An Interview with Barbara Crooker

An Interview with Poet and Editor Barbara Crooker

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PLT:		Barbara, it´s been a while since a few of your poems appeared on a PLT cover back in 99. Do you think much has happened in the development of your work since then, both as a poet and as an editor?
B. C.:		So much has happened in these past seven years, I hardly know where to begin. If I had to encapsulate it, I'd say my work has become deeper, richer, fuller. I'm always trying to push myself, to not write the same poem over and over, to not fall into self-parody (all traps for the long-time writer). It's easier, now, to quickly write a competent poem, one that could probably be published. But that's not what I want, to be "merely competent," so I keep raising the bar, higher and higher.
PLT:		Your present web site is in our opinion an excellent example of how an individual poet can present their work. Your poetry, publications, reviews and interviews are made easily accessible to the reader, whilst kept in record, starting from 1990 up to Radiance. That´s quite an achievement to have received so many commendations and prizes and not to have published your first collection until now, how did you finally get round to it?
B. C.:		Thanks for your kind comments on the website. My webmaster is my son-in-law, Devin Ceartas (at Nacredata ), a free-lance web designer whose clients are non-profits and artists. My children bought me my domain name as a birthday present one year. Part of why I have a website is archival, to have a spot where everything is listed and linked. Another is for research (and self-protection); every year, I get a number of student inquiries about my work. While this sounds neat, most of the time, they want me to write their papers for them, so I bounce them back to the website, and gently tell them to do their own research. But another reason is so that my work is available, free of charge, to anyone with internet access. I hate to be telling people that they have to buy something (I'm also not a very good collector for charity), while at the same time, I DO want people to know that my book is available, as it's very difficult, in this country, for poetry books to gain enough recognition to get good distribution. The second part of your question, Robin, made me smile: "That´s quite an achievement to have received so many commendations and prizes and not to have published your first collection until now, how did you finally get round to it?" Well, it sure wasn't by choice! It's very, very difficult to get a book of poetry published. Pretty much the only way is through the contests, and most of them garner 800-1000 submissions. Radiance was a finalist, runner-up, etc. many times (I stopped counting), but if you don't win, it's like the children's game of Chutes & Ladders--you get close to the top, but then the roll of the dice makes you land on a chute, and down you go to the bottom again. And at a $25 (average) entry fee, it's a costly proposition, too. (plus the copying, plus postage) You have to be doubly lucky, first to get by the screeners, and then for the judge to choose your ms. among all others. For fifteen, count 'em, fifteen years, I entered, 13-15 contests a year, revising the manuscript as I went along. I was beginning to think it would be a posthumous event, if it ever occurred, and then. I won the Word Press First Book Award , an imprint of Word Tech Communcations, and am still pinching myself that it (book publication) finally happened. And then Radiance was cited as one of the best poetry books of 2005, as it was one of seven finalists for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize. It's received 25 reviews, in a climate where, if you get one or two reviews, you're doing well, including one in The Christian Science Monitor. Also, as soon as Radiance was taken, I started sending out ms. #2 (I've been writing for over thirty years, remember), and it was a finalist also many times, and the runner-up at Anhinga twice. I decided to NOT go for fifteen years this time, though, and so am happy to report that Word Press will publish Line Dance in early 2008!
PLT:		On your page there are any number of comments and reviews of your works, but as a generalisation I´d say the majority emphasise you characterise the ordinariness and mundaneity of events in everyday life, would you agree with that view of your writing?
B. C.:		I'd agree with you, in part, Robin. In fact, one of my earlier chapbooks (a small book usually around 24 pages) is called Ordinary Life. Some of what I was exploring in Radiance was the way you can isolate small events, such as missing someone (and his socks)(Away in Virginia, I See a Mustard Field, and Think of You), and, in writing about them, burnish them until they shine. I'm also thinking very much about God's radiant light (Bonnie Raitt has a song with the line, Know that the light don't sleep, which says it all for me), but wanting to write about it indirectly, obliquely. Line Dance goes in a different direction; these poems are about connections, both family and friends, the ways we are connected, the ways that we are not.
PLT:		Do you write to interest readers, yourself or to get a following?
B. C.:		In America, I'd be a crazy person if I said I was writing to get a following! There are so many wonderful writers around, and quite honestly, I'm too late out of the gate to think that I will become in any way "famous". (Unless it's in the way Naomi Shihab Nye writes: "I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, / or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, / but because it never forgot what it could do.") On the one hand, I'm writing for myself (and boy, am I a hard taskmaster!). On the other, I think if you only write in your notebook, you're not serving poetry, that it is meant to be read by others (ie, published) and that it is also meant to be read aloud (in poetry readings, or on the radio). I do imagine an "ideal reader," someone who reads and loves contemporary poetry, when I'm writing.
PLT:		Do you think poetry serves a purpose in the modern world and if so should it serve modernity?
B. C.:		I'm not sure I quite understand the question. If you mean does poetry fit into contemporary culture, with its action or reality-based TV shows (American Idol and the like), video games, MTV, hip-hop and rap music, then no, it doesn't. (I confess to being almost completely pop-culture illiterate.) But I do believe (I have to believe) that there are readers out there, people who still read serious novels (I have a neighbor who came over once to borrow something, and I was reading. She said, "Oh, you mean, like, a book? I haven't read one of those in years."), who go to concerts and plays, visit museums and galleries, and who value poetry in their lives. Garrison Keillor, in his daily NPR broadcast of The Writer's Almanac (where I've had the happy fortune to appear leleven times), has done a lot to bring poetry to this kind of reader.
PLT:		The web has proved to be a boom to creative artists and writers but still we have to maintain a stance with academia and professional publication in order to get recognition. I think we need some kind of filter for work to go through and get approval, do you see that as real possibility for the future or have we arrived as much as we are going to?
B. C.:		You're talking about are largely unedited (or uncritical) websites, that pretty much post everything that is submitted, and I agree, there's a definite need there for a filter of some sort. But there are many other ezines with great editors and high standards who only take 1-3% of the work submitted. Anyone can "get published" these days, but not necessarily in a publication that means anything. (And even if one does, say, win the Pulitzer Prize, I think you also have to keep in mind Donald Hall's dictum, that prizes and awards are nice, but you shouldn't think they actually mean anything.). I think of myself as primarily a print-oriented writer, that the most interesting (and lasting) magazines come out in print format first (sometimes they're on the web later, or with excerpts on the web). And I have to confess, because I'm still on dial-up (I live in the country), that I don't have the patience to read most of the web-only publications I appear in, while I read every print magazine that comes to my mailbox from cover to cover.
PLT:		Do you think good poetry, like music and painting transcends nation state, religion, language and politics and stands entirely by its own, no matter what?
B. C.:		Absolutely, and yet we're all colored (and we should be) by what the French call "terrain," our sense of place, our connections to the earth, and the part of earth where we live.
PLT:		I suppose the poet can only say so much according to the standard norms of prose and it´s up to the rest to read their work. I suggest the reader will find a lot to digest in visiting your site and reading your works.
B. C.:		Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to "talk" to people.
PLT:		Many thanks for providing us the opportunity to recommend it and your new collection of poetry Radiance, a review of which by the way, will be appearing in our next edition in the Pandora Box.