythology, it is the dying who cross
the river Styx to the underworld, which for heroes are the Elysian fields of
beauty and bounty. For Persephone, Hades
was a land without her mother, an images in “Goddesses” (two poems later) where
the poet writes that her loss is like
living “Persephone and Demeter/in reverse.”
In “Grief” the poet’s personal loss corrupts one of Thich Naht Hahn’s
classic techniques of mindfulness—embracing difficult emotions tenderly as you
would an infant until you can release them.
“I’m going to stay here/in the shallows with my sorrow, nurture it/like
a cranky baby, rock it in my arms./I don’t want it to grow up, go to school,
get married./It’s mine.” Crooker,
acutely aware of the comforts and bounty waiting for her among the living,
roundly rejects them in her sorrow. Her
terror over her mother’s death freezes her; she stands in the river “growing
colder, until every inch/of my skin is numb. I can’t cross over.” The collision and confounding of personal,
spiritual and mythological images in this poem enacts the psychological chaos
of intense grief. The poem creates a
sense of the poet’s suspended animation in her desperate effort to deny that her
mother is really “gone.”
“Soft” in section
three, is one of the poems that celebrates the poets return to life and love. The poet’s fascination with the pleasures of
physical love still available in aging bodies is one of the pleasant surprises
in this book that could have easily been formulaic in its dogma and
darkness. “I don’t want a younger man with a buff body,”
the poem begins, with “the sine curve of his buttock, the way he doesn’t/yet
know that sorrow’s going to find him.” The poet wants “a man with a gut like a chair
cushion, something/…to hold on to, sparse silver/hairs springing out of his
chest and groin.” In “Soft” the poet
embraces the sensate details of the body with the same specificity and rich
imagery as so many of her other poems recount details in nature. The poet and her mate are a matched pair. She writes, “My body, too, loosens, sags, the
skin letting go,/…[the] sludge in my blood, crumble in my bones.” Yet, despite the “erosion” of their years and
their sheets, “under the covers, in the dark, I can edit him back to the boy/he
was, the one I never knew.” The poem
ends with the kind of acceptance and wisdom gained in a happy, long
marriage. “Some nights/ we can. Some nights we can’t. Let’s praise/what’s still working. This is every body’s story.” A woman of any age can suffer the loss of her
mother, understand a daughter’s grief, but only a woman of a certain age, with
the experience of a satisfying long term love relationship, can write and fully
appreciate a poem such as “Soft.”
Section four broadens
the lens of this collection of poems. In
“Sugar” the poet’s mother has become a hungry ghost which could devour her
daughter. “Sugar” is followed by several
more sensual poems of love and longing, a writer’s doubts and struggles,
personal and political betrayals. The
last three poems connect images of food, the metaphorical heart of so many other
poems, with the generations and the cosmos.
“Pistachios” is the unassuming, penultimate poem of the book. The reader who has traveled the book knows
that the first line, “They are already half-cracked, aren’t they,” refers to a
Pistachio and the preceding poems about grief’s obsessions. A tongue-in-cheek quality tints the line. Crooker’s
capacity for captivating and combining unusual images shows up by line two,
“the tongue/ of the nut peeping out.”
Then, a trademark leaping turn from the nut in hand to a Vancouver
museum sculpture of “First Man curled in a clam shell, Raven/perched on top,
waiting for it to crack open.” Not only
does the setting shift, the content moves from personal to archetypal where the
poet engages the reflected personal question in its archetypal shell. “If I had known then/ how much sorrow lay
ahead, was yet to be borne,/could I have let my heart open like that?” The line break on “borne,” plays on the
larger theme of the poem, the birth of the Human race, even the poet’s birth
(which some say we choose) and certainly the birth of her devotion to her dying
mother, for the choice to not be fully present is always open to us. From
contemplating birth and the (green) pistachio, the poet wanders into eight
lines of musings about other qualities of green: “things newly minted,” spring grass, things “unformed, unripe, even envy/is
jealous of green, its freshness, its hope.”
The obscure green flash that sometimes happens at certain sunsets brings
us back to the pistachio, how it, like the sun or a person, can slip “perfectly
back into its shell, although you/ can never quite click the lid, tuck in the
world’s/ sorrows …once the hinge/ is broken.”
In the last two lines, the poem turns again, taking the reader from a
morose image of a broken world into an image of perspective: “and the crack that‘s in everything/has let
the light back in.” Leonard Cohen fans
will recognize the adaptation of his song lyric from Anthem. There are all kinds
of cracks in this poem and in life and if we can find the crack that lets the
light in, we can survive and grow despite life’s imperfections, its cruelest
losses and deepest grief.
In this review, I’ve
focused how Crooker’s uses turns and seeming disparate images to braid the
ordinary and the extra ordinary in poems
that easily engage yet pull the reader into the depths of craft and experience.
I have to admit that, when I realized
that GOLD was published as part of a
Christian poetry series, I had second thoughts about my promise to review it. For a number of reasons, I have not been on
friendly terms with western religions in many years. But a promise is a promise and my commitment
was more than rewarded by the poems in GOLD. The book is a comfortable and comforting
read for the religious and non-religious seeker alike.
