Barbara Hamby (born 1952) is an American poet, fiction writer, editor, and critic. She was born in New Orleans and raised in Hawaii. Her poems have been printed in numerous publications and her first book of poetry, Delirium (1995), received literary recognition. She lives with her husband and fellow poet David Kirby in Tallahassee, Florida, where she is a writer-in-residence in the Creative Writing Program, and he a professor, both with the English Department at Florida State University.
Delirium: poems (
The Alphabet of Desire (
Awards and honors
Vassar Miller Prize for Delirium
Norma Farber First Book Award (Poetry Society of America) for Delirium
Kare Tufts Discovery Award(1996) for Delirium
Donald Hall Prize in Poetry (Association of Writers and Writing Programs, 2003) for
Ode on Dictionaries
by Barbara Hamby
A-bomb is how it begins with a big bang on page
one, a calculator of sorts whose centrifuge
begets bedouin, bamboozle, breakdance, and berserk,
one of my mother's favorite words, hard knock
clerk of clichés that she is, at the moment going ape
the current rave in the fundamentalist landscape
disguised as her brain, a rococo lexicon
of Deuteronomy, Job, gossip, spritz, and neocon
ephemera all wrapped up in a pop burrito
of movie star shenanigans, like a stray Cheeto
found in your pocket the day after you finish the bag,
tastier than any oyster and champagne fueled fugue
gastronomique you have been pursuing in
for the past four months. This 82-year-old's rants
have taken their place with the dictionary I bought
in the fourth grade, with so many gorgeous words I thought
I'd never plumb its depths. Right the first time, little girl,
yet here I am still at it, trolling for pearls,
Japanese words vying with Bantu in a goulash
I eat daily, sometimes gagging, sometimes with relish,
kleptomaniac in the candy store of language,
slipping words in my pockets like a non-smudge
lipstick that smears with the first kiss. I'm the demented
lady with sixteen cats. Sure, the house stinks, but those damned
mice have skedaddled, though I kind of miss them, their cute
little faces, the whiskers, those adorable gray suits.
No, all beasts are welcome in my menagerie, ark
of inconsolable barks and meows, sharp-toothed shark,
OED of the deep ocean, sweet compendium
of candy bars—Butterfingers, Mounds, and M&Ms—
packed next to the tripe and gizzards, trim and tackle
of butchers and bakers, the painter's brush and spackle,
quarks and black holes of physicists' theory. I'm building
my own book as a mason makes a wall or a gelding
runs round the track—brick by brick, step by step, word by word,
jonquil by gerrymander, syllabub by greensward,
swordplay by snapdragon, a never-ending parade
with clowns and funambulists in my own mouth, homemade
treasure chest of tongue and teeth, the brain's roustabout, rough
unfurler of tents and trapezes, off-the-cuff
unruly troublemaker in the high church museum
of the world. O mouth—boondoggle, auditorium,
viper, gulag, gumbo pot on a steamy August
afternoon—what have you not given me? How I must
wear on you, my Samuel Johnson in a frock coat,
lexicographer of silly thoughts, billy goat,
X-rated pornographic smut factory, scarfer
of snacks, prissy smirker, late-night barfly,
you are the megaphone by which I bewitch the world
or don't as the case may be. O chittering squirrel,
ziplock sandwich bag, sound off, shut up, gather your words
into bouquets, folios, flocks of black and flaming birds.
So Says Cleopatra, Reincarnated as a Hippie Chick, circa 1967
Snakes, snakes, snakes, Ptolmey and Caesar—I ask you, what
ubiquitous black hole was I born under? On TV
Walter Cronkite drones on about the war, but I know it’s a tax
you have to pay for being alive. News is just buzz,
a boat of lies launched in a sea of misinformation, Horab
constructing his bridge over the whole fiery sea, and I’d
even bet that particular monster would turn into a wolf
given the right aspect of the moon. However, I’d stake my girlish
intuition that the world is changing. Have some baba gahnouj,
kale casserole, museli. In fifty years everyone will be eating a lentil
mess on brown rice, but no one will be hungry. Dream on,
O Flower Child, says Set, Bulldog of Death. Dream on, Lollipop
Queen of the
Seven Poems
Venus and Dogberry,
A Match Made in
Venus, you are a major babe, your hair way big, and wow,
x-ray glasses are not needed with that see-though foxy
zebra print chiffon bra and matching thong. Fucking-A,
beautiful, I am not like that pansy Adonis. I want a bionic
diva in my king-size vibrating bed. Come on over here,
fair maid. Ain’t that the way youse guys talk? Thanksgiving,
Halloween, Christmas—everyday’s a holiday with you. I
just can’t believe I could get a goddess in the sack.
