[robert mezey]

I was just wondering how many of you have bought Dick Barnes'
gorgeous book, A WORD LIKE FIRE. I was wondering because even
after a notice in the New Yorker and several other good reviews, his book is selling poorly. There's a review in the new issue of Poetry which ends, "I'm convinced that, in the future, any anthology of twentieth-century Americsn poetry
that neglects Dick Barnes will seem ridiculous." Amen. Those of you who don't know his work are missing one of the five or six best poets of the last third of the 20th century. The book is published by Handsel Press and is only 17 bucks--one of the best bargains I can think of.

[Bruce McBirney]

Thanks for the heads up. I've seen other good reviews of it, too, so I'll look for it.

I enjoyed your own poem on Dick Barnes, a touching tribute on his retirement.

[Marilyn Taylor]

Robert--
Can you possibly post a poem or two by Dick Barnes? This could well create even more interest in his new book.

Marilyn

[Alex Pepple]

Hi Bob,

It's good to see you here again. Thanks for bring this collection to the attention of Sphereans.

Marilyn, there are a few reviews available at Amazon, and the most exhaustive and compelling is by our very own Poet Lariat, Tim Murphy, which I have quoted below. Those of you interested in getting your own copy of the book or reading all the reviews can do so directly here at Amazon.

Here is a quote of Tim's review, sample poems included:

Robert Mezey has tirelessly thrown his energies into what appear to be Quixotic causes. I first encountered his name when I acquired the Selected Poems of Henri Coulette, which he edited with Donald Justice for Arkansas. Then he edited a beautiful Selected E.A. Robinson, which Modern Library has wantonly allowed to go out of print. Then a Selected Hardy for Penguin, likewise unobtainable. Mezey's introductory essays for these collections deserve republication in their own right, as first-rate works of literary criticism.

In 1999 I met Mezey at a session on poetic translation at the West Chester Conference on Form and Narrative. Alan and I were there to talk about our work-in-process with Beowulf, which was half done at the time. Professor Mezey had brought the majestic translations of Borges that he and the late Dick Barnes had completed. Chairing the panel, poet and translator Dick Davis repeated an old chestnut that I had never heard. "Translations are like lovers. There are those that are true and unbeautiful, and there are those that are beautiful but untrue." It seemed false humility on his part. Dick's translations from the Persian are so lucid it seems impossible they could be untrue. But the Mezey/Barnes recreations of Borges were revelations.

I had seen Borges at Yale being led on stage by his young wife, Maria Kodama. He recited his poems in Spanish, and they were followed by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, reading his unlovely English renditions. After Mezey and Barnes had published about one hundred of their true and beautiful translations, Viking Penguin, which had the rights to Borges in English, commissioned them to complete the task of translating all of the 440 poems. Later the publisher rejected this project in favor of a multi-authored hodgepodge. So the great Mezey/Barnes translation can only circulate as Samizdat literature. The treachery of those editors is the literary crime of the last century.

Dick Barnes died in 2000, aged 68; and I agree with Mezey that he was one of the best and least appreciated poets of his time. He left none of his original work in print; the little chapbooks and the two small trade books long since vanished. Now Mezey has edited a Selected Dick Barnes for Other Press. I received a prepublication copy yesterday. The vast majority of Barnes' work is free verse, to which I am generally unreceptive. Nonetheless, I find him compelling. He was a country boy from the Mojave Desert, whence many of his poems derive their extraordinary sense of place. He was also a profoundly spiritual poet, whose Christianity was deeply informed by Taoism and Buddhism.

Example and Admonition

My father's admonition: when given
a choice, choose the path that
leads uphill, always,

so up we went, but all led down soon after:
our destination Deep Creek, where water had gathered
by taking every downhill opportunity.

We thought of that when the higher path turned down,
but no one mentioned it then, nor ever, in fact, til now.
Two lessons: and though sometimes I feel clever,

and have read the Chou I book all about that water,
I've not forsaken either one. If there be something in a man
that flows uphill, he has to go with it

whatever sweat or humiliation may attend his going.
Done patiently, this is called "matching heaven with heaven."
Otherwise, just strife.


This is the work of an I Ching adept who has translated Borges' reflections on Heraclitus and rivers, a learned man who has the rare gift of imparting his lessons with deadpan humor. Here's another of my favorite Barnes poems:

Shoot Out

Neils Bohr noticed in Westerns that at the draw
the first man to go for his gun was always killed.
The other, who waited for that, was quicker.

