{"id":136,"date":"2016-05-06T16:17:25","date_gmt":"2016-05-06T16:17:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooncityreview.com\/?p=136"},"modified":"2016-05-06T16:17:25","modified_gmt":"2016-05-06T16:17:25","slug":"one-blackbird-at-a-time-by-wendy-barker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mooncityreview.com\/?p=136","title":{"rendered":"One Blackbird at a Time by Wendy Barker"},"content":{"rendered":"

One Blackbird at a Time <\/em>by Wendy Barker. Kansas City: BkMk Press, 2015. 78 pages. $13.95, paper.<\/p>\n

In this collection, Wendy Barker takes us on a journey through eyes of a teacher, exploring all the complexities of what it means to simultaneously be a poet, educator, woman, and bibliophile. Each poem presents a speaker who filters her world through the work of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and many, many more. The literary worlds of the page and of the past imprint on the speaker\u2019s world of today, not just in the classroom but also in the seemingly mundane tasks of everyday life.<\/p>\n

In \u201cBooks, Bath Towels, and Beyond,\u201d the speaker reflects on teaching \u201cSong of Myself\u201d and the ambivalence it brings:<\/p>\n

[T]his time\u2014not even Gary\u2014grumbled about
\nWhitman\u2019s disgusting ego, and yet when we came to
\nthe place
\nwhere God is a \u201cloving bedfellow\u201d
\nwho leaves \u201cbaskets covered with white towels
\nbulging the house with their plenty,\u201d I was the one
\nwho
\nwanted to stop.<\/p>\n

The speaker continues to ponder how towels could be like a god. A lover, yes, the speaker asserts. But a god? It is not until the speaker traipses from classroom to the cleaning sprees of her mother, to Hawthorne\u2019s Phoebe, to divorce, and finally to a new marriage and home, that she is led to the department store to buy towels. There, standing in line to pay, the image of Whitman returns:<\/p>\n

And as I
\npulled out my MasterCard to pay for the contents
\nof my brimming cart, a gaunt, wizen man entered
\nthe check-out line, hands pressing
\nto his chest two white towels just like mine,
\neyes lifted to the ceiling as if in prayer. I doubt that
\nGary
\nwould think it normal to greet the divine
\nwhile clutching terry cloth. But now I see
\nthat Whitman knew what fresh towels could mean
\nfor a dazed
\nand puffy face, white towels unspeckled by blood
\nor errant coils of hair, towels that spill from a basket
\nlike sea-foam.<\/p>\n

This poem, like the rest in Barker\u2019s collection, details how for the lover of literature, not just the teacher, that poetry and the novel do not separate from life. As the speaker remarks in \u201cRereading The Golden Bowl<\/em>,\u201d \u201cWe live our lives through objects.\u201d The poem or the book always begins as physical object\u2014something to be picked up, handled, and consumed\u2014but yet it is more. Barker\u2019s collection flirts with some elements of magical contagion, that everything we\u2019ve come in contact with in the past will stay with us in some form or fashion for the rest of our lives. For the speaker, poems express our being and our very being expresses poems. This is concept eloquently arises aptly in the homage to Bishop in \u201cAbout That \u2018One Art\u2019\u201d:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It\u2019s a perfect poem, I say, and though no one
\nin the class is over twenty-five,
\neverybody
\nnods. They\u2019ve all lost: the Madame
\nAlexander doll fallen into the toilet, silky
\nhair never the same, the friend who
\nmoved away to Dallas, a brother once
\nagain
\nin juvie.<\/p>\n

The speaker continues to list what has been lost over the years: photo albums, people, breasts and husbands to cancer, etc. The poem concludes as she asks the class why Bishop wrote the poem as a villanelle:<\/p>\n

\u2026 [S]o we
\nparse the form, say how such echoing
\nslows us, keeps us focused on each single
\ndisappearance, so at first we hear lightheartedness,
\na witty irony\u2014but then the sounds grow
\nvaster, catch us off guard. And quicken.<\/p>\n

This collection is not simply about teaching literature: it is about living literature. The words come from the lives we live, and as we live it is the words that keep coming back to us. Every poem in Barker\u2019s collection exemplifies the inherent connectivity and the art of all the loves and losses that arise. One Blackbird at a Time<\/em> is a map of influence, a capsule of memories, a personal canon, and love letter. You would be remiss not to take the tour.<\/p>\n

\u2014Trista Edwards, University of North Texas<\/em><\/p>\n

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One Blackbird at a Time by Wendy Barker. Kansas City: BkMk Press, 2015. 78 pages. $13.95, paper. In this collection, Wendy Barker takes us on a journey through eyes of a teacher, exploring all the complexities of what it means to simultaneously be a poet, educator, woman, and bibliophile. Each poem presents a speaker who … Continue reading One Blackbird at a Time by Wendy Barker<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mooncityreview.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mooncityreview.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mooncityreview.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mooncityreview.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mooncityreview.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.mooncityreview.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":139,"href":"http:\/\/www.mooncityreview.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions\/139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mooncityreview.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mooncityreview.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mooncityreview.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}