PFA
Transcript for Episode 32: Rick Barot, ÒCascades 501Ó

Abram:

Hello listeners, and welcome back to Poetry for all. We've got something just slightly different for you today. Normally, Joanne and I record for about an hour and we edit each episode down to about 20 minutes, but today we wanted to give you a fuller picture of the kinds of conversations we have with some of our guests. And so we have an extended version of our conversation with Rick Barot today. We think itÕs pretty incredible and we hope you find it so too. So, without any further ado, here is episode 32!

Joanne: 

Hello, IÕm Joanne Diaz.

Abram:

And IÕm Abram Van Engen.

Joanne:

And this is Poetry for All.

Abram: 

In this podcast we read a poem, discuss it, learn from it, and then read it one more time. 

Joanne:

Today, we are delighted to have Rick Barot as our guest. Rick is the author of four collections of poetry. His most recent is The Galleons, which was on the long list for the National Book Award. He is the recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The ArtistÕs Trust of Washington, The Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Guggenheim Foundation, and Stanford University, where he served as a Wallace E. Stegner fellow and Jones Lecturer in poetry. Rick, thank you so much for joining us today. 

Rick: 

Thank you so much for inviting me here, IÕm looking forward to our conversation. 

Abram:

Would you be willing to get us started by reading your poem, ÒCascades 501?Ó
Rick:

Of course!

ÒCascades 501Ó: https://poets.org/poem/cascades-501

Abram:

ThatÕs so great.

Joanne:

You know, youÕve said that a lot of your poems begin in a descriptive mode and then dig into other kinds of understanding. So the poem begins with a very simple sentence, ÒThe man sitting behind me is telling the man sitting next to him about his heart bypass.Ó How do you go from that heart bypass to Òoutside the trainÕs window, the landscapes smear by -- the earnest, haphazard distillations of America.Ó ThatÕs an amazing leap, can you talk a bit about that?

Rick:

I think that that leap that you mention is a direct transcription of how my mind was working during that actual train ride. Obviously, we should never assume that the narrator in a poem is the author himself or herself or themself, but in this case, this is an autobiographical moment. Just in the sense that I was on a train and this actually happened, and I wrote down notes while I was on the train thinking that I would write, once again, I would try to write another Òbeing on a trainÓ poem. But it did happen that I was sitting on this train and overhearing this conversation that was happening behind me, but I was also visually invested in seeing what was outside the window. So the kind of tension or conflict that I was feeling within myself between being pulled into listening intently to the conversation that I could overhear, but also focusing on what was outside. That leap that you mention, thatÕs a kind of description of what I was feeling, that a part of me felt compelled to listen but another part of me also wanted to block that out. In the same way that we sometimes want to block out, you know, when we are in a setting where we canÕt help but hear other people, because theyÕre talking loudly or theyÕre on a cell phone or youÕre in proximity and therefore canÕt avoid listening to them and you donÕt really want to listen to them. And your mind has to do what it can to take itself away from what it doesnÕt want to hear. So this poem is describing a little bit of that tension where I wanted to look outside but I was also being drawn to things that were happening inside. 

Abram:

I love that description because I think it highlights a tension that runs all the way through that we get back when you get to Òthe gust of alertness.Ó In some ways, that Ògust of alertnessÓ is interfering with your looking out the window. Like you donÕt necessarily want to be overhearing this story and yet youÕre kind of drawn to the story, as such, and then youÕve got this long looking out the window, but even as youÕre looking out the window the tension is built into what you see. So I love these back-to-back adjectives, Òearnest, haphazard distillations of America.Ó On the one hand, a thing that is earnest is very intentional, thereÕs human molding of the landscape going on. And at the same time itÕs haphazard, itÕs a force of disorder, thereÕs a kind of plenty going on beyond any human intentionality or story or anything to it. So this tension is built of order, of disorder, of story, of non-story. ItÕs kind of built throughout the poem and itÕs kind of reflected in that initial tension of Òthis guyÕs telling a story but I canÕt help not hearing it. Even though I would like to look out the window at the scenery as it rolls by.Ó

Rick:

One of the kinds of secret projects that I had in writing this book and thatÕs manifested in this poem is that I wanted to think about structure. When I teach structure in poetry, my quick definition of structure is Òorder of information.Ó If youÕre telling a story or writing a poem that has materials that youÕre trying to present, how do you order that information or material in the poem? When does a reader know what? You know, if youÕre telling a story that has a beginning and a middle and an end, as a writer you donÕt necessarily have to begin at the beginning. 

