Green Linden Press

Interview with Rick Barot on The Galleons — December 20, 2020

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and attended Wesleyan University and The Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. He has published four books of poetry, including, most recently, The Galleons (Milkweed 2020), which was longlisted for the National Book Award. Barot is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer in Poetry. In 2020, Barot received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is the poetry editor of New England Review. He lives in Tacoma, Washington, and teaches at Pacific Lutheran University and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing. 

Connor Yeck: Writing about history through poetry brings up so many wonderful questions of scope and focus: what are we looking at, how closely, and for how long? I find that many poems in The Galleons directly engage this tension by highlighting the spaces between “near” and “far.” For instance, describing your grandmother in an early poem, “The Galleons 1,” we have the line: “Or, her story / is surrounded by history, the ambient spaciousness / of which she is the momentary foreground.” And, in the following poem, “UDFJ-39546284,” we encounter a similar sentiment regarding focus, this time framed through a bunraku puppet show: “there is that sweet moment in your mind / when you stop noticing the three puppeteers hovering / around each puppet like earnest ghosts / and begin to follow the story being told / by the puppets.” In these moments, I can sense the depth of field changing before me in real time, or, to borrow your own words, “the mind making its focal adjustments.” Given the vast histories being explored in The Galleons, how did this language of “foreground” and “background” guide your writing? 

Rick Barot: You touched on the image of my grandmother in “The Galleons 1.”  She’s the catalyst for the whole book and the moves in perspective that you’re referring to. She died in 2016 at 92 years old, so she lived quite a long life. She had six children, immigrated to the United States, was a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a person who worked—the identities she inhabited during her life were complicated and rich. 

She had an amazing personal history, and that was surrounded by the larger history that surrounds us—a history that often represents larger things like capitalism, politics, colonialism. When she died, I wanted very much to write elegies about her, but I was resistant to the idea of writing personal elegies, mostly because I worried they would be merely sentimental. Instead, I wanted to see the specificity of her life in the larger contextual histories that I knew surrounded that life, so that was the spark that led to the poems in the book. 

What happens when you intentionally juxtapose the intimate life of somebody like your grandmother against the larger background of history itself? In answering that question, I became conscious of the focal adjustments I had to make between what is ostensibly the foreground, the main subject, and the background, the contextual energy that informs what’s happening in the foreground. 

Yeck: It’s interesting hearing you discuss the elegiac nature of these poems and how this poetic tradition might engage something far beyond a single life. I’m always fascinated in overlapping, perhaps even competing histories, and those estuary-like moments when the individual blends or merges with the global. On the technical aspects of foreground and background in this collection, I’m reminded of the possible connections between film and poetry. I thought these poems have a distinct cinematic quality to them, and reading, I could almost sense the camera movements: where we panned, zoomed, or saw objects enter or exit a shot. 

Barot: I like that the poems are reminding you of cinematic effects because even though the content part of the book had to do with the elegiac, the technical part had to do with challenging myself to do as many different things as I could formally, knowing that the content was taken care of. I knew I was going to write about my grandmother, about history, and about the tension between the personal and the historical. Technically, I was interested in figuring out the ways that the elegy can be configured, which was also another way of asking, “What are the different ways that you can write poems?” Because, you know, from one standpoint, all poetry is elegy. 

The notion of the cinematic that you’ve mentioned is a different way of framing something that I was hoping to do in the book, which was to come up with the many ways structure can be configured in poems. This often led to poems where the poem seems to be going in one direction, narratively or emotionally, and then there’s a swerve to elsewhere—and that can sometimes happen multiple times in one poem. 

The technical motif I’m describing here didn’t come to me from cinema, but from chess. In chess, the pieces have different capabilities and powers, and I got interested in writing poems where the poems moved the way chess pieces moved. The pawn is arguably the least powerful chess piece, and it can only move forward one square at a time, and so I thought, “OK, what does it feel like for a poem to move that way?” That kind of kind of deliberate, slow pacing. And then there’s the knight that can make an L-shaped maneuver, and I thought, “That’s a very interesting way of thinking about a poetic structure. What if a poem does a series of moves that go in one direction, and then it veers in the other direction, and then it moves ahead and then it veers again?” Then there's the queen, who is the most powerful piece on the board because she can do anything the fuck she wants. What does that look like in terms of poetic structure?

This is all to say that even though, yes, the starting point for the poems was the elegiac impulse sparked by my grandmother’s death, the technical reckoning of the book had to do with structure.  

Yeck: As a follow-up to you touching on form and structure, one of the first things a reader might notice in The Galleons is that its poems are entirely composed of couplets. Did you set off knowing that you were going to have this restraint on the page, or was this a decision that came out of the writing process?

Barot:  That decision came very early on, and it was part of the challenge I gave myself to make the work of the elegy difficult, formally speaking. Having chosen the couplet early, I then had to come up with ways to vary the poems somehow, despite the choices that had been closed off by my stubborn decision to stick with the couplet for the whole book. 