Let’s toot a few lines tonight, my little summer plum,
nip out for a juicy steak in my new candy-flake Eldorado,
play footsie under the table. No Miller High Life and bar-b-q
ribs for you, baby. Only the best. Put on your high heel sneakers,
toots. I’m a
Waltz, Swing, Cha-cha-cha
I’m like Carrie Nation at a whiskey bar when it comes to sex scenes
in movies. Who needs to see Michael Douglas’s flat ass again? I, for one,
do not. I just sat through the new Bertolucci—The Dreamers—God, what
a snooze. And he used to be God. Was there ever a sexier part
in a movie than Sanda and Sandrelli glued together in that last tango
in
might add. In The Dreamers the girl’s breasts were unrelenting. I
wanted to scream, “Put on a shirt.” When did the human body become obscene?
In The Postman Always Rings Twice, when Lana Turner and John Garfield go
around the living room in each other’s arms, you know no one
will come out of that room alive. And what about the giddy dance in Bande à part—
erupting in the middle of so much black-and-white Godard-a-rama. What
kind of magic was that? Once skin seemed so recherché, but what’s
dished up today is like stale saltines with water soup. Ginger Rogers said, “I
did everything Fred did, but backwards and in heels.” Ginger, that was only part
of it. Remember The Gay Divorcee? You loathed Astaire until the scene
when he waltzed with you—the black totem of his tux, your swirling skirt—one
dance and bingo! You saw stars. In Pulp Fiction—Uma and John go
dancing, but they might as well have had sex. Think of those girls in white go-go
boots in cages—was that a sixties’ male bondage fantasy or what?
and the same—the breasts, the pecs, the suction cup mouths—Argghhh. I
love documentaries these days because there’s no bump and grind, only scenes
of spelling bees, Robert McNamara explaining, Rio de Janerio blown apart
by a city bus taken hostage, Louis Kahn’s son trying to figure out his part
in his father’s life. My skin crawls like a rattlesnake when Bolero or Mood Indigo
slithers out in full-metal Dolby, and the camera starts its obscene
caress of the body doubles. Oh, give me Audrey Hepburn with her 100-watt
smile, dancing with over-the-hill Astaire, or even The King and I—
chrome dome Yul Brynner and tight-ass Deborah Kerr don’t even sneak one
little kiss, but their waltz is more romantic than Mickey Rouark’s one-on-one
with Kim Basinger in 9-1/2 Weeks. When the camera parts
Joseph Cotton dancing with his first love in The Magnificent Ambersons, I
know I’m in the hands of a master, Orson Welles’s vertigo
like the natives’ wild dance to keep King Kong at bay. And what
moviegoer doesn’t dream of a hoedown the likes of which was last seen
in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers or Sally Porter’s lone quest in The Tango
Lesson or scarf-clad Salome’s dance that parted John the Baptist’s
body from his head. Oh, Cecil B. DeMille, now that’s what I call a sex scene.
Mr. Pillow
I’m watching a space invasion movie in which a wife
tells her pilot husband that she hugs his pillow
when he is away. Well, sure, every girl does that,
takes comfort in Mr. Pillow when her boyfriend is gone,
but not when Bela Lugosi is breaking the lock
on your prefab fifties bungalow. You fight him off,
but he still knows where you are, and the police don’t care,
or they’re bumbling incompetents, and your husband is big
but not too bright; let’s face it, he’s not even a pilot,
he’s an actor and not a very good one at that,
and what Mr. Pillow lacks in facial definition,
he more than makes up for in his cuddle quotient,
although there is the genital dilemma. Poor Mr. Pillow
is sadly lacking in that area. I hate staying in hotels
because of the king-size beds. I did not get married
not to sleep with my husband. If I had, Mr. Pillow
would do just as well, because he’s certainly never sarcastic
and he’d let me run my credit cards up as high as I want
and never make me save for retirement, so I have to admit
that I have, on occasion, used Mr. Pillow to make my husband
jealous, as when he’s sitting on his side of an enormous
hotel bed, way over in a far island of dull yellow
lamplight, reading a fascinating article on flyfishing
in
on Planet Earth, and I turn to Mr. Pillow, hold him tight
and say, “Oh, Mr. Pillow, you know what a woman needs
from a man.” Getting no response from the outer reaches
of
“Would you shut up about Mr. Pillow?” “Oh, Mr. Pillow!”
