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Biographical note: A. Robert Lee, a Britisher formerly of the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, is Professor of American Literature at Nihon University, Tokyo. Recent publications include Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America (1998), Postindian Conversations, with Gerald Vizenor (1999), Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fiction (2003),which won the 2004 American Book Award, and just published, Modern American Counter Writing: Beats, Outriders, Ethnics (2010).
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781844717187
ISBN: 9781844717187
Author: A. Robert Lee
Title: The Salt Companion to Jim Barnes
Series: Salt Companions to Poetry
Product class: BC
Language: eng
Audience: General/trade
BIC subject category: CSBH
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Pub date: 22-Feb-10
Extent: 196pp
Height: 228 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 11 mm
Weight: 294 gms
Supplier: Gardners Books
Supplier: Ingram Book Group
Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability: NP
Price: GBP 14.99
Price: USD 21.95
Rights: World
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description/annotation: Across nine volumes of poetry from This Crazy Land (1980) to Visiting Picasso (2007), in his landmark autobiography On Native Ground: Memoirs and Impressions (1997), and in his three decades of editing The Chariton Review, Jim Barnes has built an illustrious literary career.
This first book on his work, which fully recognises his mix of Anglo-Welsh and Choctaw Oklahoma heritage, could not be timelier – a long overdue tribute.
Main description: “The one right word,” as he writes in ‘The Poet’s Paradise,’ has long been a Jim Barnes desideratum. Across an illustrious literary career that has produced nine volumes of verse from This Crazy Land (1980) to Visiting Picasso (2007), there can be little doubt of seriously dedicated verve, a craftsman’s eye and ear. His landmark autobiography, On Native Ground: Memoirs and Impressions (1997) adds its own weight, a life and its imaginative turn running from hard-scrub Oklahoma birth and mixed Anglo-Celtic and Choctaw lineage, through Oregon logging in the 1950s, to an eventual professorial career at Truman State University, Missouri (1970-2003) and Brigham Young University (2003-2006).
He is the author of an important comparative study, The Fiction of Malcolm Lowry and Thomas Mann: Structural Tradition (1990), a prize-winning translator of the Munich poet Dagmar Nick, and for over nearly four decades the editor of the poetry journal The Chariton Review. This first-ever volume of essays dedicated to his work is both belated and timely recognition.
‘Bones Beneath My Feet’ offers a wide-ranging interview with Barnes, his life and writing. Contributions include a personal salute (Ken Lincoln), an across the board map of his poetry (A. Robert Lee), scrutiny of the early verse (Lance Larsen) and of the verse of the middle years (Samuel Maio), an account of Barnes’s postcard poems (Linda Helstern), and an excavation of the Barnes-Dylan Thomas connection (James Mackay). Three essays link the poetry to Native Grounds: Memoirs and Impressions (Robin Riley Fast, Paul Beekman Taylor and Patricia Clark Smith). “Poetry makes everything happen” said Jim Barnes on being appointed Oklahoma’s poet laureate in 2008. It could not speak better to his own achievement.
Table of contents:
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The One Right Word
Bones Beneath My Feet: Jim Barnes in interview with A. Robert Lee
Jim Barnes from the Heart of the Heart of Things
Oklahoma International: Jim Barnes, Poetry,and the Sites of Imagination
“One Last Go”: Recovering Jim Barnes’ The Fish on Poteau Mountain
Jim Barnes: The Middle Period
“The land behind the landscape”: Postcards from Jim Barnes
The Welsh Background: Jim Barnes and Dylan Thomas
Jim Barnes on Native Grounds
Stones, Bones and Poems: Re-membering the Dis-membered in On Native Ground
Panthers, Phantoms, Professions: Jim Barnes’ On Native Ground: Memoirs and Impressions
Bibliography
Author Notes View excerpt as PDF:  Click here to view a sample ( KB)
Excerpt from book:
from Introduction: The One Right Word
by A. Robert Lee
The announcement in December 2008 that Jim Barnes, in his mid-seventies, would become Oklahoma’s poet laureate in succession to N. Scott Momaday could not have been timelier. What better credentials than Barnes’ nine verse collections, from The Crazy Land (1980) to Visiting Picasso (2007), and to include The Fish on Poteau Mountain (1980), The American Book of The Dead (1982), A Season of Loss (1985), La Plata Cantata (1989), The Sawdust War (1997), Paris (1997), and the three-volume compilation, On a Wing of the Sun (2001)? Has there not also been his landmark autobiography On Native Ground: Memoirs and Impressions (1997), two book-translations of the Munich poet Dagmar Nick, Summons and Signs (1980) and Numbered Days (1988), a thesis-into-monograph published as The Fiction of Malcolm Lowry and Thomas Mann: Structural Tradition (1990), his more than three decades the editor of The Chariton Review as a venue for serious creative work, and the huge miscellany of separate poems, stories, and essays in magazine and anthologies?
