“It’s a very human impulse, the urge to enlarge.” Catherine Barnett is the author of three books. I was honoured to speak to her about her 2018 book, Human Hours, shortly after its publication. Among other topics, our conversation drifted across topics such as depicting memory in poetry, the ineffability of lanugage (!), and a poet’s target audience.
In your latest book, Human Hours, you’re constantly reexamining memories from different vantage points — memories from different points of the speaker’s pasts, which come to different conclusions of what those pasts mean. It made me wonder, how has your relationship with the past changed over time?
You mean, as the past gets bigger?
Yes — I love the way you put that.
Thank you! Let’s see. A good friend of mine has been able to teach me that just because a present has become the past, doesn’t mean that we lose it. I used to think that when something was over, you’ve lost it. But my friend taught me those experiences are still there, and I find that thought beautiful. When I see my father, for example, I still see the fathers he’s been. He hasn’t lost that history, it’s just all folded into the person he is now. He’s diminished in ways he once wasn’t, but I don’t only see his current self when I look at him. I like that idea, that former selves and former moments aren’t over once you’ve lived in them.
How does time physically manifest in your world? What is it made of?
To me, it’s just like rain, falling down on my body, though I suppose our brains are always going to be marked by the memories we have. You might not always have access to them, or you might have different cognitive gaps, but every interaction stays with you.
My experience of the present is nine seconds long. An earlier draft of “Lore,” the poem about jaywalking with my father in the new collection, was also about the streets here in New York, where the traffic lights tell you how many seconds you have left. It seems to me that nine seconds is going to be a long time! I’ll think that it’s more than enough time to get across both sides of Broadway, or even to my café. Of course that’s not what happens, but I never seem to learn that.
In your poem “Appeal to Numbers,” you write that “nights seem to last longer when I count one Mississippi two Mississippi.” Does documenting time through words change your perception of it?
That’s just an effort to manhandle time by paying attention to it, for me. So it’s less about language than it is about attention. When you see lightning and count it, you figure out how space and time are related in that moment. And you wonder, if you can pay enough attention to it, can you make it slow down or stop? But they do say that as you get older, your experience of a minute gets shorter. In “Appeal to Numbers,” I don’t think the speaker counts aloud to control time. She’s just trying to inhabit it more fully.
What we’ve been talking about seems to raise questions of control, of constructing time in an effort to control our experiences. Do you think documenting memories is a way of trying to control what parts of ourselves we preserve?
Well, I wouldn’t use that word “control,” but only because it puts me too much in the position of the subject. Poetry is an art of both chaos and control. I try to have no control for as long as I can in hopes of capturing or enacting the experience of true discovery.
You use rhyme often, and your poems seem to pay a lot of attention to sonic cohesion. What is that process for you, if not one of control?
Rhyme is a freeing force. It’s a generative surprise. When you think of syntax, it’s a method of control, but I try to use it to release control. And I love revision. I think even that’s generative.
You’re a musician, so you know: musicians and dancers have to exert a certain level of control to then be able to improvise.
That the rhythm can enable its own freedom.
Yes, that’s right.
In your poem “Epistemology,” you write about communication between non-humans, saying that even though trees don’t use words, “they can be said to love.” What role do words play in defining how you experience the world? How do they shape your experience of what it’s like to be human?
I think it’s interesting that in some ways language, which we think of as a form of communication, can also separate us. Scientists have said that when children come into language, their experience of the world is a more impoverished one. It’s a more isolated world, because language separates you from it. I think poetry is one of the arts where you can get closer to a more primitive use of language and try to restore some of that oceanic feeling before all of this information clogs it up.
On the other hand, language is so amazing. It’s so amazing that someone invented it, and that we can use it to communicate across distance and time.
Well, even in English, there are so many feelings we experience but can’t find the words for. There are just going to be things that we won’t be able to express, because they’re more complex than a word can carry, or more localized. So I’m wondering, is my experience of an unnameable emotion diminished because I can’t find the word for it? Or is it the other way around—that once I find a word, I’m less connected to the pure feeling?
That’s such a good question. I remember when I was in seventh grade, I had growing pains in my legs. My mother would say, “Oh, those are the anxieties.” And I didn’t know what anxiety was, I just thought it was pains in your leg.
