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Rick Barot - Want
Interview
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You use the Echo and Narcissus story as inspiration throughout your collection—why was this your choice?
When I started writing the poems for this book, I knew I wanted to write a book of love poems. A year into the project, I read Ovid’s Metamorphosis and was swept away by the story of Echo. She seemed the perfect image of love: she could only be completed by the other, she was also effaced by her encounter with the other. Her story seemed to me the exact figure for the gain-and-loss proposition that passionate love presents. The premise of her story, and her emotions, validated the themes I had only intuited up till then. She gave me a sense of the archetype behind the poems I was writing.
Your collection is rife with salutes to writers from a range of time periods: Petrarch, Heraclitus,William James,Wallace Stevens, Antonio Porchia, Kafka, Emerson, and Samual Beckett. Can you discuss some of these writers and the influence they have on your work?
Writers read. Not so much because they want to be learned, but because other writers seem to offer a response to the work you’re doing. Even a writer who wrote from a wholly other era, writing about subjects almost alien to you, converses with your own rhythm as a writer—along with, of course, your rhythm as a human. Stevens is always an influence on me: his cold eye, his sinuous syntax. I love Heraclitus and Porchia for their epigrammatic precision, their visionary wisdom boiled down to linguistic karats. Porchia has a maxim for virtually every calibration of the soul. He’s even got an answer for your question: “He who does not fill his world with phantoms remains alone.”
How does this collection differ from your last? You described your last book, The Darker Fall, as non-autobiographical. Would you say the same about this collection?
The Darker Fall seemed to me a book about seeing, whereas Want seems to me a book about telling. There are more explicit narratives here, where in the previous book there were exercises in imagery. There are big patches of autobiography in various poems in Want, but these have their place among the narratives of other figures, whether real or fictive. I like the idea of the poems in Want as being in a mode of open disguise. They are invested in fully disclosing, even as other forces complicate each attempt at testimony. Art always gets in the way of what one wants to say, and that’s a good thing, isn’t it?
In “West 16th Street” you write “You stand / by the shoreline on another coast, and to me this / may be the form of perfect wanting, the logic / of the heart unsatisfied.” Water, in oceans, springs, and pools of rain, appears throughout the collection as a form of separation and absence. How do these references help define “want” as used in the title of your collection?
I hadn’t noticed there was so much water imagery in the poems, and so it’s strange to have it pointed out. Whether the pervasive presence of water has to do with separation or loss, maybe so. It’s nice to think of water—in its various forms as ice, liquid, vapor—as a metaphor for the varieties of loss one faces in life. But not just loss, also peace and regeneration. Larkin has that poem where he says that if he ever has to construct a religion, water would be an element in the religion. He gives an image of a glass of water where light would “congregate endlessly.”
In the first three sections of the poem, “Like a Fire that Consumes All Before it,” you write about the flood of 1992 in Ormoc City, Philippines. How did you learn about this event?
Because of heavy and illegal deforestation, a mountain gave way near Ormoc City after a long period of heavy rain, killing thousands. I spent the first ten years of my life in Ormoc, which is why the story—which at the time received world-wide news coverage—meant something to me. A few people who read the poem in a magazine wondered if I had been writing about the Katrina disaster, but no, I wrote the poem a few years before that. It’s interesting, though, how the elements of disaster have their own archetypal recurrence through time.
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