Short Conversations with Poets: Rick Barot

In Moving the Bones, Rick Barot’s newest, the project is both catastrophe and praise. But it begins, paradoxically, in “Pleasure,” in a vision of paradise and meditation: “My mind has a slow metabolism, it is slow / to understand what anything means, / but it understands that if you look at something / long enough, it will have something / to say to you.” The collection is the work of a consummate artist at the height of his powers. And so its sensibility encompasses the range from beauty to suffering to queer memory—“Like the boy with a flower behind his ear who’s been interrupted / in his pleasure”—to the disastrous politics of our times. “He saw the tents people lived in / by the park get torched, and I could smell / on him what he had seen.” What he had seen: the book registers anew the vividness and radiant ethics possible in an act of description. The seeing is what begins any remaking, Rick Barot reminds us, and part of the seeing is part of the grieving.

This is partly why the book speaks beyond the valleys where poetry makes nothing happen. Or dreams of that. One of the collection’s especial wonders is that poem I just quoted, called “The Streets.” This also from it: “I thought / of the bus the way I thought of poems, that it / was a civic space and a lyric space at once.” A civic space because a poem is open to anyone. Which makes all the more arresting the turn at the heart of the book, a series called “During the Pandemic,” bits of justified prose, only a few lines long in each case, and each beginning with the phrase “During the pandemic …” The pieces represent an inward but outward, granular but grand sketch of an account of what we all lived through, the same and differently. It represents one of the first important works of post-pandemic poetry directly engaged with this global catastrophe.

And that section gives way, in one of the book’s great gifts, a jewel of a poem, to the titular piece, “Moving the Bones.” An elegy and an account of how to keep living—this is what the third section makes form for. “There are too many ancestors, so we are gathering their bones.” The lines are long. Like strands of hair. “We have bought the wide plot. We have built the mausoleum. And now we fill it with the bones.” Is that we are doing, so much of the time, one way or another? For the book, too, is an elegy, a “room of her dying,” an utterance in the light of all the dying, a world of dying. A book about facing that. About what to do in the onslaught of death, death, dying, ending. What to do with lateness. I think of the Ruth Stone poem “The Train,” “All things come to an end. / No, they go on forever.” And there is, for this poet, only the question to answer its own unknowability. The last poem, “The Field,” is a metaphor of the writer’s situation even as it is, of course, a representation of a real field:

Two people are asleep in a field.
The light is not yet up. The air is cold, even though it is summer.
I cannot get closer than where I am. I know only so much
about them. I know they are not dead.

Or as the poet says in a very lovely and very sad epistolary called “To J.”:

These stories are told as penance, lifted by tongues and said
into the sea so that we may be new again.

JESSE NATHAN: How would you describe some of your aesthetic commitments in this new book? How did they come about?

RICK BAROT: In the week or so that I’ve been mulling over your question, I’ve been repeatedly reading a new poem that Robert Hass recently published in the New Yorker, titled “A Sunset.” The poem begins with a description of a sunset, the “glowing peach” of its beauty. Then, very abruptly, the poem’s speaker says that “I could take a hard right here,” and the poem does just that, invoking “the angry adolescent boy in Texas / Who shot and killed nineteen children / With a high-powered weapon my culture / Put into his hands.” It’s a long poem, over one hundred lines, and the rest of the poem meditates on art and violence, grief and morality. I think the poem is ultimately about the lamely limited way that art can account for the brutality of human thought and action.

I dwell on Hass’s poem at length because the vexing tension at the heart of the poem—the tension between beauty and atrocity—has been with me from the very start of my life as a poet. When I was an undergraduate poet, my two passionate loves were Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich, each of whom seemed to propose a different poetics. Bishop was the poet of exquisite perception, for whom aesthetics was grounded in style, while Rich was the poet of sociality, for whom aesthetics and ethics were inextricably bound. That early wiring in varying poetics—with Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Frost, Seamus Heaney, and their aesthetic postures also thrown into the mix—has informed my ongoing development as a poet, allowing me to wildly toggle between the exquisite and the social from one book to the next.

The impulse that sparked my last book, The Galleons, was to elegize my grandmother, who had recently died at ninety-two years old. But early in my work on the book, I knew that I didn’t want to write a conventional sort of elegy. Instead, I wanted to situate my grandmother’s small individual story within the larger forces that shaped it, such as immigration, war, colonialism, capitalism, and history overall. Therefore, along with poems that are directly about my grandmother, there are also poems that examine the history of helicopters, the postcolonial valences in objects in Diego Velázquez’s iconic painting Las Meninas, and the ways in which modern capitalism has its roots in the galleon trade in the Pacific, which was active for nearly three hundred years. The aesthetics of The Galleons, then, was grounded in the juxtaposition of the sentimental and the political.

My new book, Moving the Bones, has an aesthetic that I’m still trying to describe to myself. I’m not yet far away enough from the book to really see it. What I know is that it doesn’t have the polemical energy that fueled the previous book. Instead, there’s an interiority that’s reckoning with a couple of themes. First, the concerns of someone in middle age: the aging of parents, taking stock of one’s life and what’s already occurred and what may be ahead, and one’s relationship to vocation and purpose, in my case, being an artist. The second theme is the pandemic, and the dread and isolation that were part of my experience of the pandemic.

The center of the book is a sequence of thirty prose poems titled “During the Pandemic.” I wrote these in the spring of 2020, during the first lockdown. The poems in this sequence started out as nervous bits of language and perception that I put into the Notes app on my phone. Initially, I didn’t think of the pieces as “real” poems—they were about giving myself a space for therapeutic release. But at some point, I realized the pieces had merit, so I refined them into poems. Each poem in the sequence felt like a shard, a jagged fragment that illustrated two lines from Agha Shahid Ali I had been returning to for weeks that spring, and which became the book’s epigraph: “Each statue will be broken / if the heart is a temple.”