Joanne:

Right.

Rick:

You have a godlike sort of power over your creation, which is this story, to move things around, to determine the time and the physics of the poem that you are creating, the world that you are creating. And so, a lot of the poems in this book are really very intently interested in thinking about structure and how a writer, a poet can manipulate structure to have different kinds of effects in a poem. So in this particular poem, I wanted to create a structure wherein it begins with one element, moves dramatically to another element and stays on it for a long time. And then the instigating element comes back for a brief time to close the poem. You know, if youÕre looking at the poem on the page, proportionally speaking, itÕs something like 90% of it is about the landscapes and the visual things. And something like 10% of it is about the overheard conversation, so I was interested in that kind of structural arrangement for the poem, that it begins this way, moves into this other thing, ends in this other way, and the proportion seems very disproportionate. And yet thereÕs also a kind of symmetry in the disproportion, structurally. So thatÕs my little kind of craft-aside, that I will now kind of stop. [chuckles]

Joanne:

[Laughs] 

No, I love it, and I think thatÕs one of the many reasons why I enjoy this poem so much as a reader because we have that first sentence in which the two men are speaking to each other, one man says something about his heart bypass and then it goes away! It goes away and as a reader, when you read the poem the first time you think that itÕs kind of just an instigating situation, right? But then it comes back in the final couplet, ÒThey had to open me upÑthe man is now telling the other man. I wasnÕt there to see it, but they opened me up.Ó That repetition of Òthey had to open me upÉbut they opened me up,Ó it opens the poem up and makes me want to go to the top of the poem again to understand everything that you just described about the craft and the structure. It's very compelling. 

Rick:

This poem has a lot of content, but for me, as a poet, IÕm mostly thinking about or fascinated by form. In the sense that I always know that content is always there. I like telling my students that we are content-generating machines...

Both:

[Chuckling] Hmmm.

Rick:

Whether youÕre a writer or not, you are generating content all the time. Psychological content, emotional content, physiological content, electrical content. You know, if youÕre alive youÕre creating content as a human being. What makes us writers different, not special necessarily but different, is that we have this desire to create shapes or vessels that scoop a little bit of that content into containers. So the question for me as a writer is: what container will I make this time to store or safeguard some of this content that IÕm interested in right now? As a writer, I always take it for granted that content is there and that I will always have it because I myself am always creating content. But IÕm always fascinated by form and the different things that we can make in order to contain some of the things that need to be contained. So thinking about structure for this book, that was sort of a form of obsession, even though when IÕm having conversations about this book itÕs always about content. But frankly, speaking as a poet to other poets, I love talking about form more because thatÕs where I really geeked out as a writer: thinking about structure and how different types of structures can be employed in the poems that we write. 

Joanne:

This is just an aside, I donÕt know if this will make it into the final cut, but something really funny happened to us when we started working on this podcast almost a year and a half ago now. So we met in graduate school almost twenty years ago at Northwestern. And IÕve known him for like twenty years, and I never knew this about him: that we read poems in very similar ways. And the way I found this out is because -- I donÕt remember what poem it was, maybe something by William Shakespeare or something -- and he said, Òyou know, why donÕt I send you my slides that I already shared with my students when I teach this poem.Ó And when he sent the slides to me, each sentence was color-coded and he had isolated all the verbs, and he had isolated all the nouns, and there was another slide that isolated the adjectives -- and I was like uh-oh . . . 

