Black and white photo of family standing in yard of home

Suburban Triptych

I.

No house outlasts its hill.
Here, especially, fifty years will see
bones, the basement scar,
something in its place.

But for now the half-moons of the hammer’s miss
could have been carpentered yesterday;
kernels of resin sweated from joists,
still soft to the thumbnail, shine.
In the room where the well probes the hill’s heart
the tank, full of taking, sweats.
The furnace waits, one thing on its mind.

II.

Excavating for a septic tank,
my father shovels a rock from eight feet down.
“That’s never been touched by human hands.”
I hold it aloft: for history,
the cold white thing from genesis.

Green algae, heavy hair
we pitchfork from the pond by wagon-loads.
In a week it dries to nothing, to stink.
Too many turtles, my father hooks one, clips
off its head with pruning shears, tosses
the astonished body on the compost heap.
Our garden yields a crop of trilobite
and sea-worm (already dreaming stone
when glaciers crushed their seabed into soil):
dead ringers for the fat tomato worms
we hunt. In the green immediate
they burst and soak into thirsty dirt.

III.

Past grass, past banjo legs of insects
into loam; six inches down, moraine;
then, lodged in the towering clay,
deep in the hill’s dome, be still:

You hear small gravel. Burrowing.
Then nothing.
Then
a breathing other than your own,
so slow
the breathing in
continues from one glacier to the next.

John Barr

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Descant on a Herrick Lyric

Descant on a Herrick Lyric

To say or sing in two voices.

Whenas in silks my Julia goes
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free
O how that glittering taketh me.

The merest moment justifies
the labor to perfect the song.
Life is short, art is long.

Exactness captured like a bee
in amber may endure
even to eternity.

Whenas in silks my Julia goes
The merest moment justifies
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
the labor to perfect the song,
That liquefaction of her clothes.
Life is short, art is long.

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
Exactness captured like a bee
That brave vibration each way free
in amber may endure–
O how that glittering taketh me–
even to eternity.

John Barr

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desert wilderness with hills in the distance

Going into Wilderness

If I set up on an unwitnessed rock
my showman soul would not do well.
Fresh air and privacy
would help in taking stock,
but I need someone looking in to see
how well I do, who going back can tell
which way my struggle with the angel goes.
Is such a witnessed privacy a pose?

Simeon Stylites on his post
could not get far enough above the host
that mortified him with acclaim:
mad to be rid of a mad-dog world
the block-and-tackle saint, creaking heavenward,
saw to his shame his name
become a household word,
and on a higher post than his his fame.

But think of a man whose privacy succeeds:
who quits the world uncompromised,
the corner grocer never guessing; who lives,
by an integrity that bleeds,
to be enunciated, formalized;
who dies, whose work—which argues genius—
is thrown out by impatient relatives.
How many of these men have been lost to us?

None, I suspect. We have a way
of leaving ways by which to be disclosed,
buried in backyards, tucked away
for lucky finders to exhume.
Even Jesus in the dry arroyos
could not suffer his work to stay with stone.
Go to the wilderness of your room
to get away, but not to be unknown.

John Barr, The Hundred Fathom Curve: New & Collected Poems

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Man o' War jellyfish

St. Augustine

I saw the Portuguese men-of-war
shipwrecked like a treasure fleet
a solid mile along the shore.

Hard aground they tried to beat
to windward, set their living sails
this way and that around our feet.

A wave would sometimes climb the trails
of slime and lift one almost free,
then lapse and leave the pooled entrails.

We tried to flip one back to sea,
using a piece of board to help
dig under—unsuccessfully—

then left them, fouled for good in kelp,
the great blue spinnakers to gleam
and gesture, either after help,

or merely sailing their species' dream,
judging the distance as before,
keeping the middle of the stream.

John Barr, from The Hundred Fathom Curve: New & Collected Poems

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shepherd tending flock of sheep at night

Noel

And there were shepherds abiding in the field,
keeping watch over their flock by night.
Luke 2:8

To them Orion was not a huntsman
but a shepherd of the lambent.

Safe from Leo, Lupus, Taurus
his charges followed him to dawn,

counted and content
to know they would persist

when daylight
rendered them no longer visible.

