Tag: Madeleine Barnes

Lyric Essentials: Madeleine Barnes Reads Michelle Maher

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials! This week Madeleine Barnes reads poetry from Michelle Maher and discusses maternal lineage, relationships, and inspiration. Thank you for reading!

Erica Hoffmeister: You were eager for the opportunity to share Michelle Maher’s poetry with our readers. Can you share why that is?

Madeleine Barnes: Michelle Maher is my mother! It’s a privilege to know her through her poems. I admire her as a person and an artist. In the poem “For My Mother,” May Sarton writes: “Today I remember / The creator, / The lion-hearted.” Sarton honors her mother as creator, committing her artistry and courage to memory. My mother is the lion-hearted woman who gave my sisters and me life, andthe author of an incredible debut poetry collection, Bright Air Settling Around Us (Main Street Rag, April 2020). When I was growing up, I don’t think I appreciated how much creative energy goes into motherhood, and how difficult it is to make time for writing while raising kids and working full-time. I don’t know how she ever slept. So it was really exciting when our first books were picked up for publication around the same time last year.

She’s not on social media and she’s averse to self-promotion, but her writing makes an impact on people. I want her work to reach as many people as possible because there’s so much we can learn from it. A few years ago, Toi Derricotte selected one of her poems as the winner of the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award. At the award reading, I had this experience where I both could and couldn’t believe the reader was my mother—her poems are a heartbeat. Her voice is the first poem I ever heard. In her work, I recognize the marker of poetry: a life not only lived, but deeply felt. She taught me that our legacy is who we love, who we support, and the meaning we make out of our lives.

Madeleine Barnes reads “To Return is to Carry” by Michelle Maher

EH: In our emails, you expressed the difficulty in choosing just a few poems of Maher’s to read for us–how and why did you end up reading the poems that you did?

MB: In the end I chose poems that ask difficult questions and address topics like grief. Her poems have the power to help a lot of people. “What would it mean to see with the eyes / of a woman recently returned from the dead?” she writes in “To Return is to Carry.” The speaker’s vision is a “flame that sears away everything inconsequential.” When we’re confronted with mortality, what truly matters rises to the surface. “To return is to carry a thirst so deep it seems like grief,” she writes. This line helps me recognize how loving life and loving the world is similar to complicated grief. What will outlast us? What would it be like to come back from the dead? A man walks past the woman and ignores her, assuming that she has nothing to offer him. My mother’s poetry honors people who are overlooked, and people who can’t do anything for us. The poem closes with the repeated question, “What lasts? What lasts?” It’s a question that all of us have to face, and the answer depends on the individual.

“Deep Blue Bowl” is a lesson in grief. After someone we love dies, we still feel their presence everywhere. This poem does something important—it addresses an incredulousness that can accompany grief. When the speaker sees an image of her mother, she senses that she’s is happy in the afterlife, and this feels upsetting. “Really? I want to say. / You left me with boxes of photos / and no one to call who will be interested / in my day, down to its tiniest detail. / I want to be somebody’s child again.” I feel anguish reading these lines. She captures how hard it is to feel left behind after someone so integral to your life dies. How could they leave us? Don’t they know how much we miss them? Even if we sense that they’re okay, we might selfishly wish they were still with us. I’ve read a lot of wonderful poems about grief, but to me, this one is stands out because it captures a moment in the grieving process that we don’t talk about enough, and it’s related to anger. The pain we feel over someone’s absence is directly proportionate to the amount of love we feel for them. The image of the deep blue bowl, and the feeling of being under something cosmic and heavenly, is so powerful.

Madeleine Barnes reads “Deep Blue Bowl” by Michelle Maher

EH: You and your mother write, collaborate and create together – even writing about each other and connecting familial threads throughout one another’s poetry. What positive impact do you think you and your mother have on the writing community as a writer’s family of women?

