Reviews & Interviews

Interview:

New Works Review , 2004
NWR: What first moved you to write poetry— did the influence come from your parents, friends, school, community, reading (or as a reaction to all of the above)? Were your early influences the classic European and American poets, like Donne, Shelley, Whitman, and Dickinson, or did you turn to 20th century poets for inspiration?

Crooker: Before I was a writer, I was a reader. I was one of those kids with a nose in a book, all the time. If I was sent outside to play, to “get some fresh air," I'd slip a book under my shirt and skinny up a tree so I could keep on reading. I grew up in a family that loved books; in fact, my mother put off getting a sewing machine when a salesman showed up with a set of My Book House Books (everything from nursery rhymes in Volume I to an abridged “Shakespeare for Children” in Volume 12), which I still have and cherish. I was an English major in college and took a creative writing class, but that was just dabbling. I didn’t really get started until I was in my late 20's, going through a divorce, with a small child. My ex-husband had left some of his books behind, and one of them was The Falcon from Mansfield State Teachers College. I picked it up and was blown away by a series of poems by someone who I thought was just an undergraduate (I had taken courses like "Contemporary American Literature," but we didn’t study any writers that were, um, actually LIVING), Diane Wakoski. If I'd known she was a real writer, and a famous one at that, I'm sure I would have been intimidated, and would never have even started. But I read these poems and the accompanying interview, and it felt, as Emily said, “like the top of my head would blow off,” and I thought, “Well, maybe I could do something like that. So I picked up a pen and began. If you could see my early work, I’d doubt you’d see the connection, but for me, it's there. And it's still pretty much the way I work—I read a lot, often in areas far away from poetry, but if something strikes a chord, I try and see how I can use it in a poem.
Anyway, back to talking about beginnings, after I’d begun and was writing steadily for about a year, I met my present husband. Instead of buying me an engagement ring, he paid my way to a summer writing conference, where I found out that most of what I’d written, even though I’d begun to publish, was pretty derivative, and that what I really needed to be doing was discovering contemporary writers. I had no idea that the world of small press publishing and little magazines even existed, and it was a real eye-opener. I felt like I’d just stumbled through the underbrush onto a path that wasn’t really clear, but there it was, and I’ve kept to it

NWR: Which contemporary poets have published work that you most respect?

Crooker: Here, in no particular order, are contemporary poets whose work I love, and who I'd advise, or even urge, new writers to read. All of them have had some influence on my work, and I look for their work in magazines, and buy their new books when they come out: Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds, Harry Humes, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Charles Wright, Christopher Buckley, Dorianne Laux, Maggie Anderson, Len Roberts, Linda Pastan, Maxine Kumin, Billy Collins, Stephen Dunn, Stephen Dobyns, Marilyn Hacker, Jonathan Holden, Fleda Brown Jackson, Jeanne Murray Walker, Scott Cairns, Mark Jarman, Mark Doty, Alicia Ostriker, Philip Levine, David Citino, Ted Kooser, Ron Wallace. I'm sure this list isn't complete, and I've left some out inadvertently. When I was looking through my books to compile this list, it saddened me to see those who are gone, like Jane Kenyon, Raymond Carver, William Matthews, and so they aren't on this list (and there will be no new volumes).

NWR: What are the chief concerns that are reflected in your poetry? How has having an autistic child affected your writing?

