Catherine Barnett and Sally Keith are two poets we've long admired. This year, as we read their new collections (Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space and Two of Everything, respectively), we became interested in how the two books—and poets—might speak to each other, and about how Barnett and Keith thought about form, composition, and process.
This summer we had the chance to speak to Barnett and Keith together, and we are grateful they agreed to this conversational interview, which has taken place over email and Google Docs this fall.
Swannanoa Review (SR): As we've read Two of Everything and Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space, we've been intrigued by the nature of both as book-length projects or sequences. Is this form something you planned from the beginning? Or, how and when in the writing or revising process did these books begin to take their shape?
Catherine Barnett (CB): Though my books might look like planned sequences, they are as far from planned as I can make them. Planning is the death of spontaneity for me and I've ended up here in poetry because poems invite (for me require) the greatest spontaneity in order for the deepest pleasures and surprises to happen. "Happen" has at its root the Old English "hap," which sometimes means luck, fortune, chance. I think the art of poetry is one of luck and chance and that the more you show up to the blank page (and the more you read), with as open a mind as possible, the more chances you have for luck.
But it's true that my last two books include fragmented lyric essay-like sequences, which originated in unfettered note-taking and imaginative divagations that were part of my idiosyncratic "research" for lectures I give as part of my teaching in NYU's low-residency MFA program in Paris, where each year we give talks to graduate students of all genres. I always overprepare for these (and stay up all night the night before), ending up with pages of unused notes and ideas. I try to choose subjects that obsess me (and that I think will be of use to others). One year it was a talk on how questions function in poems, stories, and memoir; this thinking / meandering / researching / inventing ended up as the five "Accursed Questions" lyric essays in Human Hours. In 2020, right before the pandemic, I gave a lecture called "The Capaciousness of Solitude," but it was really a talk on how loneliness (not the same as solitude) can fuel and charge and deepen a writer's life and work. So in that sense, the "Studies in Loneliness" sequence of ten brief lyric entries that show up in Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space were part of a "project" that ended up in the book, welcomed there with happenstance chance — a companion I court and try not to chase after but only shyly invite down onto the page.
Sally Keith (SK): You know, I am sure I had been trying to not write a book-length project; I had genuinely surprised myself with River House, the book-length sequence before Two of Everything, and was trying to get far away from it, which I could hardly manage. I wanted—as I still want—to think about lyric, lyric as song, maybe also lyric as anonymous song, and I was piecing together poems, longer poems, with what I thought of as bits of song. I was in Oaxaca, Mexico for a year. I had time. There were hummingbirds above my head. We were with our then almost two-year old twin boys. On the side, I was drafting a narrative of our experience adopting, trying to simply make sense of what we had been through. This writing also fell into pieces, pieces of prose, and at some point the narrative started feeling much more alive—weightier—than the fragmented lyrics, which risked a feeling of, well, inconsequence. I suppose it was from that year of writing and the struggle with the two parts that I began to feel the desire to make a whole.
If honest, I love collage, I love juxtaposition, and I fear I am pretty naturally given to dragging a thing out. I don’t know if I’ve concluded my interrogation of lyric versus narrative, or if I will; still, the idea of a purely lyric sequence that feels infused with consequence (while feeling free) lures me. In fact, Catherine’s new book is so inspiring in this light—not book-length, to my mind, or not technically, though of course there are the continued “Studies in Loneliness,” but, yes, there is a dimension that the reader carries with them as they feel the connectivity in the poems, a connectivity, I think, often signaled by objects. Hmmm. I’m drawn to the way these repetitions thread: the moth, the hole in the sweater, the light, the fruit. That’s just one (impartial) strand. The objects not only start to feel symbolic, but they communicate subtly with some abstract ideas, say time, that can also move into reality: a circle, a clock, a face, a mother. I find this just stunning.
SR: In the editing process—as the books took their final shape, even if it was with resistance!—how did you approach balancing “poems” with “lyric prose?”
There seems to be a tradition of works that blend these modes. (We were reminded, for example, of the haibun form—alternating prosaic accounts with distilled lyrics.) Were there works in this realm that you referenced as you built your poems and books?
