An Interview with Poet and Editor Jennifer Barber
By Jen Garfield

 

Poet Jennifer Barber is petite and soft-spoken, but don't let her size fool you. When I met her at her office at Suffolk University in Boston, where she is an assistant professor of English, she had powerful things to say about discovering yourself through history and the direction of literary journals and publishing today. And she should know, being one of the first women to start her own literary journal in the 1990s. Now, Salamander is a nationally renowned journal, publishing some of the most exciting fiction and poetry being written today. Barber's own poetry is a meditation in contrast, exploring ancient and personal history through sparse, breathless language that magically achieves rich, expansive detail. Her full-length collection, Rigging The Wind, was published by Kore Press in 2003 and won the Kore Press First Book Award. Afaa Michael Weaver writes " . . . Barber celebrates self in its magnificent frailty, particle by particle, each one polished with wonder's luminescence."

You seem like a history buff. I don't know if you would consider yourself that or not. You studied medieval literature in England as a Rhodes Scholar, and your writing draws from historical moments, from the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal to the closing of the camps in Munich. Many of these poems, if they weren't inscribed with a date, could easily take place today—there's a timeless element to them. I'm interested in what draws you to this particular history, and why it's still relevant for you. 

For me, history was a huge gap in my knowledge. I came of age at a time when history was not taught much at the schools I went to. It's strange to think about now because my children do get history; even in elementary school, they’ve studied colonial history and ancient civilizations. I guess I grew up during a time when the school system set out to be progressive, more experimental. Social studies was taught much more frequently than history.

In college, I studied English and French literature. I spent a year in Scotland and took a medieval history course, where I focused for part of a term on Jews in medieval times. Later, I studied medieval literature in England, and through those studies, got some sense of early European history. In 1986, my husband and I lived in Spain for six months, and history started to become more immediate to me. We lived in a small town consisting mostly of older people who had lived through the Spanish Civil War, and this made me think a lot about their lives. I guess for a long time, in different ways, I've been interested in the idea that people live through moments of history; I’ve been curious about how an individual experiences history, rather than just the noting of large historical currents.  

The Jews, of course, have this very heavy history to try to take in. I grew up in Newton [ Massachusetts] in the 60's and 70's, and there was less discussion of recent history than you might expect, or at least I didn’t hear much. Maybe people wanted to distance themselves from what had happened in Europe. As children, we did hear rumors that someone’s neighbors or someone’s parents had survived a concentration camp, but this was not something that was talked about much. Maybe I feel in some ways that by writing about Jewish history in recent poems, I'm doing some sort of penance for being so ignorant before, about history and about my own background. I knew that my family was Jewish, but that was the extent of what I knew.

I think if you didn't have any direct experience of the Holocaust, and if your family didn't suffer directly from it, it’s natural to feel reticence for claiming any of the suffering as your own, even indirectly, through a work of art. I don’t usually write about that period. I found it helpful in Rigging the Wind to look at a more distant time in Jewish history, the 14th and 15th centuries in Spain. Even then, I felt extremely reluctant to write in any one else’s voice, but I did, in some of the historical persona poems. It still seems to me like a slightly suspicious enterprise. I find it hard to talk about. There’s a mixture of a lot of different emotions in thinking and writing about history, trying to imagine it.  

In the editor's note in the latest 2007 issue of Salamander, you write about "the sense of loss and the hope of uncovering a deeper idea of who we are." Do you approach your writing and research, particularly when dealing with Jewish subjects, as a way to uncover not only the history you missed out on, but also a hidden self? 

Definitely. That self was very submerged and very lost. Lost partly from guilt about my own ignorance, but also lost because I was curious about Jewish history and ritual and hadn’t figured out how to find out about them. My husband’s background is Catholic, and we have two children. We didn't give my older son any substantial exposure to his half-Catholic, half-Jewish background. But by the time my daughter came along, I was more in touch with my own sense of loss. We joined a temple, and she goes to Hebrew school. My daughter was adopted from Korea, so even as she's learning about the background I lost, I'm aware that in the near future she may well want to be pursuing questions she has about her own country of origin. 

The other thing I was feeling as I wrote that editor’s note could be summarized by the title of Michael Moore’s book, "Dude, Where's my Country?” It's been a really long 8 years under Bush, and, like many people, I’ve felt a lot of despair about the direction we’ve been going in. I came of age during the Vietnam War. These past 8 years have seemed in some ways even more difficult than that era, because I thought we as a country had learned something through the pain of that experience. I went from watching boys a couple of years older than me in high school getting drafted to go to Vietnam, to watching boys my son’s age, luckily not drafted, but in the position of deciding whether to take this on, whether to join the military and go to Iraq. It’s almost worse to watch kids the age of your children doing that. 