Crooker: I think the themes of love and loss are those which have always engaged me, but the subjects for approaching these themes has changed. Early on, I wrote a lot about family— the birth of my children, those short precious days of babies and toddlers. I was home with young children, and that seemed a natural progression, but I was and still am also interested in how we all are connected, the extended family of friends and neighbors. I also wrote about home—where do we feel at home in the world? and garden—what's outside the walls, nature and the outdoors. And I wrote a few political poems using themes from the women's movement, the anti-war/anti-nuke movement, and the rising awareness of ecology. I’ve done a series on time, and how there's never enough of it.(In the Late Summer Garden, H&H Press) Currently, I'm still writing about love and loss via these subjects: love in a long-term relationship (there are many poems about falling in love, but not so many about staying there), maternal grief (I lost my first child, and have written other poems and series of poems on/for friends who have lost children), breast cancer (another series, The White Poems [Barnwood Press] is on losing a close friend to this disease), and living with a family member with a disability: our youngest child, 20, who has autism (Ordinary Life, ByLine Publishers). I've also been writing about another aspect of time, the transience of our short lives. And I've written a fair number of poems on women and sports (canoeing, playing baseball, ice hockey, running) and another group of poems about paintings (I minored in art history). (Impressionism, Grayson Books, which recently won their chapbook competition.) So in some ways, I've continued to be engaged in themes similar to those that moved me 30 years ago—“still just writing,” to quote Anne Tyler.
To say a bit more on what having a child with autism has done for my writing: it’s a huge paradox to live with, having some facility with language and living with someone for whom language isn’t necessary. It’s certainly made me more aware of the nonverbal ways we communicate, as did living with the failed Seeing-Eye dog that we adopted, who became David’s best friend. It’s also made me attuned to both the power and limitation of language. In some ways, having a person with autism in the family is the perfect training for a writer. We in the disability community talk about stereotypic repetitive behaviors (which we try to extinguish), but what could be more stimmy than the bizarre badminton game we writers play of sending poems out, getting rejected, batting them back out again, etc. etc., ad infinitum? I also have to say that besides the day-in, day-out stuff which admittedly isn’t easy (like fixing parallel meals, as he’s been on a gluten and casein-free diet for many years, dosing out meds and vitamin supplements, running an in-home behavioral program, tuning out —or trying to— the constant interruption, and our concerns for his future (at twenty, he has one more year of school, and then the great job search begins), he’s one of the most tender-hearted people I know, and also one of the funniest.

NWR:. What are your plans for your poetry? Are there any long-range projects you are currently working on?

Crooker: I don’t seem to be able to write that way, i.e., to frame a series of poems and then write them. Instead, I work in a much more piecemeal fashion, a poem at a time, one foot in front of the other. I’ll have another residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts this November, where I’ll revise the full-length manuscript that I’m currently working on. I need the kind of uninterrupted time and space (where I don’t have to pick up before dinner; my writing space is a corner of the dining room) that a colony offers to do this kind of thinking, which involves spreading the poems out, and looking for patterns and connections. One of the things I like about VCCA is that because it’s familiar territory (this will be my 10th residency), I can have my studio up and running in 45 minutes. Also, they let me have nine day stays, which is about all I can handle—it’s the most food I can make ahead of time for my son, for one thing. Even when my husband and I have gone to France, we’ve also only been away for eight to ten days, because it gets overwhelming to plan to be gone longer than that. But that’s all right; I can do six months to a year’s worth of work in those nine days. I think my only real plans are to aim for work that has greater depth. I like poems that have maybe three or four levels going in them. It’s kind of like juggling—a writer can get all these balls going up in the air, and you think, wow, how is she going to do that, how is this going to be sustained, and then at the end, plink, plank, plunk, the balls fall into her hand. Neat trick, if you can do it. I’ll be happy if I can come home with six good poems (and a revised manuscript) rather than, say, twelve mediocre ones. In fact, I’d be happy just to write one good poem a year. As I said to my husband, the chemist, once, “Honey, it’s reductive.” Quality, not quantity.

Review:

Impressionism (Grayson Books) , 2004
What struck me immediately about the poems in Impressionism is their profound sense of longing. &"I want to step out of my life into a painting," the poet says, and that is exactly what some of these poems achieve. Although we get hints of a domestic existence that is both blessed and cursed, the line between life and art is blurred so successfully that what finally emerges is the transformative power of the senses. Reading these poems, one does indeed step out of one's life and into a world of light, color, even odor and taste--and all so vividly portrayed in language that manages to convey both solace and delight.
--Sue Ellen Thompson, author of The Leaving: New and Selected Poems

Interview:

The DeSales Minstrel , 2003
Barbar Crooker has read from her poetry on numerous occasions at DeSales over the past decade. This year, she appeared as Keynote Poet for the 2003 DeSales University Annual Poetry Festival. What follows is an interview Dr. Steven Myers conducted with Barbara on March 30, 2003
SM: The first thing I wanted to ask you about was this: in all the times I've heard you read and in all our conversations over the years, I don't think I've ever heard you talk at length about how it all began. So I wanted to ask you, how did poetry begin for you?
BC: I have a funny answer, which goes back to the early seventies. I don't know if you realize that I had a period of time where I was a single mother with a two year old daughter. When my first husband left, he left a lot of his books behind. I had taken a creative writing class as an undergraduate, but I was one of those rebellious late sixties types who didn't actually go to class.
I sent my manuscripts in with a friend, who would pick up the next assignment, and I got all As. What a little snot I was!
SM: But you know, a lot of poets have gone that way.
BC: That was my first bit of dabbling, and I did a little writing on my own as an undergraduate. Then I left it, and went on to other things. Part of this was the dynamics of the marriage I was in. My ex-husband wanted to write and didn't, perceived it as threatening if I wrote. Anyway, once he was gone, I picked up a copy of a magazine he'd left behind, The Eagle, from what was then called Mansfield State Teachers' College. I read a series of poems by someone who I thought was a student, Diane Wakoski. If I had known she was a real writer, and famous to boot, I may not have begun. But when I read these poems, it just blew the top off my head (as Emily Dickinson said), and I thought, "Well, maybe I could do something like that," and so I began again.