I like to talk to my undergraduate students about the fact that every sentient being is a content- generating machine. If you're alive, every moment of your existence you’re generating some kind of content. Emotional content, psychological content, physiological content, electrical content. We're all generating content all the time. But what makes the writer and the artist different—not special necessarily, but different—is that we have this desire to create shapes or forms that can capture or preserve some of that continuously generated content. And so, to go back to the formal conundrums that I created for myself in the book, content was already there. In fact, there was an imponderably large amount of content, so I needed to figure out, “What are the vessels I can employ to help me decide what bits of content to preserve and to present to a reader?”

Yeck: On the topic of content, I found myself thinking of the immense sort of “gathering” that must’ve been done to create this collection. In turn, I was struck by poems that leaned toward ars poetica, especially “The Flea,” which has so many fantastic moments that seem to grapple with authorial control in face of imponderable sums. Two lines come to mind: “The authority / I wanted dissolved always into restlessness, / into a constant gathering of images whose aggregate / seemed like things that had come to settle / inside a glove compartment.” And soon after, “I had no faith / in my flaws, but I had a grudging faith / in the particular.” Could you speak about that, “a grudging faith in the particular”?

Barot: I wrote “The Flea” early in the process of writing the poems for the book. That poem really did come out of a moment of great frustration with myself as a poet, a great judgment against all the work that I had done. It was also a lament that I wasn’t writing poems that I thought were as good as the poems written by the poets I admired. I wrote the poem as a lark meant only for myself, serving only a therapeutic function. After I finished the poem, I started to think that maybe I should heed the implied advice in the poem, which is to stop trying to write toward ambitions you’re not capable of achieving, and write towards the things you are capable of, given your skills and your material. So it started out as complaining then it became an action plan for how to think about my writing from then on. 

That notion you pointed to about having “faith in particular,” that was another acknowledgment that poets often aim for the big things—conceptual, transcendent ideas that feel grand and philosophical—but I realized that aiming for those big things often leads to the kind of frustration expressed in “The Flea.” That is, it’s almost impossible to manifest the visionary in your poems because, in fact, we live in the particular, in the reality of pots and pans, pens and pencils, bills and emails. So the poem ended up also reorienting my sense of vision in regards to what's important in a poem for me—that it’s not about the transcendent, that it's about the everyday. 

Yeck: In some ways, “The Flea” and the idea of “particulars” made me aware of just how much naming occurs in this book, and the concept of “gathering” or “cataloging” specifics when mixing poetry, research, and the historical record. In “The Galleons 2,” you write “Research is mourning, my friend says. Which means what, / exactly, for the things listed in the archives / as filling the galleons when they left Cebu and Manila—” This is followed by an exhaustive list of living beings and inanimate goods: slaves, musk, rubies, tea, priests, chickens, sugar. Then, in “The Galleons 6” — a poem that you and Julian Randall discussed as the heart of the collection in a previous interview—we see the galleon trade stripped of its materiality, and presented instead as an inescapable list: an onslaught of ship names and exact dates over nearly three centuries. I wonder if you might speak a bit about your interactions with historical research, records, chronicles, and the kind of sorcery that’s occurring here—poetry as living form that collides with otherwise static facts?

Barot: Well, “sorcery” is exactly the word. I did an enormous amount of research during the time that I was working on these poems—a lot of online research, book research, and I had the privilege of traveling to different places to go to archives and museums, to Madrid, the Philippines, London. Through all that, I absorbed and thought about the things that I encountered—information, narratives, actual artifacts. However, the sorcery came in the form of me not actually taking obsessive notes on everything I encountered. That is, I allowed the material to come at me and settle in my consciousness then I waited to see what things would assert themselves.

At that point, the magic of poetry would come in, and I would begin to build a lyric frame around the item or the image or the sound. In one way, then, I was systematic in that I did a lot of research, but in maybe the more important way, I wasn’t systematic at all. I was simply, patiently opportunistic. I was mindful of the fact that poems for me don't come from a straightforward encounter with materials or subjects. They come from the corner of my eye or my mind. They spark there. And then I have to muse my way toward that place of possibility and energy.

Yeck: I think that’s a fantastic way to look at the sort of sieving a poet might do when engaging with histories of a certain size. It’s difficult to take everything with you, and if you do, the poems might become something you don't want them to be.

Barot:  One of the big themes of the book is colonialism, and that is an incredibly large term. It’s almost like a hyper-object. It’s not really real. It’s only real as it’s evidenced in stories, histories, data, artifacts, archival matter. So, I wanted to be true to the fact that there’s the “concept” and then there’s the “evidence,” or whatever might remain of that evidence. The poems in the book are really about translating the big things into things that are graspable.

Yeck: Making the immense graspable feels like a true pillar of this collection, and to hear you speak of translating makes me think of the active, almost curatorial role a poet takes when writing on, within, or through history. One poem that feels to so expertly explore the “creation” of historical intimacy is “The Galleons 5,” which presents a braided, polyvocal experience—in each couplet, we have your voice, and then the voice of your grandmother as she tells the story of her life in a recorded, dining room table conversation. I was fascinated how this poem encourages rereading, and how if we isolate your voice—or the voice of “the speaker”—we find this extended passage:

I think so many writers have this moment—speaking with those closest to us, perhaps a loved one from a different generation, and hearing their stories and then wondering what to do with them. How to approach them, respect them. Can you speak about this poem, and perhaps how you see poetry or poets as preservers or witnesses to these intimate histories?