Not souls—not yet—they were signifiers
ready to be metaphors.

by John Barr

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Sound and Sense in a Poem — Part 1

Sound and Sense in a Poem — Part 1

Sound and Sense in a Poem — Part 1

Speech is as natural to human kind as breathing. We inhale, and speech becomes potential, becomes a possible outcome. We exhale. The charge of air, mined of its oxygen, enters an Aeolian wind tunnel. The throat unseals and partakes. Sounding over the harp of the vocal cords, modified by tongue and teeth and lips, the warmed cloud of waste gas enters the room as language. Speech is as natural to our kind as fur to its dog.

Consonants are for communication, meant to be heard by others. But nobody owns the vowels. They are emanations from the animal in us all. They are emotion, raw. As cow to cow, coyote to coyote. In a single gaping yawn, without the use of tongue or teeth, it is possible to sing, yodel or howl the entire medley of vowels: Aa — ee — ii — o — oo. Consonants speak for civilization, but the vowels, sounding, speak for our selves.

Because speech is so effortless, we generate it in copious quantities. Talking to ourselves, thinking out loud: This kind of language is harmless but also nearly specious, like painting a house with water. Yet this dross is also the medium of poetry. This language, shed with our daily breath, hardly worth listening to, is also the clean-burning, high-octane fuel of a poem. It is also the reason why poetry is an event of the ear, not just the reading eye.

A poem is a sound train. Airy aspirates, diphthongs, fricatives, apocopes: Poetry is sound bites indeed. A poem is the shaped whistle of our experience. Whatever language is (I think it happens in the bonding of what is human with all that is not), its use by poetry is paranormal, incantational, even punitive. A poem is a parley with unknown forces. It uses words like talismans to control the refractory material of experience. When Odysseus, trapped by the Cyclops in his cave, was asked his name, the cunning hero replied, “My name is No Man.”

Mss

Since I start things on the margin
— cocktail napkins, cancelled checks,
timetables trying to be reliable —
and since I save it all, I know
there are good words buried and lost
in those fat accordian files, words
that sounded good at the time,
that I promised to get back to,
rhyme trains that never left Grand Central,
monikers that chattered like silverware
at 30,000', sounds struck
sheer of sense — coin of a realm —
from a currency of air, pronounced
like blessings on an express world,
soul puffs, plain mistakes,
angels, working definitions of.

From The Hundred Fathom Curve: New and Collected Poems by John Barr (Red Hen Press, 2018)

Be the first to receive my essays by subscribing to my biweekly newsletter. As thanks for joining, you’ll receive a free PDF of my out-of-print book, Centennial Suite. To read more of my work, please visit my website at johnbarrpoetry.com.

John Barr’s poems have been published in five books, four fine press editions, and many magazines, including The New York Times, Poetry, and others. John was also the Inaugural President of the Poetry Foundation. His newest book, The Boxer of Quirinal, will be published by Red Hen Press in June 2023. You can view more of his work at johnbarrpoetry.com and on Instagram (@johnbarrpoetry).

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Is it Poetry or is it Verse — Part 3

Is it Poetry or is it Verse? — Part 3

Is it Poetry or is it Verse — Part 3

3.

Verse, I have come to think, is poetry written in pursuit of limited objectives: to entertain us with a joke or tall tale, to give us the inherent pleasures of meter and rhyme. It is not great art, nor is it trying to be. Verse, as Orwell says, tells us something we already know — as often as not something we know we already know. Verse is not an instrument of exploration, but rather a tool of affirmation. Its rewards lie not in the excitement of discovery, but in the pleasures of encountering the familiar. Verse does not seek to know the unknown or to express the unexpected, nor does it undertake the risk of failure which both entail.

“Serious” poetry, on the other hand, is written in pursuit of an open-ended goal. It seeks to use language, in its full potential, to encompass reality, both external and internal, in the fullness of its complexity. Unlike verse, poetry does not bring our experience of the world down to the level of the homily or the bromide, and sum it all up in a soothing platitude. It does not pursue simple conclusions or familiar returns. Rather it is a voyage of discovery into the unknown. Of the figure a poem makes, Frost says,

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting…. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it…. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

A poem begins in delight, he says, and ends in wisdom. Verse begins in delight and ends in…more delight. The difference between poetry and verse, then, is the difference between an explorer and a tour guide. Verse tells us, finally, that all is well. Poetry, on the contrary, tells us that things are not as we thought they were. Verse does not ask us to change our lives. Poetry does.