A few years later, I met my present husband--we've been married for 27 years, which, for second-time arounders, is pretty amazing. I'd been writing pretty steadily for about a year when I met him, and so, instead of buying me an engagement ring, he sent me to a summer writing conference, where I found out that most of what I'd writeen, even though I'd published a bit, was pretty imitative of earlier twentieth century stuff, and what I really needed to be doing was reading contemporary writers. I didn't know how to access this world, where to find the little magazines, etc. I learned all sorts of things at this conference, mostly about what I didn't know, and where I was deficient. It was like stumbling through the underbrush onto a path that wasn't really clear, but somehow, I kept going. I feel like I'm still learning. The bar is just set higher now, and I think that's what we're all trying to do, not coast or get by on what we can do, but try to do something difficult, something you might even fail at.
SM: If we revisit the early seventies again, when you were starting out, what tid you want to accomplish then? What did you want poetry to do for you or what did you want to do through it? Can you resurrect that?
BC: That's a great question, and I'm not sure if I can answer it. I think I wanted to see if I could do the thing on paper that this little sophomore Diane Wakoski had done, which was to take pen and paper, a two dimensional form, and create something three-dimensional, something that was living. I think that's something that still both obsesses and mystifies me, the difference between a poem you work on with all your craft, everything you know about how to make a poem work, and yet it's still not alive, it's not a real poem. There's such a subtle difference between poems that fail and poems that breathe and dance.
SM: I've got a copy of a 1983 collection of yours that you co-authored with Katharyn Aal entitled Writing Home.
BC: Oh my gosh, you're one of the few people in America who has that one!
SM: I've got it. The idea of home seems to have run very deep throughout your work, and still does. What is that idea all about to you, and has it evolved or changed or morphed into something over the years since 1983?
BC: It probably has changed, just in the sense that at that time when my kids were little, I was occupied in the real world in creating a home that would be a warm and safe environment, one that would nurture children. All of those aspects of that part of my work, the day-to-day mom work, was really important to me. Right now, I want to be leaving home more. Not all of the time, but I've been bitten by the travel bug, which has actually deepened my appreciation of home by being away from it. I'm always happy to come back, but put me on a plane, and I'm delirious. Let me back up for just a second. Here's an interesting conjunction where my personal life and my writing life come together. My husband was working for a French company, so he was traveling over there on business. Because we have a child with a serious disability (autism), which happened many years after the Writing Home series, home has become a different kind of place. When I'm home, there are huge tasks to accomplish, trying to get a non-verbal child to talk, help him get through school, navigate the world, etc. I have him on a special diet, so I'm cooking two meals for every dinner. Then we have behavior issues to deal with, so I've become a special-ed teacher (sans pay) at home. The opportunity to travel to France has given us both a bit of respite time together, and it also plays into one of the themes that I keep coming back to, and which appeared in the Writing Home collection, which is maintaining love in a long-term relationship. There are a lot of poems about falling in love, and a lot of poems about being heartbroken and/or yearning for love, but there aren't a whole lot of poems about staying in love,so that's something I continue to explore. I think traveling to France was something that has helped us keep the romance going, and I also am having a love affair with the entire country, I think partly because of their own particular love for the small things of daily life, where they want a loaf of bread to be the most wonderful loaf of bread you'd ever want to eat, with a crust that explodes in your mouth. I'm afraid that here in America, we have an obsession for doing things fast, and have gone to the opposite approach with our ready-to-eat but highly processed and flavorless (not to mention unhealthy) food. Not only in France, but throughout Europe, you find people with a high esteem for all the arts: architecture, painting, music, etc. Remember that little controversy over the NEA, where they wanted to cut its funding? All it costs taxpayers is the equivalent of two first-class stamps, whereas people in Europe are taxed at rates around $50/household per year. But they feel that the arts are something worth paying for. You know the status of artists in our society--you're not on TV and you're not in People magazine, and so you don't exist.