To say this has been a compelling, as much as a considerable, output risks serious understatement.”No art is more important to me than poetry,” was Barnes’ response to news of the laureateship, “for poetry makes everything happen.” A smack as may be at W.H. Auden’s “poetry makes nothing happen” in his “Memory of W.B. Yeats,” it can also be taken for a truly symptomatic rally of his own, an unyielding and acted-upon credo. It also underscores how massively Barnes is overdue his wider recognition. This Companion makes a start, a first step in acknowledging, and celebrating, the literary verve of a necessary American contemporary whose poetry, life-writing, essays and stories have been working expressive models of memorial eye and ear and, for sure, of the always sought-after “one right word.”
Barnes’ career, his poet’s cv as it were, is to be met with foremost in On Native Ground: Memoirs and Impressions, the half-title nothing if not key. A Proustian ethos of a la recherche positively emanates from his pages. These “memoirs and impressions” launch with his Oklahoma birth in 1933 and the mix of Anglo-Welsh, Choctaw and on his own professed reckoning assorted other ethnicity. They take on definition from the eastern Oklahoma boyhood of houses, family and outdoors in LeFlore County’s Fourche Maline bottoms and Holson Creek hills and valleys where he was raised and began his interest in landscape, birdlife and fish, animals, arrowheads, bones and petroglyphs. The span extends to 1951-59 when he lumber-jacked in Oregon for Giustina Brothers, to be followed by a return to his native state for undergraduate work in English, French and Drama at Southeastern Oklahoma State University (1960-64) and the eventual University of Arkansas doctorate (completed in 1972). His full-time full professorships of Comparative Literature and Creative Writing have involved two campuses, Truman State University, Missouri (1970-2003) and Brigham Young University, Utah (2003-2006). In this he joins a long American lineage of teacher-authors.
Overseas residences have become something of a Barnes forte. There have been the Rockefeller Bellagio fellowships that came his way in 1990 and 2003 and the Senior Fulbright he held at the University of Lausanne in 1993-94. Paris has seen him as poet-in-residence at its Writer’s Workshop in 1994. Munich made him translator-in-residence at Villa Walberta in 1995 and Stuttgart named him one of its Schloss Solitude Fellows in 1998 and 2000. The Camargo Foundation fellowships at Cassis in 1996 and 2001 gave him yet more time and space for writing. It is not that Barnes has not had his honours—the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1978, the Pushcart Prize for poetry in 1980, the Oklahoma Book Award for The Sawdust War in 1993, and the American Book Award for On Native Ground in 1998. It is that more needs to be done in terms of his wider recognition. In his own turn, too, he has served as first round judge in the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry for over a decade.
On Native Ground, above all, includes accounts of his early pitch into story, verse writing and translation, the latter to win him Columbia University’s Translation Center Prize in 1980 for his version of Dagmar Nick’s Summons and Signs. He speaks with passion of the desiderata for poetry’s “art of making” (180), the need to get beyond mere subject or attitude and into the work’s self-sustaining own dynamic. For much as Barnes’ hallmarks have been those of a profound contemplative intimacy of self and place, of elegy and remembrance, they have equally been those of craft, a quite sedulous workmanship. “The Poet’s Paradise” gives just the right bearings—tooth and nail application, ladled away gush, exorcism of cliche, indeed the one right word—nothing if not the call to rigorous imaginative discipline (along with the affectingly human wish for “no delay of mail” for submitted poetry manuscripts and his lady’s affirming love).