I say as he flies across the room, and I get just what I want
and maybe what I deserve. Sometimes it’s so difficult
to make these distinctions. Puritanism dies hard,
and if there are ghouls lurking in the yard, who’s to say
they have any less right to be here than we do in our cozy
little beds all the while looking at the closet door, thinking,
Where are the cannibals, where do those zombies live?
Ode on My Wasted Youth
Is there anything so ridiculous as being twenty
and carrying around a copy of Being and Nothingness,
so boys will think you have a fine mind
when really your brain is a whirling miasma,
a rat’s nest erected by Jehovah, Rousseau, Dante,
George Eliot, and Bozo the Clown?
I might as well have been in costume and on stage,
I was so silly, but with no appreciation
of my predicament, like a dim-bulb ingenue
with a fluffy wig being bamboozled by a cad
whose insincerity oozes from every orifice,
but she thinks he’s spiritual, only I was playing
both roles, hoodwinking myself with ideas
that couldn’t and wouldn’t do me much good, buying berets,
dreaming of
like Anaïs Nin under Henry Miller or vice versa.
Other people were getting married and buying cars,
but not me, and I wasn’t even looking for Truth,
just some kind of minor grip on the whole enchilada,
and I could see why so many went for eastern cults,
because of all religions Hinduism is the only one
that seems to recognize the universal mess
and attack it with a set of ideas even wackier
than said cosmos, and I think of all
my mistaken notions, like believing “firmament”
meant “earth” and then finding out it meant “sky,”
which is not firm at all, though come to find out the substance
under our feet is rather lacking in solidity as well.
Oh, words, my very dear friends,
whether in single perfection—mordant, mellifluous,
multilingual—or crammed together
in a gold-foil-wrapped chocolate valentine
like Middlemarch, how could I have survived without you,
the bread, the meat, the absolute confection,
like the oracles at
opening my box of darkness with your tiny, insistent light.
The Mockingbird on the Buddha
The mockingbird on the Buddha says, Where’s my seed,
you Jezebel, where’s the sunshine in my blue sky,
where’s the Hittite princess, Pharaoh’s temple, where’s the rain
for the misery I love so much? The mockingbird
on the Buddha scolds the tree for trying to stay straight
in the hurricane of words blowing out of the cold north,
wind like screams, night like brandy on the dark cut of my heart.
The mockingbird on the Buddha, music is his life,
he hears the tunes of the universe, cacophony of calypso,
hacking cough in the black lung of desire; he’s ruddy
with lust, that sweet stepping puffed-up old grey bird o’ mine.
The mockingbird on the Buddha says, Eat up
while the night is young. Have some peach cobbler, girl,
have some fried oysters, have some Pouligny
Montrachet, ma chère, for the night is coming, and you need meat
on your bones to ride that wild horse. The mockingbird
on the Buddha says, It’s time for a change, little missy. You’ve
been in charge too long. It’s time for the bird
to take over, because he stays up late, knows what night can be,
past 12, past two, when trouble’s dark and beautiful.
You never knew what hit you, and that’s the best feeling
in the whole wide world. The mockingbird
on the Buddha makes his nest inside my brain: he looks good
in grey, gets fat on thought, he’s my enemy,
my Einstein, my ever-loving monkey boy, every monkey thought
I blame on him, every night so sweet my body breaks
apart like a Spanish galleon raining gold on the ocean floor.
