In 2025, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Rick Barot discusses his curatorial approach and his own creative work.
Poets.org: Welcome to the Guest Editor Q&A, hosted by the Academy of American Poets. I’m Mary Sutton, editorial director at the Academy, and I’m here today with Rick Barot, our Guest Editor for the month of October. Rick is the author, most recently, of Moving the Bones. Rick, welcome and thank you for joining me today.
Rick Barot: It’s wonderful to be here, Mary. Thank you.
Poets.org: All right, let’s jump right in. How did you approach curating Poem-a-Day for October?
Barot: I had a box of chocolates vision for the poems this month. What I mean by that is that I wanted an indulgent and really varied gathering of poems for myself and for the Poem-a-Day community. And what this meant was reaching out to poets whose work I greatly love from a pure pleasure-seeking reader standpoint. And this included older poets I’ve admired for many years, emerging poets whose poems I’ve only recently become aware of, and also peers who have been alongside me in the thirty years I’ve been writing poems. I should also say that when I refer to pleasure, I don’t just mean the beauty a reader might find in a poem’s music or imagery or metaphor but also in the painful testimonies that poems can carry. So, in the twenty-plus poems that I chose, there’s a really amazing variety of testimonies that are being presented in those poems, things that have to do with the complicated struggles of the social and the political as well as the solace of everyday life.
Poets.org: Now, if you could direct readers to one poem or more than one poem in our archive at Poets.org that you haven’t curated, what would it be and why?
Barot: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the ekphrastic poem and its place during a time of brutal history, which is what we’re going through now. And this thinking keeps leading me to Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem “Facing It.” And the speaker of that poem is at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial made by Maya Lin in Washington, D.C. And Maya Lin’s memorial is this really exemplary piece of memorial art in that it’s gorgeous in its artfulness but also deeply mournful in its content, in the way it lists the veterans’ names. And I’ve been thinking that Komunyakaa’s poem operates in the same way, in that it’s exemplary in situating the reader in the aesthetic and also the ethical reckoning that poetry can invite the reader to have.
And I love that poem. It’s a poem that I’ve been reading and teaching for many years. And what’s especially beautiful to me about it is that there are all of these images of living beings’ present-day life: the woman brushing her son’s hair, the white veteran with one arm missing, and the speaker keeping his tears back. And all of that imagery of the living is juxtaposed with the really brutal permanence of that granite and the list of names of people who are dead.
Poets.org: We’re going to circle back a little bit later to that point that you make about ekphrasis, but for now, I‘d like to know what else you’re reading in your free time or whatever there is left of it.
Barot: [laughs] Well, I have been putting together a class on the prose poem because I’ve been writing prose poems myself. And so I’ve been revisiting the works that I love in the form, and it’s such a wide variety of works, from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons to Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s Rules of the House, and many more, including Killarney Clary’s Who Whispered Near Me; Oliver de la Paz’s Post Subject; Mark Strand’s Almost Invisible; and a great gem, Anne Carson’s Short Talks.
And mostly I’ve been asking how the prose poem is a poem when it doesn’t have the means of inflection that a lineated poem uses. I’m talking about lineation and line break and stanzas and regulated meter and rhythm, depending on the line and all of that. So this has also led me to asking how we define a poem in the first place; what makes a poem a poem when it can take on so many permutations. And, really, what I’ve come up with as a definition ... And it amazes me that I’ve been writing poems for thirty years, and my definition for the poem keeps changing over time. And these days I tend to think of the poem as something that captures, in a very concentrated way, a feeling of both intimacy and the cosmic, the very large and the very specific, and the time-bound and the timeless, which is certainly what Komunyakaa's poem is doing, the poem I mentioned earlier.
Poets.org: And what are you working on now in your writing, teaching, and publishing life?
Barot: So I’m teaching two undergraduate classes this semester: a poetry workshop and also a course on the theme of the Asian American experience. And I have to say that in these two classes, I feel like a pig in mud. I’m blissfully in my element. In the first week of the workshop, we looked at the work of Chen Chen and Margaret Walker; and in the last week, later this semester, we’ll look at Tommy Blount and Matthea Harvey. In between, we’ll read many other marvelous poets. In the Asian American experience course, we began with Beth Nguyen’s recent memoir, Owner of a Lonely Heart, and we’ll wrap up the semester with Jen Soriano’s nonfiction work, Nervous. Publishing-wise, I’m excited for the publication of my new chapbook, which is titled The Emperor of the Cut Sleeve, which Sixth Finch Books will publish this month in September.
