Catherine Barnett is the author of four poetry collections, including Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space (2024 Graywolf) and Human Hours (Believer Book Award, NYT “Best Poetry of 2018” selection). A Guggenheim fellow, she received a 2022 Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other recognitions. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, The NY Review of Books, The Yale Review, The Nation, Harper’s, and elsewhere. She teaches in NYU’s MFA Program and works as an independent editor.
The first time I interviewed Catherine Barnett was also the first time I had ever interviewed any author. It was the fall of 2018, I was in the first semester of my MFA (NYU, low residency) and Catherine had a new book out, The Human Hours (Graywolf, 2018). She is on the NYU faculty, and we’d gotten to know each other, so I thought this should go well. I sent her a series of questions. She suggested that I might want to “shake them up.” Which translated to rewriting them and a call which was clearly a learning opportunity for me. I mean this in the best way. Catherine Barnett is a brilliant poet, a poet’s poet, and a reader’s poet. And Catherine Barnett is a magnificent teacher of poets. In the process of conducting that interview, she taught me to read deeper, to think. It wasn’t about her or her collection, she was guiding me to be a better poet.
Throughout my studies and ever since, I experienced what all her students have come to expect: rigor and generosity. In her extraordinary fourth collection Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space (Graywolf, 2024), Catherine writes: “When I teach, I seem to let all twelve hearts beat inside my own.” I was fortunate to be one of those beating hearts, and to have been in the room when Catherine delivered a lecture on loneliness. It is this lecture that inspired the sequence of ten “Studies in Loneliness,” the brief lyric essays that course through Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space, providing a thrilling poetic ride through time, experience and thought.
This interview was conducted in a back-and-forth exchange over email while I traveled to Charlotte and then back to my home in Seattle, and while Catherine was teaching in Paris and Florence. And it went much more smoothly, I’ll add, than the last one. It seems I’ve learned. Yet, there is still so much to gain by listening to what Catherine Barnett has to say. And so much to love in her newest book of poetry.
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Heidi Seaborn: Catherine, after reading and re-reading your stunning fourth collection, Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space, and having the great fortune to see you read from it recently at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle, I was keen to talk with you once more about your work. Thank you for making the space for this conversation. As I write this question, there is a thunderstorm brewing—the perfect backdrop to discuss your poems, which Dianne Wiest describes as “charged, unpredictable, exquisite” and the jacket copy echoes as “like entering an electrically charged cloud.” Yet there is also a quiet repose in many of these poems. The result for me is a collection that reads like a great symphonic piece, modulating in tempo and emotion, much like the past several years that we have collectively lived through. How has the pandemic and the chaos of our times influenced your writing?
CB: During the pandemic I really couldn’t write. I spent a lot of time dreaming up ways to get out West to see my family and fretting, cursing, mastering Zoom (or being mastered by it). I started going on long, long walks, which brought me back to the page, circuitously. In his essay “A Poem Is a Walk,” which I took to heart (since I was writing so little!), A.R. Ammons says, “I take the walk to be the externalization of an interior feeling.” I gave myself variations on Bernadette Mayer’s 14-block sonnet exercise; I tried to get out of my head, pick up my pace, notice the world, limited as it was during those many months. I think walking is also a good antidote to chaos, which does not seem to abate. I walked so much I did my Achilles in, which sounds metaphorical though I mean it literally.
HS: Ah no! Speaking somewhat to the medical and metaphorical, the other day I read a story in The New York Times detailing new research that indicates people tend to be lonely in young adulthood and late in life and reiterating the Surgeon General’s warning about our nation’s epidemic of loneliness. I happened to have Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space at hand (because, of course!) and turned to the opening lines of “Studies in Loneliness, iii”:
“I take issue with all the studies saying beware of loneliness, avoid loneliness, it will speed your
death // I say it will speed your death only if you believe it’s a toxin. // Imagine loneliness
is a drug curing you of loneliness!”