Six, Sex, Say
Do you think they wanted sex? asks the naive girl
in the film about a femme fatale who betrays
just about everyone stupid enough to get involved
with her, but since they are in
it sounds like, Do you think they wanted six?
which is another question altogether,
and I know if I were doing drugs I would think
this was possibly a key to unraveling
the mysteries of the universe, because six in French
is cease, which could mean stop
to one of another linguistic persuasion,
as in cease and desist, though it could mean six
and desist, and you don’t have to study the Kabbala
to know numbers are powerful, or how to explain
a system invented by Phoenician traders to keep track
of inventory being used by Einstein,
Dirac, Bohr to describe the mechanics of the universe,
and even the Marquis de Sade in his long exile
in the Bastille and other dungeons invented
a numerical code to hide his hideous imagination
from the thought police in that particular patch
of hell. Six, he might cry, but what would he mean,
especially if addressing his pregnant Italian
mistress, because six is s-e-i in Italian,
pronounced say. Say what? you might say. Girlfriend,
you don’t need drugs, and you’re absolutely right,
a conclusion I myself came to rather quickly,
because I’m crossing the
on Cupid’s wings, and in German it’s s-e-c-h-s or sex again,
in other words, sex of one, half a dozen of another,
which for not-so-unfathomable reasons recalls
all their sixes adding up to something, or why
would the psychic have told my friend
he would never have any money until his address
added up to six, because six is the money number,
the mysterious key to regeneration,
if not the alpha then the omega, and I who am living
at 15 quai de Bourbon know that one and five are six,
cease, sex, say, I’m in the money, if the money
is
An illuminative interview
superstition Review wants to know: Barbara Hamby
Superstition Review Poetry Editor Haley Larson had the enjoyable opportunity to interview poet Barbara Hamby. She says of the interview, “The minute I landed on Ms. Hamby's website, I knew I was in for some exciting research. Poetry aside, the lime green backdrop to her photography collections, soup recipes, and film favorites served as a small intimation of the vitality to be found throughout each of her artistic mediums. As a fellow travel fanatic, I was captivated by the sense of place Ms. Hamby weaves into her work. Demonstrated even by her third book's title,
HL: You have a new book coming out this year, All-Night Lingo Tango. In what ways do you approach writing differently since your first book, Delirium, or even your most recent book,
BH: In some ways my process is the same and in other ways it is different. I'm much more confident in my voice now than I was when I was writing Delirium, which I never really thought would find a publisher. I still have doubts with every book, but it is not so all consuming as it was then. It think all writers live on a continuum between hope and doubt. Sometimes I jump between the two like a meth addict, and at other times it's a boat ride on a sunny afternoon on the river.
When I was writing the poems in Delirium, I came up with a process that works so well for me that I find it scary. Before I discovered this way of working, I would work on one poem at a time, and when it didn’t work out I had a hard time letting it go, because I’d put so much into it. Now I work on poems in groups of twenty or so at a time. Usually they have some kind of formal or metaphoric connection. For example, the first time I tried this method the poems were tied together by a bee metaphor. In
This might not work for everyone, but so far it has worked for me. I have a niggling fear that hovers in the back of my brain like an especially vicious wasp that this break down. I suppose I will either quit writing or come up with a new process. I have fine tuned it over the years. At first I didn’t trust it, so I wrote a lot of bad poems. Now I try to wait until a poem is ready to be written—when it is begging for me to put words on the page, not the other way around.
I collect images, notes, ideas in notebooks I carry around with me. Then when a notebook is full I transfer the notes to the computer. Then comes the hard part: I have to wait for the different images to speak to each other. When I begin to see them come together, it’s like cosmic dust giving into a gravitational pull that will one day form a planet or at least the minor moon of a minor planet. To wait until the words are pouring out instead of trying to squeeze them out like a dried out tube of prussian blue.. But at first it’s hard to talk yourself into not writing as writing. I like to check my notebooks every day, just to make sure that something hasn’t happened in my absence.
So I'm not writing all the time, but I'm thinking about poems all the time and gathering images, ideas, lines, words, overheard conversations, magazine articles, newspaper headlines, anything that catches my fancy. My husband, David Kirby, says, “The Poetry Store is always open,” and I think that’s a brilliant way to put it. I never understood the Christian dictum “Pray without ceasing” until I became a poet. I think about poetry all the time. I write poetry without ceasing, even though I don’t have a pen in my hand all the time.
HL: What are your thoughts when you finish a book? What sort of satisfaction stems from a poem's completion versus an entire collection's completion?