Was it because the first man had to decide to shoot,
while the other, just reacting, could take a short cut?
That's what Bohr thought.

When I'd have explained by the plot: the bad guy wins
toward the middle, the good guy has to wait his turn.
That's how you know the bad guy. He knows it too,

and gloats for awhile, then loses his nerve
when he gets hints the movie is about to end.
According to the script. The scriptures. Amen.

But what if Bohr was right? And what if the script
is lost, or not even lost, but just forgotten?
And what if the wind hones the edge of my house?

I'm comin to get you, Tex.


There is a fabulous sense of rhythm in this poem -- the laconic voice of the rural California professor of Anglo Saxon spinning his yarn in conversational lines that have mostly four heavy stresses apiece. The voice of a man who knows his Bible, his physics, and High Noon. Here are the poems a famous Californian, Gary Snyder, might have written, had he been "gifted with so fine an ear," and chosen the slow mastery of traditional verse forms. Most of Barnes' formal verse will be available to us in about 2030, when Borges enters the public domain. But the little he left us is in this book, and here's one of my favorites. A take-off on "The House that Jack Built," it rivals Bishop's great poem for Pound, "Visit to St. Elizabeth's."

Trophy Hunt (for the Way Things Used to Be)

These are the sheep with curly horns
that roam the wild Mojave.

These are the wardens duly sworn
who guard the sheep with curly horns
as they roam the wild Mojave.

These are the hunters who drew the numbers
for a license at fifty thousand dollars
to pay the wardens duly sworn
and harvest some rams with curly horns
out on the wild Mojave.

These are protectors of animal rights
who came out and camped in the dark of night
to spook the rams and spoil the plans
of the lucky hunters who drew the numbers
and paid the wardens duly sworn
for a shot at a ram with curly horns
out on the wild Mojave.

These are the sheriff's deputies
called by the hunters to keep the peace
and prevent protectors of animal rights
from chasing sheep in the dark of night
to save the rams and spoil the plans
of the lucky hunters who drew the numbers
and paid the wardens duly sworn
for some trophy rams with curly horns
out on the wild Mojave.

These are the Channel Seven reporters
with their camera crews and helicopters
who followed the sheriff's deputies
called by the hunters to keep the peace
and prevent the protectors of animal rights
from chasing sheep in the dark of night
to save the rams and spoil the plans
of the lucky hunters who drew the numbers
and paid the wardens duly sworn
to kill a few rams with curly horns
out on the wild Mojave.

And this is me in my living room
with the light turned off and the TV on
and I wonder what happened to all of us
that left us in such an awful mess
with our helicopters and television
and our ball parks that have to be air conditioned,
yearning for days when we shot our food
and life was hard and hungry and good:
days you'd seldom see anyone
out there on the wild Mojave.


A Word Like Fire, the selected poems of Dick Barnes, went on sale last week. Amazon already has 33 used copies for five bucks, meaning that most of the review copies are for sale unread, more's the pity. Get yours now.

--Timothy Murphy

[Katy Evans-Bush]

Well gee, I might go and get one of those. Thanks for posting that, Alex, loved it. I'd never heard of Dick Barnes. These are interesting, great subject matter and an original take on each one I think. I loved all three.

Just an aside on Tim's reviewing style, he has such a way of getting at the little clear centres of things. And people. I wish I could see things in such a way, it's very refreshing.

KEB

[Clay Stockton]

Tim's review is really good, but the poems themselves (as I'm sure Tim would agree) are the best endorsement imaginable. Yowza, those are good.

Only eleven bucks through the link Alex posted! Put it together with another book of more than $14 and get free shipping!

--CS

[Clay Stockton]

I want to bump this up because I just feel like Sphereans should be eating this book up with spoons, fingers, shovels, whatever you can lay hands on--get these poems into your mouth.

My copy showed up yesterday and the top of my head has not been in place since. What a poet. The real deal.

When the Amazon package showed up, I unsheathed the book from its cardboard and opened it at random to this:

A Story in Blue

The coed was in the courtyard
by the jacaranda tree.

A scrub jay came to the feeder.
With its little sharp black beak

it flung spray after spray of birdseed
to one side and the other.