The sense of place has especially been central. In the first instance has to be Oklahoma and the southwest as a topography of smallholding, creek, highway, pond, cave, cow-country, work, sheriff, jails and bars, affairs, two marriages, war dead brought home for burial, and the inevitable tornado seen first-hand (“Thirty miles away/it stands still, a pillar of the sky” he writes in “Great Plains Tornado” in La Plata Cantata or “hail cracks against the ground” in “Twister” in Visiting Picasso). Other America has been just as present, from Missouri (the time-and-place landscapes of “Sundown at Swan Lake, Missouri” in The American Book of The Dead or “La Plata, Missouri: Clear November Night” in A Season of Loss) to Texas (the wry “Three Songs from a Texas Oilfield” in La Plata Cantata), and to include Oregon, Arkansas, New Mexico, Iowa, Utah and Nevada.
Each supplies extending locale, back-country and township, scenes of different relationships and personal entrances and exits (few more poignant than “After The Funeral” in The Sawdust War written in memory of his mother, or “Notes for a Love Letter from Mid-America” in A Season of Loss with its elegiac recall of past intimacy). Europe, likewise, bespeaks voyage yet also affiliation, seized location, whether cultural high-spots (Paris and its arrondissements, Lake Como and Bellagio, Munich) or even en route transport (the Metro, Basel Railway Station, the Glion funicular near Montreux). Whichever the geography, the poetry invariably enacts a meditated interaction of speaker and site, of lived-in feeling or mind as much as the immediacy of any one visiting stay.
Throughout, moreover, there is in Barnes’ work always the pull of the past- within-present (a poem like “Ithaka 2001” in Visiting Picasso with its citation from Cavafy and interplay of Homeric-Ionian and modern Ithaca, is indicative). Native America, and Oklahoma as vintage “Indian Country,” however much it offers the sites his own upbringing and life, yields for him a peopled older wisdom, the land’s rhythm. Greece can be modern Mediterranean but also archives of bequeathed civilization, notably The Iliad and Odyssey or the drama of Sophocles. Italy and France have given him not only first-hand local Europe, be it lakeside Bellagio in Lombardy or the villages of la France Profonde (in “Aix-en-Provence,” in Visiting Picasso, he has his speaker recall anecdotally “We found a place/to lunch just so: /on duck, a glass/of wine, a loaf/of Provence bread”), but also resource maps of literary-cultural tradition—Pliny, Horace, Dante, Racine, Apollinaire, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, along with art and architecture and the ongoing traditions of popular culture of la rue and il caffe. Switzerland, where he did his year’s teaching, clearly drew his poet’s eye, the alpine skylines and lakes, but also draws into the present the memory of his fond-awkward editorial exchange of letters with the Montreux-based Nabokovs (“Homage to Nabokov” in Visiting Picasso in the early 1970s). Modern Germany came early into his sights not just for its modern cities but for the language that led him to Goethe, Mann and Nick, and for a depth of history eventually to lurch into Europe’s darkest shadow. Even Japan makes the reckoning, the neon modernism of Tokyo yet also the culture of zen, scrolls and sculpture.
Bow into almost any Barnes poem and there can be no doubt of this affinity for place as also time (not just the ancient world but the Europe and America of World War II and its aftermath), the prompt to contemplation of cultural latitude and longitude, weight and depth. That is also to make comparisons with the present-day: Barnes sees the cost, the compromise, in contemporaneity’s instant media, high-rises, and fast-food. The upshot, as he invests these terrains in personal feeling, is to propel them as much towards the figural as actual. In America that can be Choctaw Oklahoma and its farmlands, townships and highways, the Missouri and Kansas of the hills and plains, or the Arizona of Canyon de Chelly and a host of rock-faces, mountainsides and caves. In his “Night Letter to the Secretary of the Interior,” in La Plata Cantata, he writes “A smothering/earth cannot breathe/without the hair/of branches and eagles/in unbending wind.”