Abram:

[Laughs]

Joanne: 

 . . . and then he isolated the turn of the sonnet, and I do that too, but we had never actually discussed it . . . 

Abram:

ThatÕs funny!

Joanne: 

 . . . you know, the reason IÕm rambling about this is because youÕre talking about the subtleties of craft. When we read your poem, first thing we did was highlight each sentence in a different color and the reason I love doing that as a reader is even if the poem looks like itÕs a very uniform couplet-following-couplet, itÕs actually very rich and varied because the length of your sentences are changing all the time. 

Abram:

Mmhmm.

Joanne:

So you start out with two couplets that look like theyÕre pretty straightforward, theyÕre following sentence lengths, but then you get into these fragments: ÒThe backyards and back sides of houses. The back lots of shops and factories. The undersides of bridges. And then the stretches of actual land . . .Ó each of those is an individual clause that kind of speeds up as the landscape speeds up within the speakerÕs field of vision. And I just love how further down in the poem, then the sentences get really long. Especially that sentence that begins, ÒBut why the gust of alertness that comes to me every time any indication of the human passes into sight . . .Ó and then it goes on for six more lines, thatÕs incredible, you know?! 

Both: 

[Chuckle]

Joanne:

So I love the way the tightness of those couplets is juxtaposed against the variety of lengths of sentences and also those insertions of white space . . . and now IÕm going to stop talking! [Laughs]

Both: 

[Laugh heartily]

Rick:

Oh no, I, no, weÕre really getting into the geeking out.

Joanne:

Yes we are! [all laugh] 

Rick:

I love discussions of syntax because, as you mention, the poems in the book are in couplets and that was a very early choice on my part. It was a very stubborn choice, you know, just as a wild kind of challenge to myself, why donÕt we make the whole book in couplets? And thinking also about YeatsÕ idea of the fascination of whatÕs difficult. When you create a difficulty for yourself as a poet, as a writer, you go into a kind of problem-solving mode formally that really makes the work exciting. And as IÕve said, content kind of takes care of itself but form, you always have to attend to form. And so making a decision about the couplet very early on activated all these other questions for me about how can I create dynamism in the poems when I have created this restriction that is going to make the poem sound the same, look the same, move the same. The couplet has a kind of tyranny that I invited because I wanted to be resourceful and inventive in other ways in the poem. And that includes what you just said about syntax. If the couplet is forcing a kind of energy on the poem, how can I use syntax to create counterveiling energies? Different ways of creating texture in the poem. And there are other poems in the book that use other formal means of doing that. ThereÕs a poem where I stop using punctuation, thereÕs a poem where itÕs one sentence long. So itÕs another syntactical gambit that IÕve brought -- that confrontation with the couplet, this sort of immovable decision that I made, how do I create variety and kind of formal thrill when a fundamental decision has already been made for me?

Abram: 

Those who are listening will not have it in front of them to see, but where the lines break often contains a kind of surprise to it. ThereÕs a kind of mental shift that has to happen as you turn to the next line, even if you keep reading without pausing. And I love the kinds of surprises that you build into the beginnings of new couplets -- and so for example, we have ÒBut why the gust of alertness that comes to me every time any indication of the human passes into sight,Ó and then we turn to the next stanza and it says, Òlike luck in the mind.Ó That is not a simile I saw coming! [Laughs] Or a little bit later, Òproving that the force of disorder is also the force,Ó and then we break and go to the next couplet -- force of what? -- force Òof plenty.Ó The force of disorder is the force of plenty. Or even another surprising simile: ÒThen the broad silver of rivers, shiny [pause] as turnstiles, the Òas turnstilesÓ is the new couplet. So the line breaks are also being used for that element of surprise to [get us into] thinking about a different trail as well.

Rick:

In the first case where you talk about Òthe kinds of water courses and greenery that registerÓ and then thatÕs where the line break is -- like luck in the mind. That is how it feels in the mind to register these things out the window and the same thing happens with the next moment where everything is disordered and seemingly falling apart and yet it also evidences the force of plenty. So how do we use form to support or emphasize or highlight or intensify content?