MB: My relationship with my mother as a poet is one that is founded on love and joy in each other’s accomplishments. She always rejoiced in my successes, and this showed me how to celebrate others. Now that I’m an adult, we’re artistic peers and collaborators. We’ve gone through hard times, and we’re not perfect in any way, but there’s a fundamental love and respect that seeps through. Our first community is our immediate family, and hopefully we carry collaboration and support into the wider world. We made a decision a long time ago to always have each other’s backs and support one another no matter what, because living any other way would be intolerable. It’s not a rivalry or a zero-sum game where “whatever you have takes away from what I have.” That mindset is extremely destructive. She says it would be strange to compete with me—she doesn’t see that as her role as a parent. We both had graduate school experiences where writers tried to tear each other down, and that competitive mindset is toxic. It destroys mutual health and friendships and support systems and love. So, we make the choice to continually lift each other up, knowing that support, encouragement, and community is what lasts.

She recently told me that she’s never been to a funeral where people say, “Oh, this person won this and that prestigious award.” What they remember is what that person contributed, who they loved, who they supported, and what meaning they made from their life. I think there’s sometimes a valorization of selfishness in art—we’re taught that it’s commendable if you put your art above how you treat people, and selfishness is somehow complex and admirable—she and I are both tired of that, especially under our current administration. We prioritize art and how we treat others, and we don’t buy into the scarcity mindset. We don’t agree on everything, but we never look at each other in a way that’s disappointed or stressed out. A win for her is a win for me. We want to lift other people up, too!

EH: Lastly, is there anything you are working on now that you’d like to share with our readers?

MB: We’re mulling over the idea of a collaborative chapbook—poems in response to each other, and in response to the urgencies of this extraordinary time that we’re living through. Our goal is to have it ready to submit by summer 2021.

Michelle Maher is is a professor of English at La Roche College and the author of the poetry collection Bright Air Settling Around Us. Her work has appeared in the journals Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Chautauqua Literary Journal, The Georgetown Review, Atlanta Review, U.S. 1 Worksheets, and others. Her poem, “At the Brera, Milan” won the 2012 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award, a national contest sponsored by Carlow University.

Further reading:

Purchase Maher’s debut poetry collection Bright Air Settling Around Us from Main Street Rag.
Read more of Maher’s poetry featured in Cordella Magazine.
Read this interview with Maher in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Madeleine Barnes is a poet, visual artist, Mellon Foundation Humanities Public Fellow, and PhD student at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her debut poetry collection, You Do Not Have To Be Good, was published by Trio House Press in July 2020. She is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Women’s Work, forthcoming from Tolsun Books. She serves as Poetry Editor at Cordella Magazine, a publication that showcases the work of women and non-binary writers and artists. She’s the recipient of two Academy of American Poets poetry prizes, the Princeton Poetry Prize, the Gertrude Gordon Journalism Prize, and the Three Rivers Review Poetry Prize. Visit her at madeleinebarnes.com.

Further reading:

Purchase Barnes’ collection You Do Not Have to Be Good.
Read an interview with Barnes and Maher in The Brooklyn Review.
Check out Barnes’ feature in Sundress Publications’ The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed series.

Erica Hoffmeister is originally from Southern California and earned an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English from Chapman University. Currently in Denver, she teaches college writing and advocates for media literacy and digital citizenship. She is an editor for the Denver-based literary journal South Broadway Ghost Society and the author of two poetry collections: Lived in Bars (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), and the prize-winning chapbook, Roots Grew Wild (Kingdoms in the Wild Press, 2019). A cross-genre writer, she has several works of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, articles and critical essays published in various outlets. Learn more about her at http://ericahoffmeister.com/


Sundress Reads: A Review of You Do Not Have to Be Good

Madeleine Barnes’ debut collection You Do Not Have to Be Good, which was published by Trio House Press this year, takes the unspoken rules of living and turns them into gentle but firm poems. With images of space scattered like constellations throughout the collection, as well as the occasional medicinal term, it isn’t just about what one does not have to be—the potential of what they can be is also explored.  Even if one doesn’t understand the nuances of such jargon, it is still impactful and striking, an inner glimpse into a compassionate world. In this world envisioned by Barnes, we do not have to always conform to a standard; rebellion should be in our hearts; that there is hope within acts and words of vulnerability. 

The book is set up in sections, such as “You Do Not Have to Generate Capital,” “You Do Not Explain Tenderness,” and “You Do Not Have to Be Captive.” As the poems within the sections weave in and outside of these abstract themes, the speakers of the poems are searching for reasons, answers for the existence of such concepts. But, as we continue to read on, we realize that sometimes there are no clear-cut reasons for existing. In the poem “New York in June,” it is written, “I’m not sure how I stayed alive / the summer I lost you…I never asked god about you.” Here, as the speaker struggles with the death of a loved one, they continue to go through a routine of mourning. It is through this process they learn how to move on, to linger in a space and live without this person. 