Across the Atlantic it can be Picasso’s Vauvenargues and other small-villages in le midi, or Stuttgart’s forest and hillside Birkenkopf, or Bellagio’s stately Villa Serbelloni. Typically “Villa Serbelloni Revisited, February 2003,” in Visiting Picasso, offers the lines:
Memories remain
of old Bellagio, and murmurs
of spring beneath the snow begin
to wake us to this paradise,
to more than we could then surmise.
As each site gathers the observer-speaker into itself, so most of Barnes’s arising poems re-enact the process while delicately keeping to their own measure, a just right degree of perspective.
To this end it bears re-emphasizing how from the outset Barnes has shown the greatest scrupulosity of voice, his rare, exact command of different verse-forms and metrics and the each connecting seam of image. Monologue can be said to have become a preferred mode. To be sure there is the first-person persona (“I have put the manuscript in the mail, my dear”) and, notably, as developed in the “Autobiography” sequence reprinted in On a Wing of the Sun (“Autobiography, Chapter 11: Prelude to Writing,” for instance, with its “I do not know whether/the poetry will come today. If it does, I will be/ ready for it”). But there can equally be the “I” implied in second-person familiarity (“Feria de Paques, Arles 1996,” in Visiting Picasso, begins “Sitting where Scott and Zelda sat/and their Provencal dog, you lean/ into other shadows captured/on the stone tiers of the arena”). The effect, either way, is of landscapes and history, life-scenes and relationships, made subject to each poem’s discrete sifting, and true to precept, given mooring within that one right word.
No single defining curvature, Anglo, Welsh, Native—however conscious and respectful he has been of Choctaw legacy, holds exclusively, unless it be that of poet. As he goes on insisting, his indeed has been an identity of different cultural plies and mix and to include the venues of Europe as well as America, but nowhere has it found fuller incarnation than in his verse and other writing. The same holds for the literary sources of his poetry. The referencing has been wide, Homer, Aristotle and Virgil, Dante and Calderon, or England’s late-Augustan elegy tradition and Wordsworth and the Romantics. Dylan Thomas holds a special place in his affections, Swansea’s rollicking drink-and-poetry bad boy and yet prodigious twentieth-century metaphysical. America’s literary roster has been equally eclectic, but in-close and inspirational for him are especially William Faulkner, James Dickey, Richard Wilbur, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, James Welch, W.D. Snodgrass and David Ray. Each, as he sees them, again bespeaks craft, the dyer’s hand.
Visual art, from Cezanne, Rodin, Monet and the Impressionists to Chaplin and Picasso, enters his poetry at any number of points, apt company in a poet so given both to place and the perceptual faculties. As might be expected of a writer who worked as a one-time logger (another of similarly mixed Choctaw-Celtic origins would be Louis Owens), he has also been acutely responsive not only to different locales but their different styles of occupation. Those include Oklahoma smallholding, the forest and ranch work, or occupations like trucking and bar-tending, and in Europe, the French or Italian village round—harvesting, craft, husbandry, and not least the work of concierge or guide within travel itself. Not to be overlooked is his own campus and poetry-reading activity.
Yet whatever the influence or source there can be little doubt that he has written ever as his own man, the discrete voice. His poetry carries whole shelves of personal experience into his sense of place—loves won and lost, friendships (his postcard prose-poem series to friends like James Welch, Brian Bedard, Alain-Andre Jourdier, David Ray, and Andrew Grossbardt—with whom he established The Chariton Review), wrong turnings, the remembered highway or hill climb, the creek with its animals and bones or pond with its fish, the small town eateries and bars, each different physical littoral or horizon, European battle-grounds and American burial places, and the inroads of eco-damage and commercialism. That experience is also to be heard in the poems where Europe becomes his overseas home as in the title poem of the sequence “In Another Country” in The Sawdust War—”In another country I push/aside the leaves, and my own loss begins to fade.” In this he has much invoked “American” Europe, be it at the literary hands of Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Julien Green or Hemingway.