It seems to me that Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space is that imagining. Not only in the sequence of ten lyrical “Studies on Loneliness” but throughout the collection, loneliness is imagined as everything from “the net beneath the trapeze act of love” to the “emptiness left by a death.” If you found yourself in conversation with Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, what would you say?
CB: I’ve just read a little bit more about Murthy, who says that he himself has experienced much loneliness. I appreciate his honesty, which, I believe, is one of the antidotes to loneliness—to be as authentic (and kind) as possible. Murthy says that few patients use the word “loneliness”—instead they say they feel invisible. I think we all have a deep human need to be seen—not judged, or objectified, but really seen (and heard). So, if you want to ease the “epidemic” Murthy talks about, just take a little extra time to notice and care for those around you—it will also make us better writers.
I’d like to ask Murthy why he’s so keen on telling people that loneliness—which is so common, so necessary, and which can be such a rich experience—will harm our health? That only makes people worry about it more. I’d also like to ask about social media and the brutal ways it intensifies an uncreative loneliness. I steer clear of social media, which may be why I have a more positive notion of loneliness than many people. A few years ago, I had an idea to set up a nonprofit organization that would fund my grad students to meet with older people, interview them, and then write their life story. I think this would, through conversation, art, connection, and making, ease the more painful forms of loneliness that sometimes accompany old age. A good writer—and my students are so good—could find a meaningful arc, I believe, in each and any life.
Murthy likens loneliness to a human drive—like hunger or thirst—that suggests you have a need, which is to seek company. I’d also say that the loneliness-hunger might also be exactly what you need to do your best creative work. Therefore, not to numb it away. Poetry is an intimate conversation that, as both writer and reader, can ease and make something rich out of this experience.
I wonder if he’d take issue with my “Studies in Loneliness.” I’d like to read his most informal, personal, and unpublished studies (and yours, too!).
HS: I love the idea for your non-profit. I hope you or someone makes that happen! It seems that writing plays a role in either embracing or combatting loneliness. I’m thinking of the lines from two of the “Studies in Loneliness”: “If you could describe this world, would that be a stay against loneliness?” and “Some of us write to appease loneliness, why else leave a mark? / I was here, words say, this is what it was like.” Both of which suggest that writing is an escape. I’m also thinking of Diane Seuss’s claim in a recent interview in The New Yorker that loneliness is “essential to being able to write,” and of Carl Phillips’s essay on loneliness in Poetry where he notes, “I’ve wondered lately if I require loneliness.” Is loneliness a necessary condition for writing and does the writing itself provide an antidote to loneliness?
CB: I wouldn’t say loneliness is a necessary condition for writing, just one not to fear but instead to make use of (as writers make use of and transform so many difficult conditions). And yes, I do think writing is an antidote to loneliness, so I realize there’s a kind of catch-22 paradoxical nature to my speaker’s claims that she loves loneliness even while we see her looking for ways to avoid it. Just today I was having a tiny espresso here in Florence, where I’m teaching, and I saw, written on the centuries-old wall across the narrow street, spray-painted in orange: I WAS HERE. I find this very moving. I love Jean Valentine’s question, in “Sanctuary,” which is a gorgeous poem about solitude, loneliness, connection: “What is it like for you there?” I think being asked this, and hearing (reading) people’s authentic answers—which is one of the many things poetry tries to do—is a way to reach into and through the loneliness to the actual individual. If ever you feel an unwanted loneliness, just ask yourself this same question and try to describe what it’s like for you there, where you are. (Or better yet, ask someone else.) This act of paying attention and of naming, and finding language to describe, can be very vivifying.
In your question, you ask if “writing is an escape.” No, that’s not what I mean; rather I think writing is a deepening of our reality: “If you could describe this world, would that be a stay against loneliness?” suggests the value of paying greater attention, which is far from escape.
The intimacy that comes from paying greater attention is something I’ve experienced myself, as well as something I experience in spades with my mother, who is so Keatsian that she’s always wondering how the trees are feeling, the lampposts, the half-open windows we pass on our walks. The phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whom I’ve read only superficially, talks about this, I think—the way the world looks back at us, which suggests a kind of silent shared existence and company. I believe he tries to dissolve the distinction between object and subject.