SK: I hate to say it, but a lot was intuition. I wanted to have an even feeling of prose alternating with poems and, generally speaking, in the case of this book, the prose is often where most of the narrative is located. Not always. I hoped the lyrics would make a different dimension—a verticality, perhaps, or a counter to the forward going property of the experience I narrate. It’s a problematic endeavor. I feared for the lyric poems. That they might not hold their own, if you will—yeah, that was the challenge.
I did once have an early experience at a writing workshop where the poet teaching us said she would sometimes annotate her own poems with “More Haiku/Less Haiku” and whether or not that could be true or possible, it is something I have thought about for many years. I am drawn to pairing silence with song, excess with absence. As with any interest in poetry, I go on because I can’t figure it out.
I had no set reference. I like wandering, swerve-y, poetry: Anne Carson, C.S. Giscombe, Maggie Nelson, the sequences of Henri Cole, Arthur Sze, George Oppen. Also, the way Marianne Moore writes sentences piling information and then, suddenly, delivers a single resonant lyric line is hugely inspirational.
CB: What Sally calls her "problematic endeavor" is exactly what is so unusual and compelling and beautiful about her new collection: that there's a story, something very much at stake. I love this and it made me want to rethink my own poetics; it made me realize how rare this narrative urgency is in contemporary poetry. I couldn't stop reading. I wanted to know what was going to happen (that word again), not only because the story itself is dramatic in the most human ways, but also because the speaker is so present–available, vulnerable, funny, real–in both the lyric and narrative moments.
Your question makes me think of Joseph Cornell's boxes. He'd go out wandering the streets looking for objects and images he could use but without knowing ahead of time what he was going to make.
What is an ordering principle that can help contain the materials without too much containment? Maybe it's found in what Apollinaire (in "The Pretty Redhead") calls "the long wrangle" between Adventure and Order.
In poetry you can not-know for a long long time and it's hardly a liability; sometimes it's a great gift. I was just reading an interview with the wonderful fiction writer Amy Hempel and she describes a similar writing process, noting that the one story she planned out ahead of time took her thirty years to write!
And earlier this week I was visiting with the critic and scholar Christopher Ricks, who was a dear friend of my dear friend, the poet Saskia Hamilton, and he said he was interested in and by coincidences. I'm not sure but I think I might read through my work looking for the coincidences, the echoes, the useful repetitions, the preoccupations, and then I see what I can make out of these—like a meal made out of whatever ingredients you happen to have in your kitchen.
The analogy fails, of course, and not only because I'm not a good cook (though I can slice fruit with alacrity), and not only because meals are perishable. (As are we.)
Perhaps it's more useful to say that, while I’m trying to figure out how the disparate poems might speak to each other, a force comes in and wants to find or invent some organizing principle—almost some kind of mathematical rule. Then this ordering principle creates some constraints that invite further revision and often-unexplored possibility.
Every year I supervise a good handful of MFA student theses and perhaps the best advice I have is to try to figure out, intuitively (there's that word again), which poem might open the manuscript and from there practice leaping and linking. By that I mean, what kind of leap can you make from one poem to the next, what kind of link can you make? And to continue like that, without too many other concerns, to see where you end up and which poems can't find a home. This isn't a one-time effort, no—there are so many ways to leap, so many ways to link—but it's a fun, liberating way to work.
SR: Both of your books share an intrigue and exploration of loneliness—of the individual, or couple, navigating the world and desires. We’ve talked about the preconceived intention vs. intuition of the form of each book, and we’re curious, is the “subject” (or what we think of as cohesive subject(s) after the book is finished), something that comes about through a similar process?
Or—when, in the process of writing or editing these two books, did the “essential” poems and subjects become clear?
SK: Subject matter is a paradox. For a long time, I have wanted to write something about the subject of subject, but repeatedly it slips away from me. [Ha.]
While it is true that I have sometimes written poems in which I write “into” something, like a subject, more often I stumble around, at least in part, and come upon the subject, if there is one… An enormous shift in my previous collection, River House, was that for the first time the subject was laid bare, all-encompassing: my mother’s death. I couldn’t have escaped it if I tried. That experience also deeply influenced Two of Everything. I’d been dilly-dallying around with a long collage, determined to say not much about what it was “about”—collecting images, indulging fragments, little clips of speech— and after sending the draft to my most supportive reader and dear friend, Jim Longenbach, who wrote “…one wants to feel, with this kind of poem, that everything could go into it, but in fact (I’m preaching to a well versed choir here) it cannot be the fact that anything could in fact go into it,” I knew exactly how I had run off the tracks. I would have to say what I meant.