Abram:

Yeah. In your last book Chord, you have this poem, ÒThe Poem is a Letter OpenerÓ and it says ÒThe poem is a letter opener and it is the letter that is answered or not answered.Ó So it is both the letter opener and the letter itself. And I love that image because it also helps get away from the content that has to be deciphered. 

Rick:

Mmhmm.

Abram:

That there is only one content or one meaning and in many ways, when I read Cascades 501, I think of it as a kind of reflection on poetry itself, on the forces of order and disorder that go into the making of a single poem, the forces of plenty that seem to sort of overwhelm the poem itself, the multiple meanings that might emerge, and in many ways what a poem offers us is a sort of truck askew in the backyard. And the reader is left wondering ÒwhatÕs the story here?Ó And is able then to attach it in different ways to their lives. And so itÕs a kind of delivery of a letter but the reception of the letter is as important as the letter itself. 

Rick:

I like what you just said because it reminds me that one of the ways I think about poetry and its role in the world is that itÕs a kind of recalcitrance against the ways that everyday life, capitalistic life simplifies everything . . .

Joanne:

Mmmmm. 

Rick:

 . . .the way we feel, the way we consume, the way we interact with each other. You know, we move through life with values that are sort of associated with efficiency and speed and quickness. But poetry -- and maybe IÕll include the poem weÕre talking about now, ÒCascades 501Ó -- resists the kind of simplicity or efficiency. It demands of the reader a kind of slowing down and a full-body sort of openness to the experience of the poem. For many of us, we move through the day using only the front part of our brains. And a poem like this, yeah you can approach it just using the front part of your brain, but thatÕs a very unsatisfying way of interacting with the poem because you will be frustrated because you canÕt process the poem as simple information that you can extract and then move forward very quickly. It makes you want to stop and ask beyond the front part of my brain, how does the rest of my body feel with the experience that the poem is giving me? How do my feet feel, how do my ears feel, how does the back of my head feel? ItÕs a kind of full-body manifestation. And I think thatÕs what poems are supposed to do, to remind us that we have these bodies that we live in and spirits and souls that we own and to be reminded of those dimensions of ourselves, but it requires time and attention and a beautiful labor. 

Joanne:

Yeah, and another reason I love your poetry in general but this poem in particular is because so often it feels like -- to borrow from that famous quote -- like a mind thinking, the poem is a mind thinking. And the poetic speaker in this poem does not speak, but there is a whole landscape within the mind as a result of the landscape thatÕs outside of the window. And thereÕs almost an ethical impulse, then, to imagine how many other worlds are in the minds of any person, who may not even be speaking or interacting with you. And to go to your question about what is poetry for, IÕm embarrassed because IÕm trying to remember which poem you wrote, and I canÕt remember if itÕs from The Chord or The Galleons, but you have a sentence in one of your poems where you say that where things are joined or connected is where you can tell the most about them...

Rick:

Oh, you know what? ItÕs in the poem called ÒVirginia WoolfÕs Walking Stick.Ó

Joanne: 

Ohhh, my god I love that poem! [All Laugh] You may have to come back for another episode on that one! [Laughing]

Rick:

ItÕs on page 22 of the book and the lines that youÕre referring to go like this: ÒLooking around at the things that surround me, I have come to understand that the test of how well a thing is made is to look at the places where its parts come together. Joints, seams, corners, folds.Ó

Abram:

ThatÕs amazing. 

Joanne:

ItÕs an amazing sentence all by itself, but itÕs also an amazing sentence when thinking about how poems work because as I hear you talk about this poem, weÕve talked about the sentence lengths and I feel like whatever that connective tissue is between the stanzas, between the sentences, quite often the silence and the leaps that occur between and among the sentences is where a lot of the excitement occurs because how youÕre joining seemingly disparate thoughts is what makes this poem exciting to me. 

