~ Delta Poetry Review ~
An Interview with Barbara Hamby
by Susan Swartwout
SS: Stuart Riordan’s cover art for your book
is stunning and energizing at once. Tell us about how you decided
upon both the cover and the title and how they usher your odes.
BH: Stuart and I were friends and collaborators for a long time. I
love the visual arts and she loved poetry, so we had a deep
connection. Her photographs were the cover images for my first two
books, the chapbook Skin and my first full-length collection,
Delirium, and then my new and selected poems, On the Street of
Divine Love and Holoholo. As soon as I saw her painting that’s on
the cover of Burn, I knew I wanted it for a cover, because it spoke
to one of my central obsessions, which is how fierce you have to be
as a woman in this world. Everything seems to conspire to keep us
from shining—biology, class, rules, even ourselves. I love the woman
in opera gloves and a ballgown or maybe a wedding gown with an axe
raised over her head. It really spoke to me about the tensions
between femininity and fury and to go back to Keats, beauty and
truth. I had the cover before I had finished the book. Stuart had
been diagnosed with dementia, so I knew I had to ask her for
permission while she could still give it. She said yes, and I had
faith that the cover and my book would work out, and it did.
SS: I’m thinking that the entire world could use a humongous dose
of “here are some praiseworthy things that I love or want to love,
am amazed by and react to, and need to share in gorgeous figurative
language instead of smack-talking other folks and being a hater,”
and to get started, they should of course read your odes in Burn as
well as the other ode collections you recommend in your book’s
back-matter essay, “Why the Ode?” but how about everyone writing an
ode a day? What could be the therapeutic benefits of keeping an Ode
journal?
BH: I love the ode because it has no formal constraints except the
ones you choose to give it. I started out writing free-verse odes,
but I’ve also written abecedarian odes and highly formal odes in
syllabic lines with end rhymes. For me, the ode is a perfect way to
write about the tension between the beauty and horror of the world,
which seems to be a constant when you look at the history of human
beings on this planet. The more of us there are, the more we seem to
gravitate to chaos, and yet our world is gorgeous and human beings
can be, too. For me, the ode usually starts with praise, but that
soon dissolves into a negotiation with the second law of
thermodynamics. I don’t know about an ode journal, but I do keep a
notebook of images that seem to be a door into a deeper vision of
the world. That notebook and those images are where all my odes are
born.
SS: Mary Jo Bang tells students that one writes about one’s
obsessions and that those don’t change. How do your obsessions feed
your writing, and do those obsessions remain the same or change?
BH: Mary Jo is absolutely spot on. I tell my students the same
thing. I love Tony Hoagland’s little two-page essay in Real Sofistikashun about obsession—“Are You Still Writing about Your
Father?” In it, he says that we are lucky as poets to have
obsessions. I think my obsessions came first and the ode followed.
One of my central obsessions is language and what it can and can’t
express. I’m in love with English. It’s a big, brawling language
that is omnivorous, but it can also be limpid and tender and filled
with wonder. Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet are my two favorite plays
by Shakespeare, and I’ve been memorizing pieces of them for years.
They are poetry incarnate. And Keats’s odes, especially “Ode to a
Nightingale” and “Ode to Autumn,” slay me every time I read them.
They show us just how beautiful English can be.
I’m also interested in how we navigate our time on earth. Our bodies
start out strong if we are lucky, but health falls away. It is
through consciousness that we come to understand our place in time.
I don’t think we can separate language and consciousness. Jorge Luis
Borges said that he did most of his reading in English because it
has two registers because it comes from two languages—Anglo-Saxon
and French. I love these two registers of English—the elemental and
the refined.
SS: I asked your lovely husband, David Kirby, this question when he
was our featured poet, but I’d love to hear your particular response
about your frequently visited European destination. Besides Italy’s
obviously incredible countryside, the food, the wine, the people,
the art, and the history, what else about it calls to your poetic
spirit?