Barot: Many years before she died, I did a series of interviews with my grandmother that we taped. I had no idea what I would use those interviews for. Initially, it was just to have some kind of record of her stories and the things she had experienced. I had not thought of it as material for poetry or any kind of writing, it was for the sake of archiving her voice and her story. When she died, I was moved to think about that material, and to think about how I might be able to include it in the poetry I wanted to write.

The problem I faced, however, was that I didn't want to write poems that inhabited her or her mind. I didn't want to write poems that imaginatively reconstructed her life stories. I had a kind of ethical resistance to using the material of her life in poetic productions where I was pretending to be her or her stories or her voice. So, in “The Galleons 5,” the layering of literal excerpts from the interview and my own thinking about how to handle this material dramatized, for me, the importance of her voice being heard by itself. It highlighted my own eagerness and reservation about using that material in my poetry—that tension between wanting to create the elegy and also wanting to be restrained about how you use somebody else’s “being” in your work.

But I want to say that the quandary I'm describing here is mine. I know many poets who do an amazing job of writing reconstructive, imaginative histories about different people, including people in their own lives—and I’m not making any judgments here about that. I simply felt that for me to write about my grandmother, there were certain things I could not do. There were certain things that I did not want my imagination to do.

Yeck:  “The Galleons 5” and other poems like it gave me the distinct sense I could “see” the speaker working their way through the material at hand. We’re never just “given” a poem, but also the multitude of ways the poet arrived at it. 

Barot: This goes back to “The Flea” in some ways. The speaker is subconsciously talking about the challenges and the limits of writing a poem, especially when dealing with personal material and also historical material. So, there’s that distinct strand of reckoning in the book. Hopefully it’s an honest reckoning about the ways that poetry can honor, and also be limited by, its materials. That tension is a motif in the poem, and also an aesthetic framework.  

Yeck: Zooming out to look at the collection as a whole, one poem that leapt out to me was “Still Life with Helicopters,” which gives us this exhaustive, almost top-down history of such machines, but with a distinct shift that occurs near the end: “One popular use / of the AStar is to provide aerial observation / and support to ground units, which must be / what the Oakland Police Department helicopter / is doing now, while the protesters swarm onto /the 580 Freeway and shut it down.”

I felt there were so many moments in The Galleons where we can feel the poet “look up” from their work, and the meditative, historical vision is almost disrupted by new associations, observations, and things coming to light. This feels like a distinct and pleasurable sort of chess move. Could you speak about this poem?

Barot: “Still Life with Helicopters” is definitely a poem that channels the knight in chess, given all the L-turns the poem makes. 

It’s worth mentioning, though, that the structure of the poem now—starting with the deeply historical and ending with the present-day helicopters—is the reverse of how I actually experienced the content of the poem before I wrote it.  The protests mentioned in the poem were those that happened in 2016, after the police officer who murdered Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, wasn’t charged with that murder.  I was in Oakland for Thanksgiving when those protests happened, and at night for two or three days we heard the helicopters nearby surveilling the protesters on the freeways and on the streets.  The sound of the helicopters, and the protests themselves, were in the forefront of my consciousness. At that point, I could have written a poem focused on the protests and the helicopters, but I understood that writing that poem was going to be—for me, anyway—a cliched response to the crisis. So I started to wonder, “What's a different way of getting at this subject in front of me, that is unfolding in front of me?” 

I got the idea of looking up “helicopters” online, and this led to a fascinating rabbit-hole of information about the history of the helicopter—a history that stretched back more than a thousand years to China, encompassing stories about inventors and people who thought about flying and flying machines, and eventually encompassing the military-industrial complex, and finally those helicopters above Oakland. The poem, then, is a kind of exercise in earnestly connecting the dots, with the internet and the imagination coming together to help with the work.  It’s still amazing to me to be continually reminded that any object or phenomenon you contemplate can be subject to that associative sprawl, proving that everything really is connected.

Yeck: You mentioned speaking to your students about generating content, and looking across my desk right now, I’m thinking of the dozen or so poems that might exist from what’s scattered about.

Barot: When I try to illustrate critical thinking to my first-year writing students, we do an exercise that involves thinking about a specific item in relation to the different disciplines at a university.  I’ll take, say, a pen that’s in front of me and I’ll ask, “How will the art historian use their discipline to look at this pen? What are the kinds of questions and ideas that they would generate looking at this object? What about the religion professor who teaches theology, what is that person thinking about in terms of this pen?” And then on and on through the list: the chemist, the economist, the mathematician, the anthropologist, the historian, the philosopher. The exercise shows the students that every phenomenon can be looked at in all of those different ways—including ideas, people, and so on. That openness to a multi-faceted way of looking at things is, I tell them, one way of practicing critical thinking.  To tie this back to poetry, maybe the work I'm doing in The Galleons puts into action the critical thinking that I ask my students to do in my classes.