M I C H E L L E
B A R K E R
Glimpsing the Stars Mini-Interview
TCE: Navigating with a sextant from Vancouver to Hawaii over the open Pacific is a mind-boggling accomplishment. Your introduction and the poems assembled here allude to that challenge, opening up its particularities to a universal human predicament. Were you writing poetry during the voyage or did poems come later after you’d safely arrived? MB: I took that sailing trip long before I became a poet, but the trip did usher in my first pieces of published writing. I wrote a travel article about the town of Hilo on the big island of Hawaii, and also a piece for an American sailing magazine called Cruising World about our journey across the Pacific Ocean. I really felt as if that trip somehow gave birth to my writing self. Perhaps the crossing was metaphoric as well as literal. TCE: Is there a sextant you use to navigate the path toward creating a poem? Or would you say the journey of your process is more like using a GPS system? MB: Interesting question. I would say the process of creating a poem is more like coastal navigation, where you have to take fixes off two distinct landmarks. Where they intersect, that's your location. My favorite poems have a way of connecting disparate images or ideas to produce a new way of seeing the world. Finding those distinct “landmarks” and making the connection — for me, that's the challenge of writing poetry. TCE: In “Cemetery of Possible Lives” you conclude, you’re “the person / I never intended / to become.” Was becoming a poet something you never intended, or is that one possible self you need not grieve? MB: Ha, no, I never intended to become a poet. In fact, I can clearly remember a conversation with a fellow swimmer at the University of Sherbrooke some years ago. He asked me what I did for a living and I said I was a writer. "Are you a poet?" he then asked. I laughed. "No, I could never write poetry." Which just goes to show you . . . never say never. Certainly, I do not regret becoming a poet. I would list it as one of the best things that ever happened to me. It changed the way I look at the world. TCE: You credit your piano teacher with introducing the star-rating system that endows and wends from your celestial metaphor throughout the chapbook; who or what else would you say influenced the creation of this group of poems? MB: Several of these poems come from a challenge I set for myself a few years ago to write a poem a day for an entire year. I didn't quite make it to 365 — it was more like 340, and some of the poems were admittedly awful. But what the process did was force me to look for poetry everywhere. When you have to come up with a new idea every day, your radar is always on. In particular, "One Hundred Rivers" came from a visit to the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver.
26