One of the many things that makes Catherine Barnett’s work so compelling is her willingness to look doubt and ennui and abjection squarely in the face. To make it, in fact, a part of the beauty. To welcome it into her lines. It is the grace and candor in the act of that curiosity and attention that makes the beauty. Never to make what is ugly or fallen a morbid delicacy, but to draw an honesty out of writing, a dispassionate and disposed truth-telling about the relentlessness of everyday suffering and sorrow and being. There is a buoyancy, a joy even, in the telling—that’s part of the gift of Barnett’s lyrics. Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space is her fourth collection, and it has all the power of her clarity, but with a new layer of sobriety, somehow, as plainspoken as it is mysterious. In a poem about chancing on the writer Nicholson Baker, tercets unfold a story of their conversation over dinner, the poet writing that “I keep many drafts of failed poems / on my kitchen table, beside a little sewing kit, a notebook, and this memory of Nicholson Baker…” Flaws and failures appear, later in the poem, as “flawed solutions” that are “sometimes prayers.” There is an irreverent reverence in the poet’s lines, an impossibly singular voice. Here are lines in “Still Life”:
‘I love loneliness,’ I told a woman
who’d just read my tarot cards,
but the emptiness left by a death
is another species of loneliness
altogether. Unquantifiable
flailing beneath the meninges.
The meninges, meaning the border, literally, of the brain matter, of the nerves—the literal edge of the directing, dreaming, city of consciousness that lives in each of our heads. What is beyond that border is another border, the skin, and beyond that the air and the earth and other people, loving and dying. The book becomes partly an elegy for the poet’s father, and partly a manual for how to live in our moment. There are poems set in the California of Barnett’s youth, and many more that spring from the New York she has called home for many years. One gorgeous series in the book is called “Studies in Loneliness.” The illusion is that these are bits of prose, or bits from a notebook, but they have the paratactical deftness of lyric poetry. One begins like this:
My aunts said they were worried about me when they heard how much I loved Beckett, whom I discovered on a friend’s bookshelf in Tucson after walking barefoot across town drinking tequila. I knew I could simply copy Beckett’s run-on sentences by hand for the rest of my life and feel I’d been understood and even that I’d made something.
And then:
Beckett on Proust: ‘ … we are alone. We cannot know and we cannot be known.’
Which leads to:
I heat up the cast-iron pan before searing a steak for my mother, which my mother often did for my father.
I see her face and am afraid of the day it will no longer exist.
And from there the “study” or poem or short story or unclassifiable bouquet of proses leaps to a meditation on faces, and then a to-do list, which gives way to another almost buoyant glimpse of the loneliness of being, the kind of thing I imagine most of us feel? And mostly either don’t have the words for, or the force of mind to get into words:
This is what I’d like to get done in the next twenty-four hours: write twelve recommendations, type up all my notes on loneliness, try to say what it’s like to be trapped as we are in an unmarked car traveling at high speeds down unknown roads, ostensibly at the wheel but really only a child inside saying slow down slow down.
There is something profoundly disarming about a poetry that cares so single-mindedly for candor above all else, that makes candor a form and a style. That makes anything less seem like wasting time, or worse—obfuscation by way of rhetoric. The poet writes:
It should be easy, I tell my son,
to dispose of the possessions kept
in these rooms.
And later:
It’s not illegal to want to hold on.
To get to my archives,
my son will have to put his ear to the ground,
listen for a quiet scream.
And beneath that, like groundwater,
the endless chatter
of praise and lament.
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JESSE NATHAN: I love the various modes in your new book. I’m so curious about how these poems come to be. How do the poems that resemble notebooks, or prose essays, emerge? I’m thinking of “Studies in Loneliness.” Maybe you don’t think of those as poems. (How do you think of them?) They have the associative and lyrical energy, to me, of poetry. Do you cut and collage and splice from notebooks to achieve that? And how is the process different from what brings about a more straightforward lyric, like, say “The Specious Present” or “In Utero and After”? How did a poem like “The Specious Present” get written?
CATHERINE BARNETT: I’m tempted to answer simply by quoting writers who’ve also had the practice of keeping a notebook—there’s Brenda Hillman’s idea that a notebook preserves “the purity of unstudied thought,” for example, and for anyone who has a tendency to overthink, the notebook is full of exhortations and permissions not to think but simply to note. To “take down actual speech,” as the poet Maureen McLane reminds us (citing W. S. Graham) in her wonderful new collection What You Want. In Sally Keith’s terrific new Two of Everything, the speaker says “the notebooks are the groundwork: the underneath… the fuel but unlike fuel they consume more energy than they give off”; she describes rereading her notebook as “looking for anything in a secondhand store, a junk shop, or a store of antiques,” which pretty much mirrors my experience, inveterate and passionate junk-shop veteran that I am.