Combining personal and impersonal narratives, such as the one in “New York in June,” Barnes sets up intimate scenes that empowers both speakers and readers. In the poem “Tenderness is all I Remember,” the speaker states, “Sister, what do you think will happen to us? / Do you think it is plausible that we, / winged, will trim the ghosts’ gowns / from snow?”  In the acknowledgements, Barnes writes that the collection is geared towards queer disabled women, non-binary individuals, girls and non-binary teens, and to those who are unknown and suffering silently. It is poems like “Tenderness is all I Remember” that this is particularly evident, as there is a particular type of vulnerability and smallness trapped within the speaker’s voice. 

I found many of these poems to come from places of pain, whether they are rooted in the poet’s personal memories, or in the ambiguous poems that seem to touch upon broader experiences and topics. My favorite poem of this collection is one of such poems, one that seemed quite raw and real. 

A favorite poem from the collection, “Some Answers I Wrote on a Long Term Disability Questionnaire,” gets into the nitty-gritty life of someone who lives with a disability. This poem alternates between the questionnaire format, asking questions like “Are your illnesses, injuries, or conditions related to your work in any way?” and if the condition will impact future work. Barnes then answers these questions with the terminology of astronomy, astrology, and physics. With haunting lines like “I have been here so many times before” and “If an object is moving towards us, its spectral lines shift to shorter wavelengths; / if it’s moving away the lines swing to longer wavelengths,” Barnes juxtaposes something that seems so small—a physical disability—with the weight of the entire universe. It is in this part of the book, in the section dubbed “You Do Not Have to Generate Capital,” where I began noticing the medical and space terminology. It is here, in this section, where the speakers begin to dig deep into themselves and tries to find answers within these grand scientific words and concepts. But, in the end, it seems quite futile, only providing answers on what could be, not what is. 

Madeleine Barnes’ You Do Not Have to Be Good layers memory and the metaphysical in order to create a thought-provoking collection. It gives a voice to those considered to be within marginalized groups, offering ideas of their potential in a beautiful, lyrical manner. Instead of focusing on the pain of living with a disability, or the burden of an identity, they can the equivalent of a shining galaxy. 

You Do Not Have to Be Good is available at Trio House Press

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is an undergraduate at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her work has appeared in Into the Void, Corvid Queen, and cahoodaloodaling, among others. She attended the International Writing Program’s Summer Institute and was a Brooklyn Poets Fellow. Currently, she is trying to figure out a happy intersection between her writing, film, and photography endeavors.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: You Do Not Have To Be Good by Madeleine Barnes

AND NOW THERE IS NO MORE BLUE

as though a certain fruit split open
and stained the air in a way I am not
imagining, as though the surface of his
turquoise ring changed to gray
in a way nothing should change
when touched, as though the surface
of the lake turned dark green when
the swans left—dramatic, as it must be,
the ritual of giving up blue, the sudden decision
not to see it, his decision to come to me broken
like they all do, because he wants me to perform
a different ritual with what light’s left.
Where are we? What else is in the room?
It still matters. He touches my ear
searching for the stray, unattainable—
wanting to catch hold of it. He leans
into me, which is what the sea can do
and it’s the same people, same music,
same ghosts I couldn’t forget from the very
start. I promised not to use less force
and by this, I meant several things:
I’d do what not everyone does,
I’d become arctic like the edges
of his body, and I wouldn’t give in
to loss and more loss even when
he indicated that it was enough.
Still: I look at him now through no particular body,
moved just enough to think I’ve found it…
the green that means something, an arrow,
a hunger is being ripped out of me
and there is a kind of music to it
that I don’t regret, or pity, and why
shouldn’t it matter, I try to say to him,
that it was so rough, that what
bruised me bruised you.

This selection comes from the book, You Do Not Have To Be Good, available from Trio House Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Krista Cox.