HS: The idea of objects taking on meaning or feelings seems to surface in the first poem “Studies in Loneliness, i” with the lines, “The main character in Cast Away befriends a volleyball. This is one sig- / nature of a lonely person—the personification of objects.”
And later:
In one of my favorite Carson McCullers stories, an old man drinks beer
In the morning. Abandoned by his wife, he grieves for five years until
he learns the science of love, which is to start with objects—a tree, a
rock, a cloud—and learn to love each one before trying to love a human being.
Objects are imbued with emotional weight throughout the collection. I’m thinking of the speaker’s borrowing of the mother’s shoes in “Morning of Departure” and the ice machine in the opening lines of “Studies in Loneliness, i.” These are objects that then reappear in different forms throughout the collection, echoing the emotional attachment to the human subject. And in the final poem, “Studies in Loneliness, x,” the sound of ice cubes falling from the ice machine comes to speak to not just the love for a specific human but for the speaker’s beloveds broadly. All of which is to say that it occurs to me that the speaker in your poems is not the old man in the McCullers story, but rather someone who loves people dearly, and is attentive to the objects that meld into their persona and memory. Are we fundamentally defined by the objects we love?
CB: Thanks for this careful reading. Though I wouldn’t say we’re defined by the objects we love, like children with their stuffed animals, I think we imbue both our own objects and the objects of others with meaning in a desperate attempt to push back against loss. Last winter, there was an amazing show at the Picasso Museum in Paris, which Sophie Calle filled with possessions removed from her apartment by professional auctioneers. While she listened in (and while someone else filmed the exchanges), the auctioneers cataloged Calle’s personal objects in a soulless way. Calle was curious about how her “life of objects,” which had meant so much to her, would be valued and described by strangers who perhaps had expertise as appraisers but who did not know their history. In the eerie film that was on view at the museum, Calle stretches out at the feet of the auctioneers as they callously describe the object in its barest terms; she follows them through her apartment as they describe, evaluate, and remove each item, nearly 500 of which ended up in the museum. (The others were put into storage; her apartment was emptied.) Calle ended up creating her own catalog that told the stories of 100 of the objects.
More than being defined by the objects we love, I’d argue that we’re defined by the things we’ve made—art and messes, love, and haste.
I’ve had to help clear out friends’ apartments after their deaths. The objects are both breath and ash. I find the objects both reassuring and terrifying, but I don’t feel they define the person who owned them. I think the Buddhists might say the objects own us.
HS: Yes, to being defined by the things we’ve made. And perhaps formed by the people who’ve helped make us, I might add. The speaker’s family is very present in all your work. In this book, the father’s death is captured in the poem “Hyacinth”:
My brother was on watch. “Hurry,” he’d said
until he was surrounded by sisters.
We were all silent.
Then the poem takes this turn:
I don’t know if my father forgave the years
I did not love him. Decades, even,
When I did not know I loved him.
That stanza is gutting. It captures all the regret many of us have—everything said and unsaid. Yet the poem turns again to discuss how the composting of human remains works, imagining the father feeding the soil of the mother’s hyacinth beds. To me this poem is such a Catherine Barnett poem—descriptive, reflective, then deflective. And unforgettable. What was your process of making “Hyacinth” like?
CB: Almost all of my poems go through endless revisions, so much so that the final draft (if there is such a thing) is often only tangentially connected to the first draft, which originates in my notebook. The first draft of this poem was about 15 lines and began: “Why do I smell rotting flowers?”
HS: Ha! In Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space, there are poems of elegy for the father and for a friend, and there are poems of pre-elegy for the mother and the self. Yet grief in these poems is surrounded by the quotidian (wearing a skort, visiting the dermatologist, the various references to shoes) and a deflective humor (again, the skort, the dermatologist, all the shoes!) that both buffer and brighten the emotional pain. When you are drafting a poem, are grief, dailiness, and humor present in that moment or do the various emotional threads appear in revision?