Rick:

WeÕre gonna go deeper into sort of the geek part of being a poet . . . [all chuckling] . . . so as I had mentioned earlier, I chose the couplet very early on as a way of making things challenging for myself. Another sort of secret project that I had for myself when I was thinking about structure and how poems can be structured, I was thinking about chess. So I donÕt know if either of you play chess or know chess, but you know that every piece in chess has a different way of moving on the board, and has a different concentration of power. So the pawn can only move forward and one square at a time, and the bishop is always moving at a slant, the knight is always moving in this L-shaped motion, and then thereÕs the queen who can do whatever the heck she wants. But there really was a part of my brain when I was writing these poems thinking: what about writing a poem that moves structurally the way a pawn moves or a poem that moves the way the knife moves, with these swerving L-shapes in structure, or a poem that moves the way a queen moves, which is with absolute power and determination that is not circumscribed. So the ÒCascades 501Ó poem is doing a little of what a knight might do where it does a kind of L-shape. And there are other poems in the book that are doing these other kinds of moves that feel very jarring but also inevitable at the same time. 

Joanne: 

Well, hearing you talk also makes me think about -- I think it was maybe the poet David Kirby -- who said that for him as a poet, so much of his work he feels like is just moving the pieces around like a puzzle until it feels right. 

Rick: 

Mmhmm. 

Joanne:

Right, so what you said about manipulating the narrative, not necessarily just creating a story that begins with A and goes to B and goes to C but creating suspense and momentum through the rearrangement of some of those details, but also the way youÕre imposing these various kinds of structures until they work for the poem you want to create. 

Abram:

And the other thing that a knight can do, of course, to think about it with relation to this poem is leap things, which no other piece can do, and thereÕs so many sort of swerving leaps that get made in this poem that suddenly connect two things that werenÕt necessarily connected. Of course the first big leap is the one Joanne pointed out, between the first couplet and the second, the person talking behind you on the train, the landscape out the window. But to think a bit about how those leaps relate to the places where the joints are, where the connections get made, and how that infuses the idea of poetry, what I love about it and one way I think about poetry is that the reader has to be part of that process . . . 

Rick:

Right.

Abram:

 . . . the structure, the form, theyÕre doing it, theyÕre creating the space for it, theyÕre almost like laying out that landscape that you see out the window, but I think of poetry in some way -- to quote your own poem here -- as Òa system unfastened to story.Ó Or as Òpeacefully beyond any clear meaning.Ó Not that itÕs beyond meaning, but that itÕs peacefully beyond any clear meaning and that it requires another person in the train, so to speak, looking at it, reading it, to complete its meaning, to think about it in relation to themselves. There's a kind of openness to poetry and thatÕs of course where this poem ends, ÒI wasnÕt there to see it but they opened me up.Ó Thinking about poetry that is peacefully beyond any clear meaning but at the same time that opens us up.Ó ThatÕs in many ways why I thought of this throughout as a sort of poem about poetry itself. 

Rick:

That reminds me of another thing that I talk to my students about with regards to not just poetry but creative writing in general, that it begins as expression but ends as communication. And the kind of impulse part of the self to say something through language, that is a very intense impulse. And eventually, it wants to find another person, another being, to receive that. Which is when communication comes in. Obviously, there are a lot of poems that we write thatÕs only for ourselves, and thatÕs good too, because it means weÕre communicating with other selves within our own self. But the completion that Abram is talking about, thatÕs really about the desire to communicate.

Joanne:

Yeah.

Abram:

Yeah . . . I mentioned to you shortly before we started recording that we have two poems in a row about ecology, environment in the fall, Keats and then Kenyon. And in many ways we were thinking about a landscape without human beings in the sense of Keats, a landscape and a life within that landscape that will outlast in many ways, human life itself. And in the Kenyon poem she has elements of that but then a kind of infusion of human beings throughout the landscape as well. And I find this poem really interesting to think about that element of a kind of environment and a kind of life that is both infused with human beings and also outlasting or beyond the scope of human life or human definition itself. And just to mention a couple places in your poem where we get that sense of a really big time that exists sort of before and after human life. So you talk about Òthe bogs that must have been left by retreating glaciersÓ and then you said Òthe creeks, the algae broth of ponds,Ó and the first thing I think of when I hear algae broth is like  the beginning of life on Earth and the first cells that came out of these ponds, right

Rick:

Yeah.
 
