COLEMAN BARKS__________________________________________________

Coleman Barks was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but he has made his home in Georgia for more than forty years. For three decades, until his retirement in 1997, Barks taught poetry and creative writing at the University of Georgia in Athens, where he still lives, writes, and operates Maypop Press.
        Barks’s first poetry collection, The Juice, was published in 1972—the same year as his initial appearance in The Georgia Review. Just a few years later, Robert Bly introduced Barks to the thirteenth-century Islamic poet and Sufi mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi, and the rest is a prominent piece of literary history: thanks to such volumes as The Essential Rumi (1995), Rumi: The Book of Love (2003), and Rumi: Bridge to the Soul (2007), Barks has garnered world renown as Rumi’s foremost translator.
        In recent years, however, Barks has returned more and more to his own writing—a return importantly marked by the publication of Winter Sky: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2008 (University of Georgia Press). Barks’s study of Near Eastern mysticism informs his interpretations of the life and landscape of the southern United States. For instance, in “My Segment on the NewsHour” in the Summer 2010 issue of The Georgia Review, he parses some language from the Bible and determines that

The holiest thing then, the kingdom, is inside—
the observing consciousness, the deep core of being—
and outside, in the brown thrasher, the little girl skipping…

The poet then resolves that “It would be best here to start singing, and dancing.” Indeed, anyone who has had the good fortune of hearing Barks read—either his own poems or Rumi translations—knows that the sine qua non of his aesthetic is the dancing and singing of language through the human voice, as it attempts to bridge the interior mysteries of the (feeling and thinking) human body and the “unlimited” mysteries of the universe outside.
        In his twelve poems published in The Georgia Review since 1972, Barks’s subjects are predominantly grief, love, and the particular commonplace joys of the everyday. Especially in his most recent works, Barks’s diction is colloquial—close to ordinary speech and to his audience—so that his language becomes “poetic” through its intimacy. “You whisper into me,” he says in “In the Woods, You and I” (Spring 1979), inviting us to see language literally leave one body and enter another.
        Such intimacy, or heightening-by-proximity—how a rock is invisible from an airplane but heavy and large in the palm of one’s hand—is Barks’s medium as well as his subject. Thus, we can see, hear, and feel an essential collaboration of form and content in the dream he describes in “Fivepoints” (Spring 1982):

In the flowing river up to our necks
we accidentally brush against each other sometimes,

and in the touch the glittery sparkles
flake off our arms and hands, wherever we touch,

and the strong, clear light gets exchanged,
merging in the two touchers.

Barks’s touch is touch; each line, with the effortlessness of accident, becomes a point of contact joining the speaker, the reader, and the world.
        In “Currycombing” (Fall 1994), a woman grooms a stallion and in doing so communicates with him: “He is her doorway,” Barks writes, “where what is touched // flames and consciously mirrors back, a conversation / of leg and groin to along and down.” But a conversation is also occurring between the woman and some deeper reaches of her interior kingdom, like “the whoooing exchange / the dervishes call sohbet, one step above / meditation, which is a step up from prayer.”
        Barks implores the reader to take up her own currycomb and “Feel / the layered pack alive beneath the words— // field, faces, hue, tone, chip, grain— / the twitch of overlapping melody / as you and your animal are talking.”
        We can recognize the poet’s currycomb at work here, teasing out and untangling. However, the seeming ease of this “conversation”—confessional and confident, sidelong and straight-on, spoken to an audience and to the self—belies its eventual resolution in a moment of deep clarity.  Talking is also central to “Inbetween Deaths” (Winter 2008), where Barks says of his own work that he now prefers “writing this wandering” to pursuing that of Rumi:

I more enjoy scooting about like a zigzag
waterbug above the motionless Chinese goldfish
hung in the living jade of a shadow from where
one of them may, one will, suddenly twitch
and gobble me out of this talking any second.

        Barks reminds his readers that the delicate touch, dance, and wandering song of “talking” is life itself. He admits that communication is a risk, but says it is also the energy that fuels poetry and connects us all.

                                                                                                                       Ida Stewart