CB: Grief and dailiness: yes, quotidian details accompany, speak to, and soothe my various sadnesses. I’m committed to trying to notice the details that might help me stop time, simply by noticing. That might help me remember, simply by noticing. I think my humor, such as it is, comes from a sense of the absurdity of this get-up we find ourselves in. A question I’ve asked in a poem and that I hear myself asking over and over—if only to myself—is “who dreamed this up?” Just this evening I was talking with the wonderful poet Mark Bibbins about the beauty of mistakes, and we both seemed to agree that mistakes and humor are linked. Mark said poetry is an art of the mistake, by which I think he means the kind of instantaneous logic we invent when we misread a sign, for example—and I think humor is a little like this, instantaneous and simultaneous recombinations that push against expectation and bring small bursts of joy to the brain. I’m mostly baffled, and I try to let this state find its way to the page.
HS: Do you think humor is in short supply in the poetry world?
CB: Only if you define humor in a narrow way. There are all kinds of theories about humor, and as long as a writer isn’t trying too hard to be funny, I’d recommend reading them; they’re fascinating. I subscribe mostly to the incongruity theory, which has lots to do with derailing expectations. (I don’t like the superiority theory, in which people get pleasure from others’ misfortunes or through criticism of others.) I’d say there’s lots of humor in contemporary poetry—I suggest poets check out Matt Rohrer’s The Sky Contains the Plans for a very funny book. Strange as this might seem to say, I think Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, serious as it is, has such humor, as does the late Jay Hopler’s wonderful book Green Squall and his posthumous collection Still Life, written as he was suffering from terminal cancer. Terrance Hayes’s “Bob Ross Paints Your Portrait” is dead serious and wonderfully funny, haunting. I think Jen Levitt’s debut The Off-Season is funny, self-deprecating in a non-performative way, and intimate.
Just yesterday I opened the tiny Shambhala pocket edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems (which I’ve carried in my knapsack for well over fifteen years) and saw the humor laced right into the dread and grief:
Funny–to be a Century–
And see the People–going by–
HS: In this century, we need humor! Assuming one has a sense of humor to begin with, are there any preparation or craft exercises or recommended reading that you would suggest for injecting humor and self-deprecation into one’s writing?
CB: Take a live improv class! Practice desperate honesty!
HS: Your wonderful poem “Nicholson Baker & I” opens with the speaker seated next to the writer Nicholson Baker at dinner and ends with a reference to his book A Box of Matches, which I adore. The character in that book begins every day by lighting a fire. Is there a daily routine that you follow to engage the muse?
CB: I try to write every morning. Lately I’ve slacked off and am the worse for it! I write freely, with no agenda, just to try to figure out what it is I’m feeling and thinking—without overthinking. This discipline, along with daily walks, helps remind me to pay attention to both the interior and exterior worlds. I try to show up for 21 days straight; if I don’t skip even one day, often the muse returns to keep me company. I’m grateful when she does, skittish as we both are.
HS: At The Adroit Journal, we are fortunate to have a broad following with young and emerging writers. As a teacher of writers, what excites you about the work you are seeing in the upcoming generation of poets?
CB: Another wonderful question. I am very moved by their commitment to trying to say what it’s like to be young, aware, wary, confident, and full of doubt, as most young people are. In this they’re like the rest of us but even more so. Because they’ve grown up online, their minds are super quick, their interior human algorithms buzz with invention, juxtaposition, simultaneities, and wholly new metaphors.
HS: Well, may we both keep buzzing too! Catherine, I always enjoy our conversations, whether in person or virtually, and thank you for this lively back and forth conversation about loneliness, love, grief, humor, writing, walking and your marvelous and provocative new collection Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space.
CB: Thank you, Heidi, for your good company, on and off the page!
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Heidi Seaborn is the winner of The Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors Prize in Poetry. She’s the author of three award-winning books/chapbooks of poetry: An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and Bite Marks. Recent work in Agni, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Financial Times of London, Poetry Northwest, Plume, The Slowdown and elsewhere. Heidi serves as Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and holds degrees from Stanford and NYU.