The tiny house with its walls of glass
was empty, quite empty.

The jay with a loud cry flew away
and she said, sotto voce,

reminds me of you you prick.

[FOsen]

I bought Barnes's book the night I attended Bob Mezey's read at the Huntington. They are both wonderful poets who should be known to all of us, The first below is Barnes, who wrote mostly free verse but with knockout control, and the second is one of Mezey's that he read that night. Let it also be noted that Professor Mezey has championed the work of Henri Coulette, another unjustly neglected poet.

-- Frank

Alluvium: A Reply

Somewhere two rivers rush together at the foot of a scarp,
meander over a coastal plateau, then down a barranca

the rio caudal plunges into its deep estuary
and huge canyons under the sea. But here

on this nearly level delta wide as the eye can see
streams mingle and separate, some sweet, some brack

some sink under their own silt, are lost in the arrowweed
where a curve of current earlier carved the bank

some dwindle down sloughs under poplar or willow,
the heron’s home, some into quicksand, and

nothing is turning out the way you thought it would be,
nothing.


Hardy

Thrown away at birth, he was recovered,
Plucked from the swaddling shroud, and chafed and slapped,
The crone implacable. At last he shivered,
Drew the first breath, and howled, and lay there, trapped
In a world from which there is but one escape
And that forestalled now almost ninety years.
In such a scene as he himself might shape,
The maker of a thousand songs appears.

From this it follows, all the ironies
Life plays on one whose fate it is to follow
The way of things, the suffering one sees,
The many cups of bitterness he must swallow
Before he is permitted to be gone
Where he was headed in that early dawn.

[robert mezey]

I was disappointed to see only 8 hits on this thread, but that seems to be Dick Barnes' fate, for reasons obscure to me. He seems to me clearly a far better poet than Graham, Ashbery,
Williams (CK), Levine, Clifton etc etc, yet almost no one seems to have heard of him. But I'm delighted to read the various responses, to see Tim's beautiful review quoted at length, and a number of other excellent poems posted. It's a big book, so no harm in adding another poem or two:

A CHILD WHO IS NOT LIKABLE

A child who is not likable, quite lacks
the innocent coquetries of her age and sex,

knocks things over often, demands what she can get,
does not expect to be liked, and is not likable--yet

seldom frets, and never without calculation, sees
right through the phony kindness of adults she knows,

plays soberly upon their vanities, never pleads for mercy
nor for the love she isn't going to get, gets

what she has, and keeps it.


And here is one of Dick's exquisite Borges versions:

LUKE XXIII

Gentile or Hebrew or simply a man
Whose face is lost in time;
We shall never recover from oblivion
The silent letters of his name.

About mercy he knew what a bandit can know
Whom Judea nails to a cross.
Of time gone before, we can recover, now,
Nothing. During his final task,

To die crucified, he heard
Among the jibes of the people
That the man crucified next to him
Was a god, and he blurted out, "Lord,

Remember me when thou comest
Into thy kingdom." The inconceivable voice
That one day shall judge all beings
Promised from the terrible Cross

Paradise. They said no more
Till the end came, but history
Won't let the memory
Of that afternoon when they both died, die.

O my friends, the innocence of this friend
Of Jesus, the openness that prompted him
To ask for Paradise and to receive it
Out of the ignominy of his chastisement

Was the same that threw him down so many times
Into bloody calamity and crimes.


And one more---one that shows how surely and gracefully he handles a formal measure. The hero of this little ballad is the adolescent Borges; a true story:

GENEVA, 1916

A glance along the table,
light words, heady laughter,
the possibly deliberate
pressure of an ankle,

a possible innuendo
in clever things she said:
one thing led to another,
and she led him to her bed.

It seemed to him a conquest
though she were oh so willing;
but after a night with her
he woke up in the morning

to find that she had done it
as a favor to his father.
She, his father's mistress.
He felt "unstable as water,"

like Reuben in the Bible.
An atavistic sheen
undid the sexual debut
of this son from the Argentine

but gave him, as a poet,
a thought to write about:
whether all our deeds are darkened
by the shadow of a doubt;

who is, in any action,
the actor, who the author?
If you do what another has done,
are you the same, or the other?

Enjoy.

[Duncan Gillies MacLaurin]

Well, I've ordered a copy. Thanks for the tip!

Duncan