BH: I find finishing a book very depressing. I imagine it must be like seeing a much loved child go off to college. You want her to go, but at the same time it leaves a hole in your life. I want my books to be published, but at the same time the work that has been my constant companion for five years is no longer there to chat with, contemplate, or fool around with whenever I want. When I sent the final version of Delirium off the publisher, I was unprepared for how desolate I felt. This was what I’d been working for; this was what I wanted, but I missed my poems. I had nothing to absorb my poetic energies. It took me a while to figure out how to start on my next book, and when it was published I had the same reaction. Finally, I realized that when I saw the end of a book in sight, I had to start thinking about a new group of poems. I had to write poetry without ceasing. I finally did that with my new book All-Night Lingo Tango. By the time I sent the final draft off, I had a completely new group of poems in the planning stages. So I’ve been very happy with the publication of this book. You’d think I could have figured this dynamic out a little more quickly, but I suppose each of us works at his or her own pace.
On the other hand finishing a poem is lovely, like solving an intricate mathematical problem or baking a cake or making a delicious meal. And having a magazine take a poem is lovely as well. I love looking at proofs. I’ve just received the proofs of a poem that is coming out in APR. For some reason seeing the poem on a page makes me very happy.
HL: Your forthcoming book of poems will center on the connections between dreams and film. What led you to explore these connections? How much did your own dreams serve as research for this book?
BH: Oh, you read something I said about the book a couple of years ago. I thought that’s what it was about, and I suppose some of the poems are, but it is really about how we make our worlds out of dreams and language, which is kind of like making a movie. However, I could be wrong about that. I often am wrong about almost everything. I began the book writing a lot about movies, but it changed as I worked on the poems.
I have a very active dream life. In fact, it’s almost like watching a movie, a chaotic movie. I sometimes dream until the very moment I wake in the morning or that’s how it seems to me. And I think that connection between the conscious and unconscious worlds is essential in poetry. Poetry that is made entirely from the conscious mind seems limited, cold and only about half of the human experience. And by the same token, poetry that comes entirely from the unconscious mind is unsuccessful in a different way. Anyone who has done automatic writing or transcribed a dream knows this to be true or anyone older than sixteen. Our entire lives are made up of an interpenetration of the conscious and unconscious minds. If art has anything to tell us, it must take this basic fact into consideration.
HL: In your poem "Cinerama" from
BH: I feel very strongly that we look to art in the same way we look to religion–to discover how to be a human being living within the constraints of time. This was what I think Lorca was getting at with his idea of duende. Any piece of art must express this basic truth of mortality. It is the central fact and mystery of life. The Hindus have a concept that all life is a vehicle for God to experience himself. What ever you believe, it is true that every person experiences life in a different way. We go to art for many things–entertainment, escape, stimulation, knowledge–but we also want to experience another human being’s take on consciousness. It is how we refine our own consciousness. I’m not religious any more, but I do think about my place in time. For me art is a divine enterprise, but with out the gods.
When I write from my own point of view, in a sense it is a persona poem. My poetic persona is certainly much wittier and much more quick on her toes than I am. She’s more optimistic and knows a lot more. So writing from the point of view of Cleopatra or Leda or Lysistrata is much the same as writing from my own voice.
HL: Having picked up a bit of the German language from my father, "The Mockingbird Invents Writing" includes a couple lines I am particularly fond of: "Charming language German: Schadenfreude, Übermensch, Scheissbedauren, regret that something's not as bad as you'd hoped it would be." How has your exposure to other languages molded or influenced your regard for the English language? In another interview, you said you tell your students they are lucky to write poetry in English. Can you expand on this a bit?
BH: I suppose all poets are in love with their own languages, just as all painters must be in love with color or all musicians with sound. Language is our medium. The strength and beauty of English is in part its huge and omnivorous vocabulary. It also has a flexibility that comes from its mongrel background. Anglo-Saxon is concrete. Norman French is cultivated, and Latin is abstract. All three together make for a rollicking good time. Of course, I’m not saying that English is the best language. It certainly has limitations. There are some emotional gradations that we have a hard time expressing. Our word “love” is so inadequate to the task that it must be one of the reasons English has created so much love poetry. I find other languages give me what English sometimes cannot, and they are also a mirror to hold up to our own expressions.