The chapbook is part of a longer manuscript of prose poems that I recently completed, titled Shadow Machine. And I began Shadow Machine with a really strict directive for myself. I would write the poems in the span of just one calendar year, and the poems would be what I call a lyric documentary of what would happen during that year. Now, I didn’t know that the year would turn out to be so full of deeply consequential experiences in my life: the end of a relationship, the blossoming of another one, the death of my father, and so much of the ordinary everyday besides. So the book tries to capture all of that.
And lastly, in my work as a writer, I’m in a quiet period right now. I’m not working on anything that’s intended for any eventual reader. Instead, I’m just spending a lot of time each day in my journal, writing about the minutiae of the everyday, my own thinking and also my reading. Because I’m in this journaling space, I’ve been reading and rereading the journals of others and finding really great company in their solitude. I’m talking about Virginia Woolf’s diaries, Helen Garner’s collected diaries and [sic] How to End a Story. And also James Schuyler’s diary, which has this really amazing entry, and I’m quoting here, “Another day, another dolor.”
Poets.org: That is a good line. Circling back a little bit to that poetry workshop for which you’re preparing, I’m very curious about your choice to juxtapose Margaret Walker and Chen Chen in the first week. As many in our audience will know, Margaret Walker was also a highly lauded novelist, particularly known for the fictionalized account of her family, Jubilee, a book that I love personally. So why Margaret Walker and Chen Chen in that
first—
Barot: That’s a great question. So during that first week or so, there are two values that I foreground to the students in regards to what our class will be about. One of those values is risk, and the other one is what I call “formal ingenuity.” And the poems that I teach by Chen Chen and Margaret Walker are really, to me, exemplifying the sense of boldness and directness and also just passion that poetry can display and really kind of putting yourself and your ideas on the line. And so those two poets, I think, are really illustrating that. But also their sense of form is so varied and beautiful and inventive and creative. So I think those two poets are in a way setting a certain kind of standard, but also inspiration for my students. And that’s why I teach them during that first week.
Poets.org: Fantastic. I love Margaret Walker’s “For My People,” which is on Poets.org, for anyone who is curious. I promised to circle back to the point you made earlier about ekphrasis. I’m going to do that now. In your poem, “Cross-Hatch 1,” from your latest collection, Moving the Bones, you make an allusion to what I believe is a painting by Jasper Johns, yes?
Barot: Mm-hmm.
Poets.org: And in one line in that poem you write, “The ekphrastic act is a catalyst for observation, association, and dream. It is like the flaneur’s arc of walking, seeing, and reverie.” You mentioned journaling a little bit earlier too, and perhaps both journaling and the act of writing the ekphrastic poem serve similar purposes in offering opportunities to pause and pay attention and develop greater awareness, both of self and of our responses to what exists outside of us. You mentioned earlier the poem is about both the intimate and the cosmic. So do you feel like when you’re journaling, you’re doing something similar to what you’re doing in an ekphrastic poem, or do they bear stark differences in some ways in your purpose?
Barot: I don’t know that my journaling practice is that elevated because the journaling is really just about recording the day’s tea. Poetry I think has a different ... It’s doing something different when it’s in that ekphrastic mode. It’s a more concentrated sort of attempt at understanding what is in front of you, but also what is within you. The poem that I always point to when I talk about a kind of exemplary ekphrastic act is the very famous poem by Rilke, “The Archaic Torso of Apollo.” And it’s this beautiful sonnet that starts with an objective description of this piece of sculpture, this beautiful piece of sculpture. And as the description moves forward, it begins to take on more subjectivity in terms of the metaphors that are applied to the work of art. And then as many of you know, the ending of that poem is, “You must change your life.”
And so that arc from the direct objective reckoning that eventually [leads] to an illumination about something within the self, that to me is what I think the arc of the ekphrastic usually is, that it begins with an exterior catalyst that leads into an understanding about who you are and what your place is looking at that thing that you’re looking at. So I suppose the journal is also a little bit like that in the sense that it does begin with talking about the day’s tea, but sometimes there’s deep reflection happening there as well about the larger things that contextualize the everyday because these larger things are often really terrible. So that ends up in the journal as well.
Poets.org: This was great. Thank you so much for your observations, Rick, and for this stellar curation in October. We’re excited to share it.
Barot: Thank you so much for the wonderful questions, Mary.