At its best, verse can cross over into the realm of serious poetry. Children’s poetry, in particular, can speak at the same time to its intended audience of the young or very young, while holding the attention of an experienced reader.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” probably stands, today, even higher in the critical community than it does with young readers. Constructed wholly out of neologisms, the poem tells its tale from a parallel universe. Many of the new schools of poetry that followed in the 20th century could claim it a progenitor. With a little effort, you can even get Mother Goose and Dr. Seuss to resonate with contemporary poetry’s fascination for the non-rational. The nonsense of children’s verse converges with the non-sense of the fanciest experimental poetry.

Most verse has no following in the critical world because it needs none to be understood and appreciated. Most verse also receives no support from the programs of the Poetry Foundation (the exception is Children’s Poetry). This is not so much because the Foundation takes a position on the value of verse as poetry, although the legacy of Poetry magazine strongly inclines us to the “serious.” It is rather because the mission of the Foundation is to discover and address poetry’s greatest unmet needs. The estate of Tupac Shakur is presumably doing just fine without the Poetry Foundation, thank you very much. Whether “Jack and Jill ran up the hill” or “There once was a man from Nantucket,” there is a kind of poem that won’t get out of our ears even as it refuses our serious attention in the matter of its sense. There is a place in the poetry world for verse — if it is memorably written — and we wish it well.

John Bar

Be the first to receive my essays by subscribing to my biweekly newsletter. As thanks for joining, you’ll receive a free PDF of my out-of-print book, Centennial Suite. To read more of my work, please visit my website at johnbarrpoetry.com.

John Barr’s poems have been published in five books, four fine press editions, and many magazines, including The New York Times, Poetry, and others. John was also the Inaugural President of the Poetry Foundation. His newest book, The Boxer of Quirinal, will be published by Red Hen Press in June 2023. You can view more of his work at johnbarrpoetry.com and on Instagram (@johnbarrpoetry).

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Join over 5 thousand subscribers. Sign up to receive poems and brief thoughts about the state of the art of poetry a couple of times a month for free.

As a welcome gift, I’ll send you my free, digital version of my latest poetry collection, Iron’s Keeping on signup.

Iron’s Keeping is a story in poems that tells of my coming of age as a U.S. Navy officer by going to sea in a voyage that took me around the world. It is, so far as I know, the only published collection of poems about the Naval experience in the Vietnam War.

Is it Poetry or Is it Verse — Part 2

Is it Poetry or Is it Verse? — Part 2

Is it Poetry or Is it Verse — Part 2

2.

Efforts to define the difference between poetry and verse (like efforts to define the difference between poetry and prose) have been with us for a long time. Verse is often a term of disparagement in the poetry world, used to dismiss the work of people who want to write poetry but don’t know how. Verse in this usage means unsophisticated or poorly written poetry. But quality of writing is not the real difference between the two. Yes, there is plenty of poorly written verse out there, but there is also plenty of poorly written poetry — and sometimes the verse is the better crafted.

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

“The Cremation of Sam McGee,” with no help from the critical establishment, is still going strong after a century, while most early Yeats is read today only because it was written by Yeats. To use “verse” as a pejorative term, then, is to lose the use of it as a true distinction.

George Orwell gives us another way to think about this when he describes Kipling as “a good bad poet.”

A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form — for verse is a mnemonic device, among other things — some emotion which very nearly every human being can share.

Into this same pot Orwell puts “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” the work of Bret Harte — and presumably “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” “There is a great deal of good bad poetry in English,” says Orwell; by implication there is even more bad bad poetry. My own nominations to the latter include the work of Edgar Guest, whose Collected Poems, in a signed limp leather edition, was one of two books of poetry in the house where I grew up (a wedding present to my parents).

Ma has a dandy little book that’s full of narrow slips,
An’ when she wants to pay a bill a page from it she rips;
She just writes in the dollars and the cents and signs her name
An’ that’s as good as money, though it doesn’t look the same.

Orwell’s distinction, between good bad poetry and just plain bad poetry, is one based on quality of execution, of craftsmanship. Good bad poetry is verse competently — even memorably — written. But his distinction leaves unaddressed the nature of the poem itself.

