A Conversation with Rick Barot
BY HUA XI
Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. His fourth book of poems, The Galleons, was published by Milkweed Editions and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His earlier collections include The Darker Fall, Want, and Chord, all published by Sarabande Books. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Stanford University. He lives in Tacoma, Washington and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University. His newest book of poems, Moving the Bones, was published by Milkweed Editions this year.
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In Rick Barot’s latest collection, everyday observations of people lying in the grass, or the waiting room of a car dealership, or the way a small plant wraps itself around a pencil are infused with a profound lyricism. Barot’s poetry engages deeply with the world around it while wrestling with deeper philosophical questions of who we are and what our lives mean. I was honored to have the chance to speak with Barot about how these questions resonate throughout his latest collection, Moving the Bones. This newest work has a sense of deep isolation, particularly in a section of thirty prose poems beginning “During the pandemic.” Yet this isolation is not cynical or despairing, but is instead accompanied by a sense of searching in the world. This book places the relationship between the self and the world at the forefront, repeatedly capturing how solitude can bring one closer to life and vice versa. I spoke here to Barot about the self, others, and that distance in between which encloses so much love and beauty. – Hua Xi
Hua Xi: I am struck by a poem in your book in which the speaker describes a Rembrandt painting. Rembrandt of course is widely known for his many self-portraits, and this poem of yours is titled “My Rembrandt,” in the possessive. There are many layers of the self here, including Rembrandt’s self, yourself, the self you see in the painting. Could you talk about how you saw yourself in Rembrandt’s painting?
Rick Barot: For years I’d pass Rembrandt’s self-portraits in museums and vaguely register the moods they conveyed—bombast, or wit, or calm, or resignation—and that was all. I’ve been studying art since I was an undergraduate, but I never paid much attention to Rembrandt’s self-portraits because they seemed cliché. It seemed enough to know these paintings existed, but they didn’t require actual study. A more intent engagement with the paintings didn’t begin until I saw the self-portrait that’s in the collection of the Frick Museum in New York City. This is the painting I write about in my poem “My Rembrandt.”
What struck me when I first saw the painting was the fact that Rembrandt was 52 years old when he created it—the same age I was when I encountered it. In the painting, Rembrandt portrays himself as an eminent-looking figure. He wears ostentatious clothing and an amused expression on his heavy, worn face. I immediately understood the ironic grandiosity of the painting—it was the ironic grandiosity of middle age. When Rembrandt made the painting, his reputation and his finances were in turmoil, despite the pleased air he conjured up in the painting. That complex self-awareness seemed to be embodied in the painting—and this moved me, and led me to look closely at his other self-portraits, to see how the “I” recorded in them changed over many decades.
HX: As I think about the self in your poems, I think of your lines, “I was alone. I had chosen to be… what I loved and what I chose did not always correlate in my character.” It comes from the middle section of your book, which is a sequence of prose poems that all begin “During the pandemic.” There is a sense here, and throughout, of physical and emotional isolation. How do you understand the isolation of the speaker and how solitude shaped this book’s perspective?
RB: The “During the Pandemic” sequence you refer to tries to describe the seeming paradox that I felt during lockdown: it felt good to be alone, to have my own space and mind, but it also felt awful to be away from the people in my life during a time of crisis. Therefore, the isolation in that case felt very specific. It was a product of the pandemic. But in general, for a writer, for an artist, the need to be solitary must often feel like a vocational prerequisite and a character flaw at the same time. In the decades I’ve studied and loved other writers and artists, one of the things I’ve realized about their lives is that they’ve had to find a peripheral position from which they could view things and make their art. What I mean is, it’s really hard to have a perspective on something when you’re in the thick of it. And so you find a place to stand at the margin, and there you get to see. Sometimes that position is a given of an artist’s identity—being brown, being queer, for example. But I think every artist has to inhabit that place of periphery somehow when they write, even if it means just standing some distance away from what’s familiar and seeing it from an odd, new angle.
HX: Tell me about the decision to include your “During the Pandemic” sequence in the middle of this collection. There are poems in other formats about other subjects before and after this sequence. How do you understand the relationship between this pandemic section and the rest of your collection?