 Madeleine Barnes is a poet, visual artist, Mellon Foundation Humanities Public Fellow, and English PhD student at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She serves as Poetry Editor at Cordella Magazine, a publication that showcases the work of women and non-binary writers and artists. Her debut poetry collection, You Do Not Have To Be Good, is forthcoming from Trio House Press in July 2020. She is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Women’s Work, forthcoming from Tolsun Books. She’s the recipient of two Academy of American Poets poetry prizes, the Princeton Poetry Prize, the Gertrude Gordon Journalism Prize, and the Three Rivers Review Poetry Prize. Visit her at madeleinebarnes.com.

For money, Krista Cox is a paralegal at an environmental and insurance coverage firm. For joy, she’s an Associate Poetry Editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection and Executive Director of Lit Literary Collective, a nonprofit serving her local literary community. She serves on the board of the Feminist Humanist Alliance. Her poetry has appeared in Columbia Journal, Crab Fat Magazine, The Humanist, and elsewhere. Her internet hangout is http://kristacox.me.

 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: You Do Not Have To Be Good by Madeleine Barnes

Retelling

There was one who did not return—
the boy in my high school who inhaled gauze

before the anesthesiologist could bring him back
to the same room where they took out

four of my teeth, cotton rolled against my gums.
There must be room for error in every procedure

but I want to know if he heard, lying down,
the light spray of water in his mouth,

or the summer heat that makes it hard to inhale,
heat that stays wrapped up in the lungs.

My sisters give me a lucky pomegranate seed
as if they know how close we are to going under.

Some say luck itself is simple, but have you ever
felt luck unlock wrong, held your hand

against the wall that luck broke down
so you could fix wrong and live with certain losses,

so you could match the groove in every brick
that pinned you to the ground,

luck nothing more but a tongue that moves.

This selection comes from the book, You Do Not Have To Be Good, available from Trio House Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Krista Cox.

 Madeleine Barnes is a poet, visual artist, Mellon Foundation Humanities Public Fellow, and English PhD student at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She serves as Poetry Editor at Cordella Magazine, a publication that showcases the work of women and non-binary writers and artists. Her debut poetry collection, You Do Not Have To Be Good, is forthcoming from Trio House Press in July 2020. She is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Women’s Work, forthcoming from Tolsun Books. She’s the recipient of two Academy of American Poets poetry prizes, the Princeton Poetry Prize, the Gertrude Gordon Journalism Prize, and the Three Rivers Review Poetry Prize. Visit her at madeleinebarnes.com.

For money, Krista Cox is a paralegal at an environmental and insurance coverage firm. For joy, she’s an Associate Poetry Editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection and Executive Director of Lit Literary Collective, a nonprofit serving her local literary community. She serves on the board of the Feminist Humanist Alliance. Her poetry has appeared in Columbia Journal, Crab Fat Magazine, The Humanist, and elsewhere. Her internet hangout is http://kristacox.me.

 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: You Do Not Have To Be Good by Madeleine Barnes

INCIDENT ON THE TRAM

The girl on the tram without a ticket
is forced off the car between stations.
The officer has different colored eyebrows.
He speaks harshly and spits at her shoes.

Seven hundred crowns, he says to her in English.
She shows him her wallet, five American dollars,
a medical card. A large yellow leaf is stuck
below her heel. When he twists her arm,

her shoes make no utterance. Two hundred
hours from now, four thousand miles overseas,
her mother will drop the phone. In three hundred hours,
the news will air. They will have found her clothes.

The tram doors open and he pulls her off.
The passengers stare in different directions
while the fields change color, full of testimonies.
Something about the way he struck her head

to wake her—did he have a badge? A pin drops.
The tram makes its way through the mountains.
She is walking at night on the path
beside the river. Cables shudder overhead,

making their secret violent connections,
her voice a wire so thin
it cannot be traced to a body.

This selection comes from the book, You Do Not Have To Be Good, available from Trio House Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Krista Cox.

 Madeleine Barnes is a poet, visual artist, Mellon Foundation Humanities Public Fellow, and English PhD student at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She serves as Poetry Editor at Cordella Magazine, a publication that showcases the work of women and non-binary writers and artists. Her debut poetry collection, You Do Not Have To Be Good, is forthcoming from Trio House Press in July 2020. She is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Women’s Work, forthcoming from Tolsun Books. She’s the recipient of two Academy of American Poets poetry prizes, the Princeton Poetry Prize, the Gertrude Gordon Journalism Prize, and the Three Rivers Review Poetry Prize. Visit her at madeleinebarnes.com.