Be the first to receive my essays by subscribing to my biweekly newsletter. As thanks for joining, you’ll receive a free PDF of my out-of-print book, Centennial Suite. To read more of my work, please visit my website at johnbarrpoetry.com.

John Barr’s poems have been published in five books, four fine press editions, and many magazines, including The New York Times, Poetry, and others. John was also the Inaugural President of the Poetry Foundation. His newest book, The Boxer of Quirinal, will be published by Red Hen Press in June 2023. You can view more of his work at johnbarrpoetry.com and on Instagram (@johnbarrpoetry).

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As a welcome gift, I’ll send you my free, digital version of my latest poetry collection, Iron’s Keeping on signup.

Iron’s Keeping is a story in poems that tells of my coming of age as a U.S. Navy officer by going to sea in a voyage that took me around the world. It is, so far as I know, the only published collection of poems about the Naval experience in the Vietnam War.

Is it Poetry or Is it Verse? — Part 1

Is it Poetry or Is it Verse? — Part 1

Is it Poetry or Is it Verse? — Part 1

1.

Question: What do the following poems have in common?

********

It seemed to me a simple thing since my socks was showin’ through:
Turn my old boots out to pasture, and buy a pair — brand new.
Well, they built this cowboy K-mart outa town there in the Mall,
Where I parked my Studdybaker after shippin’ drys this fall.

********

There R no words 2 express
how much I truly care
So many times I fantasize of
feelings we can share
My heart has never known
the Joy u bring 2 me
As if GOD knew what I wanted
and made u a reality

********

My brother built a robot
that does not exactly work,
as soon as it was finished,
it began to go berserk,
its eyes grew incandescent
and its nose appeared to gleam,
it bellowed unbenignly
and its ears emitted steam.

Answer: They are the opening lines of poems by leading writers in their respective fields. And they all, most likely, set on edge the teeth of the readers of Poetry magazine.

It’s not just snobbery. People who care about their poetry often experience genuine feelings of embarrassment — even revulsion, when confronted with cowboy poetry, rap and hip hop, and children’s poetry not written by “adult” poets. Their readerly sensibilities are offended. (If the writing gives them any pleasure, it is a guilty pleasure.) The fact that Wallace McRae, Tupac Shakur and Jack Prelutsky all wrote these for large, devoted audiences simply adds insult to the injury. Somewhat defensively, the serious poetry crowd dismisses such work as verse, not poetry, and generally acts so as to avoid it if at all possible in the future. The fact that these different kinds of poetry don’t communicate, don’t do business with one another is not just a matter of lost email addresses. The advocates of each know what they like, and it’s definitely not what the others are doing. The result is a poetry world of broad divides, a balkanized system of poetries with their own sovereign audiences, prizes and heroes. The only thing they share is the word poetry, and that not willingly.

There’s nothing wrong with this, a generally peaceful co-existence of live-and-let-live poetry communities, except to those who require, for intellectual comfort, a universal theory of poetry that ties it all altogether. It also matters to the Poetry Foundation and organizations like it, who must make choices and use their finite resources to support some kinds of poetry while not others.

Be the first to receive my essays by subscribing to my biweekly newsletter. As thanks for joining, you’ll receive a free PDF of my out-of-print book, Centennial Suite. To read more of my work, please visit my website at johnbarrpoetry.com.

John Barr’s poems have been published in five books, four fine press editions, and many magazines, including The New York Times, Poetry, and others. John was also the Inaugural President of the Poetry Foundation. His newest book, The Boxer of Quirinal, will be published by Red Hen Press in June 2023. You can view more of his work at johnbarrpoetry.com and on Instagram (@johnbarrpoetry).

Latest Posts

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Join over 5 thousand subscribers. Sign up to receive poems and brief thoughts about the state of the art of poetry a couple of times a month for free.

As a welcome gift, I’ll send you my free, digital version of my latest poetry collection, Iron’s Keeping on signup.

Iron’s Keeping is a story in poems that tells of my coming of age as a U.S. Navy officer by going to sea in a voyage that took me around the world. It is, so far as I know, the only published collection of poems about the Naval experience in the Vietnam War.