RB: I wrote the 30 prose poems in the “During the Pandemic” sequence in the spring of 2020, very early in the first lockdown, when there was so much dread and uncertainty about the coronavirus. A lot of dying was happening elsewhere, while I had the privilege of sheltering by myself in Tacoma, Washington, teaching on Zoom, seeing my family and friends on Zoom, doing readings and other literary things on Zoom, going to the grocery store in the middle of the night to avoid crowds, taking long walks at the track of the nearby high school, going around and around in melancholy circles. On some days I reveled in my solitude, and on other days that solitude felt like desperate isolation. I wrote the pandemic poems in the Notes app of my phone, just playing around with feelings and perceptions and bits of language, not thinking I was writing “real” poems. But at some point I realized the pieces did have merit, and so I worked on them in earnest. In that way, the poems became an escape from the dread and uncertainty, a focused pocket of intensity within this chaotic other pocket of intensity. The “During the Pandemic” sequence is the middle section of Moving the Bones because, like the pandemic itself, it was a disruption that became the center of my life, of everyone’s lives. The sequence was also a disruption in this other way: I hadn’t written prose poems for over 20 years, and so the work felt thrilling and challenging, as though I had come up with a new way of being a writer.
HX: It’s interesting to think about these poems of pandemic isolation being at the center of your book. At the same time, I think a distinct characteristic of your work is in your profound observation of strangers. How do you think about this relationship between the “I” and the “other” in your work?
RB: In the many years I’ve been a poet, I’ve had different notions about why I write poems, why I’m an artist. It’s possible that my notion of myself as a poet has changed from book to book, informed by the experiences and thoughts that led to the poems in each one. These days, I like thinking of the phrase in relation to as a starting point for my work. That is, making art for me now begins with the urge to understand myself in relation to the people around me, to the realities around me, and to the realities within me. I suppose this impetus for making art is why anyone would make art at all, and why I’ve made art for much of my life.
This impetus has a specific clarity for me now, in middle age, when my vantage point feels expansive in all directions and is hopefully less occluded by the ego of earlier selves. In Moving the Bones, there are love poems for the beloved and love poems for my parents. There’s the prose-poem sequence, which is finally about the isolation and solitude of the pandemic—that is, the sequence is a kind of love poem to the self. And there are poems about strangers—a couple lying in a field, a woman in a car dealership waiting room. All of these poems, I think, are finally about being aware of how fleeting everything is. Or, as I say in one of the poems, about being “astounded at the transport of the body / from one end of time to another.”
HX: Your poems observing strangers are both fascinating and distinctive. I want to know more about them. Are the observations of others in your poems real observations or something that you imagined, or does that even matter?
RB: For me, just about every poem begins with something directly observed, but what’s observed is always only a starting point. Once the initial observation is in the mind, it sparks a set of rapid associations that the writing of the poem attempts to capture, like scrambling to catch a bunch of marbles rolling off a table. It’s probably the same way for everyone who writes poems: the literal rouses the imaginative, the metaphoric. What fascinates me about this early part of the creative process is that I never know what will set off that process in the first place. As I move through the hours and events of an ordinary day, I never know why certain things snag my attention, and so writing becomes the place to ask why that moment in the waiting room, why that trivial detail seen while walking from one place to another, why that bit of noise heard from across the house, where your beloved is doing some task.
HX: There is also something painterly about the way you write descriptions. Your poems are filled with really lovely, effective phrases, like a “gray ceramic bowl,” “the handle of a worn paintbrush,” and this tender description of a mussel as “quiet and rare.” How do you think about description in poetry? What is your process?
RB: Description is one of the ways that consciousness expresses joy. Even when a writer is describing things that are dark or harsh, there’s an exquisite aliveness that the description embodies. Description brings the sensory vitality of being in the world into the abstract plane of language. And so, the best descriptions manifest a duality. They immerse the reader in an empirical reality, where the things described have their concrete vividness, and in a metaphoric reality, where those same things represent emotional, philosophical, and other abstract properties.