In these several respects he has sometimes bridled at being denominated exclusively a Native American poet, warmly as he regards those of a shared Native-literary generation, James Welch, say, or Gerald Vizenor and Carter Revard. He has sought to convey his recognition of Native presence from the start, datelines but also figures both historic and alive in his own time, a spectrum of art, song, tools, petroglyphic cave and wall engraving, place-names, and however selectively, the language of the Choctaw people in its expressive range and tease. Barnes, however evidently the reader of the Greeks or Shakespeare and the high western canon, in shared measure has been emphatic in his relish of tribal spoken story and belief-system, the tricksterism of coyote and crow.
Our interview “Bones Beneath My Feet,” its title taken from one of his best-known poems, offers Barnes delivering live recollection and opinion. It has been conceived to add not only updating detail, an overview-in-brief, but also something of a notes towards his own ars poetica. Most of the constituent essays at hand have resort to Barnes’ different life-accounts (to include, besides On Native Ground, his contributions to I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Authors, 1987, and Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, 1998, revised 2009). If, discernibly, there has been some small repetition of biographical reference that has been allowed to stand. As only appropriate in a poet-author who has insisted on the primacy of the text in earning its own imaginative credential, its presence has less to do with any literal record than as a means of supplying pathways into the disposition at work in the writings.
This holds across the board, whether Kenneth Lincoln’s warm personal salute to Barnes, my own tour d’horizon of his writings, or the careful scrutiny of the early verse (Lance Larsen), the middle years (Samuel Maio), the postcard compositions (Linda Helstern) and the Barnes-Dylan Thomas connection (James Mackay). The three essays which have their focus in On Native Ground (Robin Riley Fast, Paul Beekman Taylor and Patricia Clark Smith) likewise steer a mediating path between the autobiography as a composition in its own right and the different cross-lights it sheds upon his verse.
For however much the stalwart of traditional poetic genres, quatrain or villanelle, Villonesque lay or rondeau, sonnet or sestina, or of a work of narrative life-writing like On Native Ground—albeit full of its own meditative poetry, Barnes has long had about him a huge individual deliberateness of voice, even the power of epiphany. The past, memory, transience, loss, absence, the beauty of things, landscape, love and its variations, art and artist, and to be sure place in its myriad of styles and variety, all carry the stamp of his own virtuosity of register (poetry “to catch time” as he says in “Decades” in A Season of Loss). At the same time, and whether formally or colloquially, or in the deft interplay of both, he is a poet who at once has long called for, and kept himself to, due compositional distance. It is this Jim Barnes, the subtly achieved poet and autobiographer of a lifetime’s creative dedication, whom the present Companion situates at centre-place.
Unpublished endorsement: In this Salt companion volume, Jim Barnes’ poetry — writing Ken Lincoln calls “carefully edged” and “deeply insightful” — at last receives the critical attention long its due. That A. Robert Lee has gathered an insightful collection of essays from scholars as far flung as Cyprus, Geneva, and Albuquerque, attests to the broad appeal of this Oklahoma writer, whose poetic voice, the contributors demonstrate, itself stretches effortlessly between the down home, the worldly, and the sometimes other-worldly. The discussions in this volume explore Barnes’ oeuvre as it also migrates between formalism and free verse, or, as Linda Helstern suggests, conjures a Barnsian innovation in the “postcard … hybrid … contemporary sonnet” form. Whether tracing the “Native Ground” of Barnes’ poetic memoir or the influence of Dylan Thomas and the Celtic tradition, the authors in this collection remind us of why Barnes, the longtime editor of The Chariton Review, remains a force in poetry on Native grounds and in the global literary world. Kimberly Blaeser Unpublished endorsement: Jim Barnes is a superb writer whose achievements merit the critical attention given in this volume. He is renowned as a master of poetic form, a gifted teller of stories, perceptive critic, and sensitive translator. Critics have justly praised Barnes’ poetry and prose for their personal observation, strong sense of place, and language of crystalline purity. A. Lavonne Brown Ruoff Unpublished endorsement: Jim Barnes is a master of tropes, a poet of the world. Gerald Vizenor Unpublished endorsement: Reading Jim Barnes’ poems, we arrive, as in T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” at the place and know it for the first time. What has always been there, in poem after poem, is Barnes’s mastery of the beauty and power of language. Ted Haddin |
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