Abram:

So I feel like thereÕs a gesture towards big Time here thatÕs also being made

Rick:

Yeah, you just reminded me that where I am right now, in Tacoma Washington, 10,000 years ago this part of the continent was under a mile of ice. 

Joanne:

Mmmmmm.

Rick:

We were in the Ice Age 10,000 years ago. Right now itÕs in the 60Õs, itÕs temperate, itÕs cloudy, and itÕs inhabitable, we can live here. But you know, 10,000 years ago we could not. And who knows what this place will look like just a thousand years from now. ThereÕs evidence everywhere that time is so much larger than the moment that weÕre in. Part of poetryÕs beauty is that it sort of illustrates this sort of conflict or tension that I think is present between human time, which is linear in the sense that a human being moves through time in a beginning, middle, and end, and thereÕs a kind of finiteness to human time. But cosmic time or universe-time is cyclical, you know, itÕs constantly rolling over from season to season to season in a kind of endless way and so that conflict between linear time and cyclic time and the pain that that conflict creates for humans, I think is one thing that poems can illustrate, can show. And I think maybe this poem is doing a little bit of that in the sense that thereÕs evidence all outside the window of universe time, nature time, cyclic time, in juxtaposition with human time, which is the time of vulnerability, a man having heart-bypass, which points to the fact that we live in bodies that have a very finite amount of time given to them. 

Joanne:

Well I think too, hearing you talk makes me feel like maybe the poetic speaker is reassured in some ways by what you say about the insistence of nature to be itself and to insert itself with or without us. I donÕt know if reassurance is the right word but our time here is limited but the abundance and insistence of nature doesnÕt make it feel like it is. 

Rick:

Mmmmmm. Do you both know that amazing poem by Louise Glick ÒWitchgrassÓ from The Wild Iris?

Abram:

I donÕt!

Rick:

Well, I would invite you to revisit The Wild Iris, which is a great book, but thereÕs a particular poem within that book, so the book is comprised of different poetic speakers -- plants speak, flowers speak, God speaks -- but thereÕs a particular poem there called ÒWitchgrassÓ where witchgrass speaks. And witchgrass, the speaker in the poem, basically chides humans for trying to create order, trying to create gardens, when thereÕs all of this disorder all around. And at the end of that poem, the witchgrass says, ÒI was here before you, I will be here after you, I will constitute the fieldÓ or something like that. But itÕs this terrifying voice from this plant that basically reminds humans that, you know, here you are kind of making a mess of things, getting all emotional about things, itÕs okay. You will die, but I will still be here. [all chuckling] ItÕs this very powerful voice of nature that Glick has created in that poem.

Abram:

Hmmm.

Joanne:

ThatÕs great!

Rick:

And so maybe thatÕs one of the secret influences on this poem -- because I do love this poem so much -- that nature is there and we are harming it and yet it will still be there regardless of what we do. 

Abram:

ÒA dense wall of treesÓ and the -- I love this line -- ÒPunky little woods. The living continually out-growing the fallen and decaying.Ó Yeah, I love those lines. 

Joanne:

So, with all that youÕve taught us about this poem, would you be willing to read it again, please?

Rick:

Sure!

ÒCascades 501Ó

Abram:

Wow, thank you so much! [Chuckles] Thank you, for more information about Rick Barot and his work, please visit our website at poetryforall.fireside.fm

Joanne:

And you can subscribe to Poetry For All wherever you get your podcasts. Please be sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. 

Abram:

Thank you so much for being our guest today!

Rick:

What a pleasure this was, thank you both!

Abram: 

And thank you all for listening!