HL: Fitting in with the concept of
BH: I really am a magpie. It just has to be bright and shiny and I’ll love it. If I can play with a word or it sounds weird or has an oddball connotation, then I’ll use it.
HL: In your poem "Ode to American English," our dialects and linguistic mannerisms, all of their colorful oddities are revered. Discuss where you have lived in the
BH: My father was in the Air Force, so we moved around quite a bit, and it gave me a love of travel. Growing up in
HL: How do you create the sense of place in your poems? Explain the development of setting when you begin a poem.
BH: I have just been realizing that sometimes when I’m reading a poem that isn’t moving me, it is often because it has a lot of air and water or mental and emotional energy but no earth and fire or materiality or passion. I think place is an earthy element, and must be given its due for a poem to be successful. You don’t have to be Frost, but this world is important. Flesh is important. The body and the senses are essential to the human endeavor. I think young people want to pretend it isn’t, or at least that was true for me. I wanted the mind to be everything. Even my most word-drunk ethereal poems have their orientation in the world.
HL: You've traveled to and lived in many places. Is there a particular country, state, or town that has most influenced your writing - a place that each new place tries to live up to? What sort of differences in inspiration do you detect between "just visiting" different locations as opposed to residing somewhere? Discuss the unique view of a place that is allowed from being more detached - a traveler rather than a resident.
BH: I’ve lived in the South for a long time, and I love the wackiness of it. The American South is profoundly weird, which is very nourishing to a poet. It has resisted the homogenization that television has forced on the rest of the country. There must be something in the water. It’s also hot where I live, which gives one a connection with the body and the outside world. You don’t have to wear as many clothes. Summer in the deep South is a very sensual experience.
That is my reality, but I think that growing up in
HL: Discuss writing abroad versus writing at home. How are your processes different?
BH: They are no real differences. David and I travel to write. There’s no telephone or not as much of it. You have acres of uninterrupted time, which is so necessary for writing.
HL: You teach at
BH: I love teaching and I love my students. For the most part they are such a joy. Every once in a while I encounter a young man or woman who is trying to disengage from a strong mother, and that’s a potentially weird mix. But 99% of the time it’s a love fest. They are in my classroom for the thing I love most in the world, and that is a gorgeous place to work and a place of continual discovery. I can’t think of a better job.
The most difficult idea to teach is the primacy of the image and writing from the senses. All students are in college because they are good at abstract reasoning and writing using abstractions. That kind of writing doesn’t work in poetry where we are creating a world where we felt a certain emotion so our reader can enter into it and feel it as well. This is that air-water problem again. They have thoughts and feelings, but the trick is to breathe life into them.
And central to any poem is that there is a central voice or a central self that speaks to the reader. We go to art to learn how to be a human being. Of course, a lot of people seem to have perfectly satisfactory lives without art, but for those of us who want deep interior lives, art is essential. That central self is expressed in sense images creates a world on the page, a world that the reader can enter into and experience what the poet has experience. It is communion on the highest level.
I love Robert Bly’s idea of the leap and Lorca’s duende. For me, these two concepts can supercharge a poem. They are jet fuel. Bly defines a leap as movement from the conscious to the unconscious and back again. For me this is true to the way the human mind works. We are continually moving between the reality and dream, daydream, memory, fantasy. And duende is that acknowledgment of mortality–the shadow of death. So for me these concepts are central to the poetic process: the self or voice, sense images, moving from the conscious to the unconscious, and duende.
The most rewarding part of my career is to see a student blossom in front of me. It is especially exciting when that student has given no indication of any ability and then suddenly writes a real poem. I do everything I can to encourage that kind of breakthrough. I had a very negative experience with a teacher in graduate school. She told me I was smart, but I’d never be a poet. I keep that experience in mind when I’m dealing with a hopeless student, because I can’t know what that person is capable of in the future.
HL: Your work contains quite a blend of cultural references from both present day and the past: films, the Dodgers, Caravaggio, a Singer sewing machine. How are these items and cultural icons incorporated into your work and/or daily life?
BH: I read two newspapers every day and I travel as much as I can. I love the multiplicity of existence.
HL: The characters in your poems range from Moses to the guy at the office to the dancing romances of films old and new. Who is most difficult to write about or take on as a persona - historical figures, literary figures, film characters, or actual acquaintances? What are the challenges of writing these characters into poetry?