In her introduction to your collection Rigging the Wind, Jane Miller claims that you present "spiritual epiphanies at a time when the world needs poetry desperately." This is a pretty bold statement to make. Two questions: Do you think your poems are spiritual, which is different from seeking a self or historical connection? Do you think the world desperately needs poetry?  

I think some of the poems want to look at a spiritual dimension, but I'm not a person prone to epiphanies. If an epiphany is a revelation, a manifestation on a peak, I'm somebody who would be standing on the slope, looking around. Whether the world desperately needs poetry—this is more complicated. I could make an analogy with classical music. If I said that "everybody needs classical music, now more than ever," I would be assuming that everybody has some receptivity to classical music, and I’m not sure that’s true. I don't think everybody can receive poetry, and I don't think they should have to. I don't think we as poets should feel that that's our goal, that we'll get everybody to see what we're doing. But if “the world needs poetry” means that we hope to put something out there, and we hope that some people receive it, even if that number is small, that's the most we can hope for in any art form.

You'll hear poets give a lot of different opinions about National Poetry Month, and I have questions about it. What are we trying to do?  Are we trying to get all people to appreciate poetry? Are we simply trying to expose people to it, people who might not have come across it? The latter, I think, could be valuable. 

Let's go back to Salamander. You started the literary journal in your attic in 1992. What compelled you to start another literary journal—was “another” a question?

At that time, believe it or not, “another” was not a question. There were several well established literary journals, but in the late 1980s, for my friends and I who had recently finished graduate writing programs, there were not many new journals. It's almost impossible to believe now because journal publishing has been mushrooming year after year. Anyone who starts a literary journal today, hats off, because there are so many of them. 

There had been a very lively scene in the 60's and 70's, with people doing letterpress projects, including books, broadsides, and journals. Usually they didn’t have much funding, and letterpress is very labor-intensive, so most of these small publishers were gone by the early 80's. By the time I started Salamander, though, I discovered that other people had noticed the same need for a new crop of journals. I remember talking to Stratis Haviaras, soliciting some work from him for a future issue, and he said, “Oh, I've just started a journal too. It's called the Harvard Review.” Around that same time Kevin Gallagher started a magazine called Compost, and Vera Gold started 96 Inc. What made the new crop possible was the advent of personal computers and desktop publishing, allowing editors to do the typesetting easily and inexpensively themselves. I also had this idea that there weren't that many journals run by women, and that was added incentive. Today, it seems like I must be talking about a different century, which, of course, it was.  

In an article you wrote for the Suffolk Arts and Sciences Alumni Magazine, you quote the poet Frank Stanford, who wrote in a letter to Michael Cuddihy, editor of Ironwood, "There is only one train running for poets . . . the little magazines are the boxcars, hauling our goods." Do you see your role as a "conductor" of the boxcars? Is it separate from your role as poet?

I see it as a separate role but part of the same thing we're all trying to do, which is to use words and share them. With all the changes that are happening in the commercial publishing industry, literary journals have become more important. I'm always amazed by the things you can find in journals. It's a fact that literary journals reach a relatively small number of people, but I love them.  

What's a day in the life like for you, both as "conductor" of Salamander and poet? 

Sometimes I'll be up in my attic (now Salamander has moved to Suffolk University, I have more space) and I'll be happily working on a poem at 5:30 in the morning. By 7 a.m., it’s time to switch gears and start the day, and sometimes I find the switch difficult, but every writer has that. I'm lucky that my job is in my area of interest now.

I think any literary journal editor will tell you, as an editor, you feel very aware of the fact that you have a lot of submissions on your shelf, and you don't want people to wait too long to hear back. And I teach, so any given day I'll work on a poem, work on Salamander, and, at a certain point, gather my things together to teach. I write at 5:30 because the other responsibilities I have can't reasonably expect attention at that hour. 

What are you working on now?

I'm working on some new poems and trying out some new directions. A friend of mine asked the other day if I have a new manuscript ready. In the email that I haven't written back to her yet, I would say that maybe I'm at the base camp, looking at climbing the mountain in the next year or two. I write really slowly, and for me it's a good feeling even to be at the base camp.