For money, Krista Cox is a paralegal at an environmental and insurance coverage firm. For joy, she’s an Associate Poetry Editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection and Executive Director of Lit Literary Collective, a nonprofit serving her local literary community. She serves on the board of the Feminist Humanist Alliance. Her poetry has appeared in Columbia Journal, Crab Fat Magazine, The Humanist, and elsewhere. Her internet hangout is http://kristacox.me.

 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: You Do Not Have To Be Good by Madeleine Barnes

SURROUND her WITH COLORS

Step one: Andromeda. Step two: dark eyelashes.
Step three: adulthood with faint traces of childhood.
Stabilizer: On. Auto-focus: off. Love
how she touches you. Think: the stars are planning
the erasure of two-hundred-year-old silences,
so let her try to reach you. Step five: look at her
without expressing fear. Draw a tarot card
and let her tell you what it means.
Give her a crown of almonds and wet grass.
Frame something teal, something velvet,
something worthy. Give her a cathedral,
an amber glove, remix raspberry and neon.
Give her a lilac cube, enamored hi-shine,
avalanche of electric violet.
Cover her in changeable taffeta and ginger root.
Love her vices, her moss and copper.
Bring your relics. Step seven: sing.

This selection comes from the book, You Do Not Have To Be Good, available from Trio House Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Krista Cox.

 Madeleine Barnes is a poet, visual artist, Mellon Foundation Humanities Public Fellow, and English PhD student at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She serves as Poetry Editor at Cordella Magazine, a publication that showcases the work of women and non-binary writers and artists. Her debut poetry collection, You Do Not Have To Be Good, is forthcoming from Trio House Press in July 2020. She is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Women’s Work, forthcoming from Tolsun Books. She’s the recipient of two Academy of American Poets poetry prizes, the Princeton Poetry Prize, the Gertrude Gordon Journalism Prize, and the Three Rivers Review Poetry Prize. Visit her at madeleinebarnes.com.

For money, Krista Cox is a paralegal at an environmental and insurance coverage firm. For joy, she’s an Associate Poetry Editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection and Executive Director of Lit Literary Collective, a nonprofit serving her local literary community. She serves on the board of the Feminist Humanist Alliance. Her poetry has appeared in Columbia Journal, Crab Fat Magazine, The Humanist, and elsewhere. Her internet hangout is http://kristacox.me.

 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: You Do Not Have To Be Good by Madeleine Barnes

Forty Black Ships 

I was dressing her in armor for the war.
I guided her feet into bronze socks,

helped her step into netted yellow pants,
tied her shins with quilted grids of gold.

Crinet, grangaurd, shoulder plates.
It was almost time, but I didn’t know.

And when the nurse knocked I helped her
rise from the violet bed. And when I

dispatched her into the battlefield, I said:
take my spears and black-tipped arrows.

Run toward your mother, and her mother.
I will follow soon when I find the right plates

to cover my trembling breastbone.
I’ll come when I cannot see you anymore

but for now, my shield, my daggers,
forty black ships in the sea offshore.

I was sure that she could not hear me weeping
as I lowered the helmet over her curls
and kissed the heavy visor.

This selection comes from the book, You Do Not Have To Be Good, available from Trio House Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Krista Cox.

 Madeleine Barnes is a poet, visual artist, Mellon Foundation Humanities Public Fellow, and English PhD student at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She serves as Poetry Editor at Cordella Magazine, a publication that showcases the work of women and non-binary writers and artists. Her debut poetry collection, You Do Not Have To Be Good, is forthcoming from Trio House Press in July 2020. She is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Women’s Work, forthcoming from Tolsun Books. She’s the recipient of two Academy of American Poets poetry prizes, the Princeton Poetry Prize, the Gertrude Gordon Journalism Prize, and the Three Rivers Review Poetry Prize. Visit her at madeleinebarnes.com.

For money, Krista Cox is a paralegal at an environmental and insurance coverage firm. For joy, she’s an Associate Poetry Editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection and Executive Director of Lit Literary Collective, a nonprofit serving her local literary community. She serves on the board of the Feminist Humanist Alliance. Her poetry has appeared in Columbia Journal, Crab Fat Magazine, The Humanist, and elsewhere. Her internet hangout is http://kristacox.me.