Haha.
When I actually understood what anxiety meant, it was calming to know that was what the experience was. I think for children, too, when they can name the feeling, when it’s mirrored back to them—this is the opposite of what I just said—they might feel less at large, less afloat. And at the same time I think it’s important to use words to approximate the life of feeling. With the unfolding of a sentence, the stuttering, or the physicality of words on a page, we’re capturing our experiences.
It’s an interesting question about paraphrasing. I’ve heard some teachers ask their students to paraphrase a poem during workshop. And I’ve always resisted that, but then a wonderful poet named Kevin Prufer told me that he has his students describe a poem as if they were describing it to a six-year-old. Trying to get the basic concerns of a work across. I’ve found that helpful. So having to use language to describe language is an art; as is using language while also trying to transcend its limits.
Okay, yeah. That makes sense to me.
What’s it like for you?
Well, I’m not sure. Because I get what you’re saying about how language and attempts at empathy can be freeing. But I’m also very suspicious of language, and conscious of how it might be changing my experiences. I’m always thinking, how much of this reaction has been prompted by my definition of what I should be experiencing when I express—I suppose—symptoms of fear or joy? It almost seems like a multiple choice test, or a diagnosis, that I’m making for myself at every moment.
Right. Well, I guess I’m intrigued by all of these things as well, but I don’t apply them to poetry as much. They’re definitely related, but language seems so exciting on its own that I don’t worry about them in the context of my writing.
That’s interesting. Who do you think you’re writing for, then, when you write? Do you have an ideal audience?
In a conversation about Emily Dickinson, the marvelous fiction writer Marilynne Robinson talks about what she calls the “mysterious other,” and I would say in some ways that “a mysterious other” would be my deepest reader. An intimate, close, mysterious other. So it’s not just me, but it’s not a lecture hall of people either. I think the poems in this new book are more conversational, and I’ve been investigating the difference that exists for me between inner speech and regular speech. In some ways, this book shifts between these different modes.
There’s a wonderful poet, Forrest Hamer, who talks about reading poems as if you’re both speaking and the one spoken to. When I’m revising, I try to practice both of those positions. What would help the listener be more attached to what the speaker is saying? I think attachment is a big part of this for me. There is a desire for connection in each of the books I’ve written.
Do you think you’ve found those connections?
I hope I have, but I don’t know the reader’s experience. The poet Carl Dennis taught at my MFA, and I once asked him “What is poetry for?” He said that it was to allow us to speak more intimately. I don’t think that means confessing, necessarily: to me, it means to write without defense, and with more vulnerability.
Do you feel like you’ve completed this phase as soon as you’ve written a poem, or does it only realize itself after a certain degree of exposure to the public?
It’s not the latter at all. That’s a more vexed part of the process for me. Connection–even a kind of libido, or eros–comes out of making, exploring, shaping the work itself. The public I care most about–or most want to know–is whoever’s here, now, whenever “now” and “here” might be, unlimited by our Cartesian notions of time and space. Let’s say I give a reading. That reading is really for that particular present. It’s an exchange between the reader and the room in that moment. I hope the same exchange happens during a silent encounter with the poems, too, maybe even something like the charged alive exchange I feel when I write and revise.
My first book — a book of elegies — was, in a way, trying to hide from the public. I made the font as small as possible, I kind of wanted the publisher to sew it shut. Because to me, it was a very private type of book, and there was a real protective drive there.
But when I’m writing, in my communication I also want the reader to feel enlivened, and in conversation. So it’s not just a monologue. It’s an unseen, rich exchange, similar to what it is to exist richly in the present, in these nine seconds of our shared present, which contains the people I love, the writers and thinkers and makers I admire, people who are both alive and dead.
Who’s the persona in your poems? Who does she think she is to herself and the reader, and how does she want to change?
The speaker believes that she’s an “I”, but she’s actually a compilation of different selves, and different stories. My real self is shyer than that “I,” and slower. I think the speaker has a life of her own. And I want her to be less wary. I want her to explore new possibilities, and I was especially interested in that with Human Hours. It’s a very human impulse, the urge to enlarge.