I tell my students that one of the things we want our readers to experience when they read our poems is a fullness of response that includes not just the cognitive experience of reading a poem’s language, but also the physical resonances you experience in a richly complicated poem. The poem’s images remind you that you have eyes that see. The poem’s sounds remind you that you have ears that hear. The poem’s sensory cues remind you of taste, touch, smell. And the poem’s meters and rhythms remind you that you have physiological processes that pulse and thrum in peristaltic measures within your body.
HX: Connected to that, I’d love to hear more about your perspective on beauty. There are descriptions of paintings and food and nature throughout your poems, all subjects in which people have traditionally found beauty. Yet your poems also contain harsh realities, not shying away from the pandemic or other larger societal traumas. How do you think about the role of beauty and lyricism in your work?
RB: Maybe one way of answering this question is to say that beauty is the goal and lyricism is the means. As I define it for myself, beauty in a poem is a state of reverie where the reader experiences a pocket of awareness that’s removed from the headlong, transactional condition of everyday life. The lyric poem, as Charles Simic once defined it, is “a fragment of time haunted by the whole of time.” Time is this relentless force carrying us towards oblivion, but the absorption one can have with a poem, or with art, is a reprieve from that relentlessness. Beauty is one way of describing that state of reprieve. But I don’t mean to suggest that beauty is a vague aesthetic sugar-high. Instead, it’s an intense awareness that encompasses the aesthetic intensity as well as the “difficult subject matter” that every powerful poem carries. Beauty, to my mind, isn’t a passive experience, but the experience of the mind making intense connections among complicated, disparate dimensions of reality. Beauty feels like a kind of coalescence. As for lyricism, I define it as the set of technical means a poet uses to make that beauty concrete on the page—imagery, sound, metaphor, syntax, and so on.
HX: I appreciate this idea you bring up of beauty as a kind of coalescence. The poems in your book make many references to other works of art—to paintings, to a Samuel Beckett play, to a song, to other books. I would love to hear you discuss the role that this ekphrasis serves in this book. It also seems to me that, with the isolation of the pandemic, the line between art and life becomes blurred, and that experiencing literature or music becomes indistinguishable from everyday living. But what do you think about that?
RB: I think there are two ways that other artists matter to me. First: they give me an inspiring variety of new ways to think about the old problems. How to think about love and desire; how to think about history and justice; how to think about seeing and making—going deeply into how a painter, a musician, a choreographer thinks about these things complicates how I think about them in my medium, in writing. Second: they’re companions in the solitude that defines so much of my life.
I really like your insight about how the line between art and life got blurred during the pandemic. I certainly felt this sense of camaraderie with the artists I was obsessed with during the first year or so of the pandemic—they were in my mind and all around me at the same time, in a strange porousness or hauntedness. I listened to William Basinski’s “Disintegration Loops” for hours and hours, for months. I watched documentaries and clips of Pina Bausch’s choreography, its gnomic physical vocabularies. I looked at Vija Celmins’s drawings and paintings, so dim and quiet. These artists made me feel alone but in a good way.
HX: Your book begins with two lines about paradise—“You are told to believe in one paradise / and then there is the paradise you come to know.” Paradise, of course, is an idea which runs through art and literature in many ways. Do you think of these lines as framing the book?
RB: I definitely consider those two lines to be a kind of “thesis” for the book. Earlier I mentioned the expansiveness of middle age, and that expansiveness is what’s being described in those two opening lines. On the one hand, you’re aware of the ideals and fantasies that have fueled your life. But on the other hand, you’re also aware of the tenderly modest things that most of us actually get in life, if we’re lucky. Those two lines are partly about disillusionment, but they’re ultimately about the deep pleasure of being intently present for the things of your life—the blissful things as well as the awful things, the loves and the losses. Paradise is the life you get to have, not an exemption you are rewarded with eventually. The other thesis of the book appears a few pages earlier, in the epigraph from Agha Shahid Ali, which I also take to be an ironic take on paradise: “Each statue will be broken / if the heart is a temple.” Here again, as Ali achingly suggests, if you’re lucky, you get to have your heart broken, over and over.