BH: I think the most difficult poems are the ones about people who are close to you. Because you know them so well, it’s difficult to really get them. I wrote a poem about my mother in
HL: Your poems pack so much punch into every line. Images and diction- there is a momentum there. Can you discuss your writing and revision process? Which poetic elements, for example rhythm or imagery, are most difficult to revise? Can you explain how you form the associations within a line or phrase?
BH: I revise by reading a poem aloud. The line also gives the poem a certain rhythm. When I change a word or image because of sound or meaning, then I often have to change the line as well. As for the associations, they really come from the moment of writing. When I am in the zone and everything is clicking, one word will trigger a memory or a rhyme or an image or a metaphor. It’s like improvising with music. I think that’s why I really loved working with end rhymes in All-Night Lingo Tango. One rhyme would lead to another. I often work with lists of words. I use them to improvise.
HL: You have an absolute gift with figurative language and imagery.
From "Ode to My 1977
as we drive home from the coast, the Milky Way
strung across the black velvet bowl of the sky like the tiara
of some impossibly fat empress who rules the universe
but doesn't know if tomorrow is December or Tuesday or June first.
Discuss who or what has influenced how you approach imagery in your work.
BH: Actually teaching has helped me with imagery. It’s something that I emphasize to my students, and concentrating on images in my teaching has helped me to see how powerful they are on the page.
HL: In another interview, you spoke about a form that you created concerning letters of the alphabet. Discuss the role form plays in your poems. How does form challenge or liberate your work?
BH: Form has been miraculous for me. When I started writing I was a free verse poet all the way, and after All-Night Lingo Tango I am writing free verse again with renewed relish. While I was writing
In
As for the abecedarian obsession, I can’t really explain it, or I can, but I think I’m making up an explanation after the fact. I could say that the alphabet is the basis of language, and by emphasizing the alphabet I am emphasizing the primacy of language in my work However much that is true, in reality the abecedarian poem was just a form that was so pleasurable for me to write. In my first book, Delirium, I wrote one, and I just loved it. I didn’t know what I wanted to say until I got to “z.” That was such a thrill for me, because I have a tendency to over think everything. Then in The Alphabet of Desire I decided to amplify my pleasure 26 times and write one poem for every letter of the alphabet. I ended up writing more that 26, because as I wrote I became more skilled and more adventurous.
Then in
I’m hoping that I’ve finished with the form in Lingo Tango. I worked with the beginning and the end of the line in the abecedarians in that book. The middle section is a group of thirteen-line poems beginning with one letter and carrying on with the end letters and beginning letters of the lines. The first letter of the first poem is “a,” and the first line ends with “b” and so on until it ends with the letter “z.” The second poem “Betty Boop’s Bebop” begins with a “b,” and the first line ends with the word “picnic.” I wrote this whole sequence during the fall of 2004, when my husband and I were living in
HL: Your short story "Mr. Manago's Mango Trees" along with your poems bring out striking contrasts: manure and sweet mangoes, youth and age, waking and dreaming, chiaro and scurro. Can you talk about this balance within your images and themes?
BH: I have to say that those kinds of contrasts are a direct result of the interplay between the conscious and unconscious mind. I rarely think about them. Any gardener knows that to grow a good tomato you need compost. It’s the yin and yang. I might emphasize a contrast in rewrites, but they are pretty organic.
HL: The rich images found in your poetry are mirrored in your short stories. Explain the differences in your process of writing prose as opposed to poetry. Discuss your writing beginnings in both genres.
BH: Actually the first piece I wrote was a short story. I was in the third grade, and it was called “The Magic Cornfield.” It was published in the school newspaper. Sixth graders would stop me in the hall and say, “I liked your story.” It was my first glimmering of how powerful words could be. Then in the fourth grade, I got my first dictionary. I was sunk after that. I felt so rich, when I opened that book. All those words—and they were mine. I think that led me to poetry.
For me time is the big difference between poetry and fiction. For me fiction is very embedded in time. Even if I jump around in a story, it is important that the reader knows where and when the scene is taking place. That isn’t so important in poetry. For me it is less linear. In a couple of lines I might use memory, fantasy, history and the present moment. Now that I write this, I see all the holes in my argument. I think about this question all them time. My current thought on the subject is that time is more important in fiction than in poetry. Or at least in my fiction and poetry.
