Barbra Nightingale

One of my favorite poems in your collection, Singing in the Key of L, is “Pedestals.” Is the “problem with sculptors” also a problem with poets when they over-revise a piece, or “blinded by the art” they polish away eccentricities that made the poem interesting in the first place? Yes, that is an underlying theme. Sometimes it is the imperfections that make something unique and even more loved. It is dangerous to want perfection, sometimes.

Along the same lines, Wallace Stevens once wrote, “To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.” Do you agree with Stevens? If yes, why do you think it is easier to discuss one method in terms of another?

Yes, I do agree, and the reason is that paintings are visual representations and what poets do, of course, is paint with words, thereby making their words very visual as well. The language of criticism in any media is often the same.

I enjoyed your collection, “Singing in the Key of L.” The poems are full of sensuous physical and sensory details, intelligence and a broad emotional range including humor, desire, and vulnerability. When you are working on a collection, how much does organization come into play, or do you intentionally place poems closer and farther apart so that the poems illuminate one another besides having their own revelations?

Actually, I am never working on a "collection." The collection comes after I gather the poems I've written. I just write. Then, in putting together a collection, I look for poems with commonalities, and not surprisingly, actually, I find there are quite a few. However, I have published 4 books now, and they are actually different. At least I think they are. There are some similarities, of course, but they are different enough to be different collections, not just divisions of the same. In organizing what I gather together, I look for how the poems compliment one another, how they look on the page across from one another, how one ends and another begins. I hope that they leave an echo which is picked up by each subsequent poem.

What are you working on now? How is your current work different from your collection “Singing in the Key of L”?

My newest manuscript is called The Geometry of Dreams. It is similar to Singing in that it explores a certain kind of language (Singing was musical); this one is mathematical, actually. It explores the relationships among us in both linear and non-linear ways.

I also have a collection called Sweet Insomnia, which is looking for a home, and that one consists of many of my Miranda poems, juxtaposed with "regular" poems on similar themes, so that it's like looking into a mirrored image.

Both of these are looking for a home.