SM: You recently won the Thomas Merton Poetry Prize. I know that meant a great deal to you. Could you talk about that a little bit?
BC: My middle daughter is very much into environmental issues, but she didn't know who Thomas Merton was. I typed into email some of the quotes from him on the Merton Foundation's website. One of the things he said was, "We Americans ought to love our land, our forests, our plains, and we ought to do everything we can to preserve it in its richness and beauty by respect for our natural resources, for water, for land, for wildlife. We need men and women of the rising generation to dedicate themselves to this."
SM: Merton probably said that in the late fifties--
BC: The quote was taken from a book written in 1989, but the quote may have been from an earlier piece. But back to the contest--there were over a thousand poems entered. Stanley Kunitz was the judge, and I won $500.
SM: Can't get any better than that.
BC: No, you really can't. The judging criteria were "literary excellence, spiritual tenor, and human authenticity."
SM: I loved the poem, it's a wonderful poem. It's interesting, you seem to be playing around with line length now. It really opens up and expands.
BC: Thanks. I tend to trust the inner music of the poem, and if it wants to have long lines, I let that pony run. Other ones want to be shorter. Because I'm writing on paper first, I try to not, as much as possible, impose my own will on things when I'm in the early draft stages, and I don't fool around with line lengths very much until I move to working on the computer. Then there's a shapeliness I aim for. I don't like to have short lines and then suddenly a long one, unless I'm trying to do that for a particular effect. Seeing the poem on the screen also affects how the lines are going to fall. It's wonderful to be able to do all of this on the computer--I started writing when manual typewriters were all that was available.
SM: That makes all the difference. It's funny you should say that because I was noticing that featured on the cover of Writing Home is an electric Coronet Typewriter, Automatic 12 it says on it. I had one of those, too.
BC: Exactly. That was such a boon, the electric typewriter; you could go so much faster. I sure couldn't go back in time and be myself again as an undergraduate and graduate student using a manual typewriter, staying up all night, because you couldn't correct without retyping. I say "thank you" to my computer every time I turn it on.
SM: Say a little bit about being nominated for a Grammy Award.
BC: The Grammy nomination, that was something almost silly. I was in an anthology who did an audio version. It was from a small women-centered press, so it was a real fluke that they got a nomination in the Spoken Word Category. But somehow, it was a finalist, up against Charles Kurault reading On the Road, Garrison Keillor reading one of the Prairie Home companion books, a play about Harry Truman read by Jason Robards and Lauren Bacall, us, and then Hillary Clinton reading It Takes a Village.
SM: I think it's great company.
BC: It was excellent company. The young African American actress Alfre Woodard read my poem on the recording.
SM: What was the title of the poem?
BC: That was my Elvis poem, "Nearing Menopause, I Run into Elvis at Shoprite,"
SM: It's a brilliant poem.
BC: Thank you. Sometimes, when you read a poem a lot, you can get sick of it. That's kind of a test that says, well, maybe that poem isn't so hot. I haven't gotten tired of reading Elvis yet, though.
SM: Where are you going from here? Do you have a vision of your work for, say, the next five years, or do you have a ten-year plan? What's up for you?
BC: No. All I know is what I'm doing in two weeks, which is having another writing residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. I think this is my ninth residency there. I keep going back because it's an easy drive, and I've been there so many times I can have my studio up and running in about 45 minutes. Also, I can still really only be away from home for ten days--it's the most food I can make ahead of time, for one thing, for my son. When my husband and I have had these trips to France, we've typically been gone eight to ten days also, because again, it gets to be a bit too overwhelming to plan to be gone beyond that point. That's okay. I can cram six months to a year's worth of work in those nine days, depending on how it's going. Things don't really start to cook until the seventh or eighth day, and then it's really hard to leave, but that's the way it goes . . . .I think my only plans or my only hopes are to try to do work that has greater depth. I like poems that have three or four levels going on in them. It's almost like juggling--the writer gets all these balls going up in the air, and you think, man how is she going to do this, and then, at the end, plink, plank, plunk. . . .
SM: They all plunk down.
BC: Yes. That's all I want to do.
SM; Neat trick. That's plenty--work enough for any poet, I think.
BC: I'd be happy to write one good poem a year, but to do that, I think you've got to write a whole bunch of lesser poems in order to get there.
SM: I promise you, I do that.
BC: We all do that.