Barbara Crooker is the author of nine books of poetry, including Les Fauves, The Book of Kells, and most recently, Some Glad Morning, published this year by University of Pittsburgh Press. Her work is wide-ranging, touching on subjects as diverse as spirituality, gardening, and domestic life, and she is a master of the ekphrastic poem, often exploring different painters in each of her books.

She is interviewed here by poet James Crews.

James Crews: One of the poems from your new collection that stood out to me the most was “Practicing Mindfulness.” You’ve also had poems appear in Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, and in magazines like Christian Century. Would you consider yourself a spiritual writer? Did you have a strong religious upbringing as a child, and has that changed over the years?

Barbara Crooker: I do consider myself a spiritual writer, and that would be, perhaps, in opposition to a religious one, which, for me, has the connotations of rules, narrowness, walls. Whereas my definition of “spiritual writer” means openness, mindfulness, inclusion. One of my favorite writing trips involved travelling to upstate New York (where I used to live), doing a reading, then going to Mass at a monastery with my Catholic friends,  staying on to participate in a Seder with my Jewish friends. It’s difficult for me to use the term “Christian writer,” even though I’m a practicing one (albeit with Eastern tendencies), because of the way this term is currently linked to right-wing politics, whose policies are in direct opposition to everything Jesus ever said. I’d love to share a poem from Les Fauves (C&R Press, 2017) that relates to what we’re discussing:

WALKING WITH JESUS

 in the Blue Ridge Mountains, eating corn fritters
and okra, passing the black-eyed peas. He loves
redbirds and kudzu, all that green tenaciousness.
He’s not so much of a fan of men in white sheets,
gun racks, the Stars and Bars, but he’s Jesus, so
he loves them anyway. The gospel of football
eludes him, but he sure likes to tailgate. He tells
me that all the commandments are really
about sitting with your neighbors on a wide
front porch, eating peach pie, watching the sun
go down. Why are you still going on about sin
and salvation, he asks me, when you have all this,
right here, right now?

JC: I notice that so much of your poetry, even when it’s focused on what’s wrong with the world, turns right back toward praise and gratitude. I often think back to your poem, “Praise Song” (from your book Radiance) which was written after 9/11, and ends with these lines: “Though darkness gathers, praise our crazy/ fallen world; it’s all we have, and it’s never enough.” Do you find connections between your creative practice and your own spirituality?

BC: Actually, I don’t see a difference between my creative practice and my spirituality; it’s all cut from the same cloth.  I’m not doing any of this consciously when I write (I try to hold the reins loosely, and let the poem lead the way), and I’ll tell you it’s getting harder right now as the world situation grows darker. But look out the window! See the way the sunlight is falling lavishly on the dead lawn, the dry leaves, the bare trees (it’s late November). How can we not be down on our knees, surrounded with such beauty?

Praise Song

Praise the light of late November,
the thin sunlight that goes deep in the bones.
Praise the crows chattering in the oak trees;
though they are clothed in night, they do not
despair. Praise what little there’s left:
the small boats of milkweed pods, husks, hulls,
shells, the architecture of trees. Praise the meadow
of dried weeds: yarrow, goldenrod, chicory,
the remains of summer. Praise the blue sky
that hasn’t cracked yet. Praise the sun slipping down
behind the beechnuts, praise the quilt of leaves
that covers the grass: Scarlet Oak, Sweet Gum,
Sugar Maple. Though darkness gathers, praise our crazy
fallen world; it’s all we have, and it’s never enough.

JC: Another favorite poem of mine in Some Glad Morning is “Fifteen Bean Soup,” which also unfolds as a poem of exuberant praise. Can you speak to how this poem came to you? What’s your process for writing your poems: are you an endless reviser, or do some of these pieces come out fully formed, needing only a few changes here and there? I know you’ve said in other contexts that you’re a “slow writer,” and I wonder if you carry a poem for days, weeks, months or even years before it comes fully into being.

BC: And the answer is. . . .both! My normal process is to start with notes, then “progress” to truly awful prose, and to be patient and wait until some lines that might resemble a poem start to form, whether this is via image, music, one good line. . . .  Once I have something to grab onto, I try to let the poem organically progress from that point, going through a fair number of hand written drafts (someone just asked me how the digital revolution changed my work, and I had to gently tell her, “Um, I’m still writing with a pen. Head to heart to hand; that’s my motto.”) before I type it up. Sometimes, when I poem seems “stuck,” I try and re-write it from memory, which seems to let the better parts float up to the surface. And then I might do 5-10 more drafts once it’s typed. But then. . . .there are the days when lightning strikes, and a poem comes and taps me on the shoulder, almost finished.  I say thank you, and call those a gift. So I have poems that pretty much just arrived and poems that have taken years and years. It’s all a mystery.

Fifteen Bean Soup

I want to thank this pot for its art
of containment, the stove for its gentle
heat.  Thank you to the beans, all fifteen
of you, for your transformation from stony
pebbles into nuggets of deliciousness, regaining
your original forms:  large & small limas, lentils,
navy beans, pintos, yellow-eyed beans, red & white
kidneys, black beans, garbanzos, cranberry beans,
small white & pink beans, green & yellow split peas.
And thank you to the onions, for your bite and snap;
tomatoes, chili powder, garlic, lemon juice—what
you add is undetectable, but if you’re omitted,
all is lost.  A word of applause, gnarly ham hocks,
for coming apart in the bubble and boil,
for lending your parts for the good of the whole.
And thank you, thank you, stoneware bowls—
without your help, this dinner wouldn’t be possible.
Have I forgotten anyone?  The farmer who sowed
the crops, the rancher who raised the pigs, the grocery
store that carried their wares.  Finally—and yes, I hear
the orchestra music, know my time is coming to a close—
let me thank the housewife, lost in history, who figured
out this recipe, the proportions, who added in the harmony,
the way the notes combined, the blend, the music, the mastery.