BH: Italy has been a real piece of luck for us. Our university has a
study abroad program in Florence, so we’ve been able to live there
for extended periods of time. But before that, I took a lot of art
history classes in college. My favorite professor taught the Italian
Renaissance and Baroque classes, and I wanted to see those paintings
more than anything. Talk about beauty. I actually took my art
history class notes to Italy on our honeymoon. I knew I’d married
the right guy when he drove me to see every out-of-the-way fresco
and sculpture my heart desired to see.
Now we try to go to Florence in May and June for a month. Social
Security is paying for it. I love to think of my younger self
working as a waitress or a hotel maid, subsidizing my poetic life as
an older woman in Italy. When I was toiling at those jobs, poetry
was my great love, but it was also a dream, which in many ways has
come true. The time in Florence is a reset after a busy semester. In
fact, I’m writing this in Florence at 4:30 am. I have notes for lots
of poems and plans to revisit my favorite paintings and sculptures.
I love Donatello’s David, so I know I’ll visit him two or three
times in the next month at the Bargello. It’s a short walk from the
apartment we rent. There’s a big Rothko show at the Palazzo Strozzi,
too, that I’m excited to see, and, of course, it’s lovely to sit out
on the piazzas and watch the world walk by. Poems happen when you
least expect them.
SS: What is your writing practice and process? Are you a scheduler
or are you inspired more sporadically? What are you working on next?
BH: Picasso said,
“Inspiration exists, but it must find us working.” I’m always
working, but that work takes different forms. All year, I’ve been
putting together notes for our time in Florence. I give my
undergraduate students prompts which they start writing to in class
with a pen on paper, and I write with them, so I have almost twenty
handwritten drafts ready to go. I was teaching Richard Siken’s new
book, I Do Know Some Things, in my graduate workshop on poetic
sequences in the spring, and when I was preparing for class, I wrote
a huge new ode based on his staccato rhythms. It gave me hope that
I’d have a productive summer. These poems are big odes.
But two summers ago I started another project. The show at the
Palazzo Strozzi in Florence featured Anselm Kiefer’s work. His
sculpture of Daphne just knocked me out. Almost immediately Daphne
started talking to me, and I’ve been writing Daphne odes ever since.
I’ve always thought that Daphne was running toward her freedom more
than away from Apollo. I have about thirty of them so far and notes
for ten or fifteen more. In my sequence, after a few hundred years
Daphne’s tree falls away and she begins to move through time. She’s
talking to everyone—Jesus on the cross, Queen Elizabeth I, Rita
Hayworth in Lady from Shanghai, Veronica Lake. One of my favorites
is when she meets Mr. Twister, a guy who ride tornadoes. I’m having
so much fun. I don’t know if I have one or two books of poems. I’m
trying to keep my negative capability open and not worry too much
about it.
For about ten years I’ve also been working on a book of essays about
the history of the ode. I start out in ancient Mesopotamia and the
Hebrew Psalms and then move to ancient Greece, Horace, Ronsard, the
Sidney Psalter (I have a major crush on Mary Sidney), and the
post-Renaissance craze for odes in England that led to the Romantic
odes. Keats has his own chapter. Right now, I’m finishing up my
essay on Whitman’s “Song of Myself” then it’s on to Lorca’s casidas
and the Arabian ode and, of course, Neruda’s odes. I’ve learned so
much writing these essays. For a long time, I doubted that I’d
finish the book, but now it’s looking as if I might.
I’m a fiction writer, too. Four Way Books is publishing my novella,
"At the Mamba Room" in March 2027. It’s about an obituary writer who
is trying to extricate himself from a toxic relationship. The Mamba
Room is the tiki bar where he hangs out. There is also a cat that I
based on my cat Patsy as well as a dead Bichon Frisee and a python.
They’re all talking, and they have a lot to say about life and
death. The manuscript is 160 pages, but it has 45 chapters. It’s
what happens when a poet tries to write a novel.
One of my other obsessions is my right-wing Christian mother, who
loved me fiercely. She always said, “An idle mind is the devil’s
workshop.” I hate to be depressed, so having a lot of projects going
on at the same time keeps me cheerful or at least as cheerful as I
can be given the state of the world. When I hit a wall in one, I
just move on to another. It has taken me a long time to be able to
juggle so many. Let’s see how many I can finish.
Barbara Hamby's Poetry and Bio
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