Rick Barot: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

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A Poem as Long as California

 

 This is my pastoral: the used car lot

where someone read Song of Myself over the loudspeaker

 

all that afternoon, to customers who walked among the cars

mostly absent to what they heard,

 

except for the one or two who looked up

into the air, as though they recognized the reckless phrases

 

hovering there with the colored streamers,

their faces suddenly loose with a dreamy attention.

 

This is also my pastoral: once a week,

in the apartment above, the prayer group that would chant

 

for a sustained hour.  I never saw them,

I didn’t know the words they sang, but I could feel

 

my breath running heavy or light

as the hour’s abstract narrative unfolded, rising and falling

 

like cicadas, sometimes changing in abrupt

turns of speed, as though a new cantor had taken the lead.

 

And this, too, is my pastoral: reading in my car

in the supermarket parking lot, reading the Spicer poem

 

where he wants to write a poem as long

as California.  It was cold in the car, then it was too dark.

 

Why had I been so forlorn, when there was so much

just beyond, leaning into life?  Even the cart

 

humped on a concrete island, the left-behind grapefruit

in the basket like a lost green sun.

 

And this is my pastoral: reading again and again

the paragraph in the novel by DeLillo where the family eats

 

the take-out fried chicken in their car,

not talking, trading the parts of the meal among themselves

 

in a primal choreography, a softly single consciousness,

while outside, everything stumbled apart,

 

the grim world pastoralizing their heavy coats,

the car’s windows, their breath and hands, the grease.

 

If, by pastoral, we mean a kind of peace,

this is my pastoral: walking up Grand Avenue, down 6th

 

Avenue, up Charing Cross Road, down Canal,

then up Valencia, all the way back to Agua Dulce Street,

 

the street of my childhood, terrifying with roaring trucks

and stray dogs, but whose cold sweetness

 

flowed night and day from the artesian well at the corner,

where the poor got their water.  And this is

 

also my pastoral: in 1502, when Albrecht Dürer painted

the young hare, he painted into its eye

 

the window of his studio.  The hare is the color

of a winter meadow, brown and gold, each strand of fur

 

like a slip of grass holding an exact amount

of the season’s voltage.  And the window within the eye,

 

which you don’t see until you see, is white as a winter sky,

though you know it is joy that is held there.

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Rick Barot’s most recent book of poems is Moving the Bones, published by Milkweed Editions in 2024.  His previous collection, The Galleons, was longlisted for the National Book Award.  He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Stanford University.  He lives in Tacoma, Washington and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University. [Author photo by Rachel McCauley.}

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Jack Spicer, second from left, with members of the staff of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State College in 1957: Ida Hodes, Ruth Witt-Diamant, and Robert Duncan. Photo by Harry Redl. 

Comments

[Jody Payne]

Marvelous

[lally]

a brilliant poem, worthy of whitman and spicer

[Abbie Mulvihill]

What a remarkable poem! I love all the references. I also really appreciate the images you included, Terry.

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Abbie. Glad you liked it.

[Sr. Leslie]

Beautiful!…What a breath of fresh air…another keeper…Thank you Terence and thank you Rick…

[Cleo]

So rich and lovely.

[Grace Cavalieri]

If ever poetry were connected to Source.

[Don Berger]

This poem treats us to a bunch of things we'd never experience without first reading Barot's words about what he's come across, classified and interpreted. I love the structure, first an uncanny, striking, original pastoral and then the scene (small story) growing out of each. Hooray for Rick's memory, ear, and genius, and for Terence's wisdom and energy in finding and placing this where we can all be thrilled by it.

[Alan Bernheimer]

A pleasure to read this (in a time when any pleasure is a treasure).

[s campbell]

Remarkable!

[Eileen Reich]

A lovely poem. This is definitely a keeper. The photo and painting of the hare add to the enjoyment of this poem.

[Charlene M Auer]

I loved it! It became my pastoral this afternoon! I keep rereading it…

[Phyllis Rosenzweig]

I had never looked that closely in the rabbit's eye. Small miracles. Thank you.

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Leslie. Happy you liked it.

[Terence Winch]

Thank you, Prof. Berger.

[Terence Winch]

Charlene---thanks for commenting!

[Anne Harding Woodworth]

Barot doesn’t have to write another poem as long as he lives, though I’m sure that won’t be the case. And I hope it won’t be. He has said it all in his beautiful pastorals. What I would give to be in a used car lot and hear Walt Whitman.

[Clarinda]

I quite literally felt my hair standing on end reading this superb poem. It speaks to me as a city girl whose recalled pastorals include streetcars rumbling on tracks up and down St. Paul st, butter brickle ice cream cones in the back seat of my step grandfather’s old deSoto

[Thomas Davis]

As you know, Terence, I love longer poems, and this is an absolute gem of a work.

[Terence Winch]

Tom!  Nice to hear from you.