HL: Your poems are almost like small collections - collections of alliterations, places, characters, languages. Your photography featured on your website is very similar in this sense - collections from car graveyards, shoes, signs. Can you talk about this a bit? Is this something that results from your writing method or just personal taste?
BH: I have a very chaotic mind, which I find very worrying. I think the compulsive organizing is a way to deal with that chaos. I find sequences and series very helpful in organizing my thoughts and ideas.
It’s probably an indication of some kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder. I love to put things in order. All my bookshelves are alphabetized. Chaos makes me profoundly anxious, my mind most of all. It doesn’t work out for me so well in my personal life—it drives people crazy—but I’m trying to make it work in my artistic life. However, my desk is a mess. I work in chaos.
HL: The second section of poems in your first book, Delirium, is largely set in
BH: I took a lot of art history classes in college, and about ten years ago I started taking drawing lessons. I think my love of art is connected with my use of images in my poems.
HL: Your website unveils a love for soup. In what ways does revising a poem resonate with revising and perfecting a recipe? How does the creativity of cooking differ from the creativity of writing poetry?
Well, there’s immediate gratification with cooking. It doesn’t take as much discipline, at least the way I do it. I really don’t like a recipe that is more than one page. That’s certainly not true of my poems.
HL: Describe a moment you first felt like a "poet."
BH: My breakthrough poem was the first poem in Delirium, “The Language of Bees.” When I wrote it, I was stunned. It was so different than anything I had written before. I had been working up to that poem for a long time, but when I wrote it, I thought, “This is what I want to do; this is my real voice.” I also used language in a more complex way than I had ever used it. After that I sat down at my desk with such a different feeling. I still had my ups and downs, but I had a new sense of confidence in my work.
HL: Who has been influential in your work?
BH: Keats, Neruda, Garcia Lorca, Whitman, Donne, Plath, Ginsberg, and so many more poets. I couldn’t have written my Lingo Sonnets without Shakespeare’s sonnets. I love Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer. I’ve come to love Rilke after resisting him for years. I’ve also come to love
HL: Your couplet poems have a very distinctive jazzy rhythm to them. How has music influenced your work? Can you discuss your
BH: I studied music as a girl, so I can read music though I’m not a skilled musician. I certainly pay attention to how the sounds of words relate to each other. I have been influenced by Keats’s use of assonance to tie together his lines. We left
HL: In another interview, you mention a need for a quick wit as a child in your household (which is very apparent in your poems). At what point did you start writing? More specifically, when did you write your first poem? Whom did you show it to? When you write a poem now, who is the first person you have read it?
BH: As I mentioned before I started writing early. It was always something that I had a facility for, something I inherited from my father, who was a clear, elegant writer. One of my sisters is also a good writer. She’s a nurse, and she has always gotten raves for her case studies. I really started writing poetry in high school. I had a boyfriend who was a poet, and we egged each other on. We were both huge Bob Dylan fans. I memorized all the lyrics to the songs on Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. I think I could still pull up “Just Like Tom Thumb Blues” in a pinch. However, I never considered poetry as a vocation. I thought that it wasn’t something that I could aspire to, because I revered poetry so much. I could read poetry and write my secret poems, but I could never be a poet. Then I went to college and complete idiots were saying, “I’m a poet.” It was then that I began to think, “Hey, I’m an idiot. Maybe I could be a poet, too.”
HL: In the same interview, you mention that learning to read was almost an escape for you as a child. Discuss the role that writing plays for you now. How has this role changed since childhood? What has remained?
BH: When I was younger, writing was sporadic. Now I’m much more disciplined, as you would have to be if you want to write poetry without ceasing.
HL: I read that your dictionary was a prized possession as a child. Discuss an instance when you "discovered" a new word as a child. From where do you unearth exciting new words now?
BH: I find new words everywhere: in the newspaper, on billboards, in overheard conversations, and, of course, in books. My husband knows what I like, and he’s always finding something for me.
HL: What advice do you have for young writers?
BH: Cultivate good work habits. Create a place to work, and go there every day, even if you write two words and erase three. Picasso said, “Inspiration exists, but it must find us working.” The more you work, the greater your facility, and the more pleasure you will take in sitting down at your desk.
Never stop reading.
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