My practice of keeping a notebook started in earnest after the unspeakable deaths of my two nieces in a plane crash. To try to help my sister through, I flew out West to be with her every few weeks, and while she did yoga, I’d go to a café and write whatever I didn’t want to forget from the day before. I think my notebook is a bulwark against loss. It’s a way to preserve—or to as-if preserve—the Minute Particulars William Blake commends. It’s also a place where I let go of, experiment with, distort, and exaggerate narrative fact to see what new kinds of truths contradiction can create. In this way, my “Studies in Loneliness,” which I don’t consider poems but more as collaged lyrics essays, come from exaggerated explorations of the idea, experience, mystery, and truth of loneliness. In one study, the speaker asks the question: “Who knows you best in the world?” and then answers by saying her notebooks know her best “but you can’t trust what you find there.”
Those ten “Studies in Loneliness” come from the notebooks I kept as I prepared a talk on the value and use and necessity and ubiquity of loneliness in a writer’s life. I tried to come at the question from as many angles as possible, both analytic and creative. Then I typed up all the notes—150 pages—underlined what most interested me, cut the salvaged excerpts into scraps, laid them out on a table in my mother’s studio, and began taping them up one by one on an enormous foam board I found there, just proceeding by intuition. I used a beautiful blue painter’s tape that made the whole experiment aesthetically pleasing. Then I gathered the taped-up scraps into fifty-six “lonely books” (tiny little flip books, all different dimensions and lengths) and tried to figure out how to weave them into and among the poems. It was a gratifying process, borrowed in part from the miraculous Ilya Kaminsky, who says he writes his essays using foam boards and scraps (each scrap an answer to a question he asks himself but placed into a new order, which is I think why his essays leap so beautifully; he has a book of essays coming out from Graywolf, which I can’t wait for).
I also love what the nineteenth-century French painter Eugène Delacroix says re: notebooks: “By keeping a record of my experiences I live my life twice over. The past returns to me. The future is always with me.”
And Virginia Woolf, who describes her own notebook practice as one of writing for her “own eye only… at a rapid haphazard galloping,” admits that “if I stopped and took thought, it would never be written at all; and the advantage of the method is that it sweeps up accidentally several stray matters which I should exclude if I hesitated, but which are the diamonds of the dustheap.”
Because I am so filled with anxiety about the passing of time, keeping a notebook is reassuring and useful for me. I keep my expectations extremely low so that all I have to do is write a certain number of pages a day, regardless of quality. The practice makes me feel I have a little stash of materials, ingredients for my next foray.
My notebooks are private, for private explorations and experiments. I always assumed my dear friend Saskia Hamilton would destroy them, or lock them away for fifty years, but in the saddest turn of events, I’ve become her literary executor and am in charge of her notebooks. She writes in such a faint pencil, and so small, it’s hard to decipher her words, which I know led to some of her most beautiful poems.
You ask about “The Specious Present,” which doesn’t at first glance look like it’s about loneliness, but its first draft was indeed from my notebook as I was preparing for that talk I gave in January 2020 about the difference between loneliness and solitude and the value of loneliness. The poem went through some fifty-plus revisions. I’m an avid nutty obsessive reviser. I love revision; it’s what lets me keep my daily expectations so low!
Here’s how that entry started: “Because writing poems begets a listener / it’s a prosthetic device,” a line that doesn’t show up at all in the final draft. This first draft was written right after my return from a high school reunion, the setting and occasion of the poem that shows up more explicitly in the later and final drafts.
A year or so later the draft opens: “California was loneliness when I returned / except the light and the almonds.”
“Be the Void”—my favorite part of the poem—shows up some months later, an artifact of a fading flyer posted on a Seattle streetlight. (I do believe that poems can be found; that the world itself is sometimes willing, or even eager, to help us out in our drafts.)
So “The Specious Present” started in the fall of 2019 and was revised (often radically) until the fall of 2023, when I finally had to stop revising and turn my final draft in. Without a hard deadline, and friends, I might still be working on every poem with pleasure, frustration, excitement, simultaneous hope and disappointment, accompanied both by the creative process itself and by the voices—invented and real—of poets I admire and trust and need.