In the case of Two of Everything, then, my forever desire to get inside and underneath would need to include excavating a tangible experience. As for the loneliness you detect, well, I think no matter what you do (in writing or in life) it’s relatively hard to stave off the dominant feelings of one’s existence. Right? Probably fair to say that as a person and a poet, I am enticed by impossibility, drawn to the space between what is and what’s not, a space I find inherently both lonely and desirous. What one wants more than a subject is to add stuff up, to approximate what living is like, to make of the page a possible access point, for the reader but more so for yourself.
I was just reading Shine by Joe Millar, a dear-to-me person and poet, and came across his “Ars Poetica” which opens by asking: “Why must you penetrate the silence/ since you can never speak what it is?”
In Ben Lerner’s The Lights I found this sentence: “But if you’ve ever seen a dendritic pattern in a frozen pond, lightning captured in hard plastic, or the delicate venation of an insect wing (the fourth vein of the wing is called the media), then you’ve probably felt that a spirit is at work in the world, or was, and that making it visible is the artist’s task, or was. I am resolved to admire all elaborate silvery pathways no matter where I find them….”
Both of these resonate with me in terms of loneliness, poetry and plain old existence. Feeling lonely is part of the deal, I think. It’s a good thing. I look forward to reading what Catherine has to say, having tackled this question so brilliantly in her “Studies in Loneliness,” a series of poems I have read, reread and will keep close.
“Some of us write to appease the loneliness, why else leave a mark?
I was here, words say, this is what it was like, don’t forget—”
(from Catherine’s “Studies in Loneliness, iv”)
To answer, again, with concision: I think I needed the subject to be clear in order to write into open space.
CB: Yes, the processes are very similar and absolutely linked. I can’t think about—or feel my way towards—form until I have all my materials (or close to all). And then form gives rise to new or changed materials. It's absolutely a case of give and take. A dance. What is it A. R. Ammons says in his essay “A Poem Is a Walk?”
"I take the walk to be the externalization of an interior seeking."
As I know I've said in the earlier questions, I try to have no preconceived intentions when I come to the blank page.
My computer just auto-corrected me: "I try to have no preconceived intentions when I come to the blanket"—which points me to a useful comparison: writing as dreaming. Yes, think of the generative process as a form of dreaming.
So to answer the "when" in your question: I try to dream for as long as I can. The essential poems and subjects don't become clear until I become tired of my way of thinking/saying and curious about what I've been making out of that extended dream state. In my last two books, part of the dream state was enlivened by the research I was doing for my teaching and lectures.
I often tell my students (and myself) to look back at your own work as if you were a very good friend—a sister—of the writer; a friend who believes in the work (the dream of the work, the dreams in the work, the dreams for the work) and brings a sense of as-yet undiscovered possibility–of both form and content–that comes with greater distance and discernment. Simultaneous rigor and gentleness help keep me from the familiar quicksands of misguided enthusiasm and despair.
SR: As we approach the end of 2024, what's next? What writing projects, or thinking projects, or projects in general, are you looking forward to working on, both in the new year, and on the heels of these collections?
CB: My aim is not to rush! To read more. To read Jenny Erpenbeck, whose Kairos I just opened this morning--after two friends, Diana Khoi Nyugen and Rosanna Warren, both recommended it to me--and loved it so much I want to dive onto the couch right now and keep reading. I want to practice what the poet Forrest Hamer calls "deep listening" and see where that listening takes me.
SK: I have been joking—in part—that I’m going to write dense, baroque poems about absolutely nothing. But, seriously, apart from leaning into the project of poetry as the project of life, which is to suggest feeling awake, in motion, alive to good writing and art, and people, too, I’ve got no set plan. I’m rereading Fernanda Melchor’s amazing Hurricane Season (translated by Sophie Hughes) for the second time this year. I have Shirley Jackson’s letters by the bed. I’m thinking about animals and unseen spirits and whatever it is that might help mitigate our little residence here on earth. There is the attractive notion that the lyric might allow one to escape the self. So, yes. Always that.