Joan Baranow founded and teaches in Dominican University of CA’s Low-Residency MFA program in creative writing. Her poetry has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Paris Review, JAMA, Feminist Studies, Spillway, and other magazines. Her poetry has also appeared in anthologies that focus on writing and healing: Women Write Their Bodies: Stories of Illness and Recovery (Kent State, 2007) and The Art of Medicine in Metaphors (Copernicus Healthcare, 2012). She has published six books of poetry, most recently Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague (Brick Road Press, 2023). A Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and long-time member of the Community of Writers, she has won individual artists fellowships in poetry from the Marin Arts Council and from the Ohio Arts Council. With her husband, physician and poet David Watts, she produced the PBS documentary Healing Words: Poetry & Medicine. Her second documentary, The Time We Have, presents an intimate portrait of a young woman facing terminal illness.
Joan Baranow’s Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague is imbued with an elegiac sense of displacement wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, of aging, illness, and death, and of the speaker’s role as a teacher, mother, and wife. “There’s no funeral for the death / of an idea / no matter how loved / or for the loss / of something made / and discarded–” Baranow memorializes “a kid’s painting/ a knit hat, / an academic program,” climbing a tree at fifty, visiting a childhood friend who “never did learn to read.” Her poetry brings us close to suffering at the end of life and of letting go. In “Wreckage,” she writes in honor of her late mother, “as her lungs flooded and she sank / down on that bed that settles all of us.” It is tender and generous; even in imagining advice from a moth, she writes, “Don’t let light fool you.”
Tiffany Troy: How does “Traveling in Tiger Rain” set up what is to follow? To me, the placement of the speaker behind “the pretty curtain / bought on budget from World Market” teaches me that the preoccupation of the speaker is to maintain a connection with the “world” “out there” even as she is consumed by ekphrasis. This tension features prominently as you dwell on what it means to live under Covid, to age, to be in pain, as a blondie cat lady who hugs trees, accepts late assignments, and traps rats, and who came of age among women “with their nailed shut concepts / about Nature, et. al.”
Joan Baranow: That’s a great question. When putting the book together, I wanted to signal its theme to the reader right from the start–that I, along with most everyone else, was confined at home during those early months of the pandemic. California was under a shelter in place order, so I spent a lot of time around the house, looking out the window. I happened to be in my bedroom when I started writing “Traveling in Tiger Rain,” and the Hiroshige print hanging on the wall seemed to capture the mood of the country. The print, Tora’s Rain at Ōiso, shows a rain shower with a few people hunched over as they make their way towards a village. We were all “getting through it” at the time. I also wanted to convey a sense of displacement from normal life that the pandemic brought and how art can weirdly function in the same way, taking you to another time and place.
TT: Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague frames the poems in the collection as “pandemic poems” and certainly we see that in “Measuring the Oak” and “Business as Usual on Zoom.” But the poems also feel much more capacious than that, and so maybe the idea of “plague” and the idea of entering into another world (whether visual arts or books). Can you speak of the process of writing and putting together this collection? I am curious about how the pandemic presents for you specific challenges which are different from writing your other collections.
JB: The pandemic happened to coincide with a year-long sabbatical from teaching, when I was expected to write new poems. So I had an unusual expanse of time, both literally and figuratively–literal in the sense of having time itself to stay home and write about events that we were all, in some way or another, going through, and figurative in the way that the expansiveness opened up a new form for me. I don’t think I would have been able to write the long lines of “Summer Ghazals” or “First Woman” without the gift of time that let my mind wander, uninterrupted. I was also reading a lot and owe the ghazals to Galway Kinnell’s “Sheffield Ghazals” in his book Imperfect Thirst. Reading poetry is what gets me writing poetry; it’s my primary source of inspiration.
With the exception of “Prayer,” the poems in the third section date back over many years. Several of them are elegies, which seemed to fit the feel of the book. I wanted the last section to move away from the pandemic into other occasions of loss. But I also arranged them so that the book would move towards celebration and hope.
TT: Speaking of poetic forms, what does the writing process look like during your year-long sabbatical versus before the pandemic? Do your poems typically find its form or do you set out to write in a received form?
JB: I rarely write in a received form, though I like and admire formal poems, especially when the form is somewhat hidden. There’s a wonderful tension that gets created when a poet wrestles with a recognizable form. James Merrill’s rhyme schemes in A Scattering of Salt, for instance, are just brilliant. Terrence Hayes’ American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin is a fabulous reinvention of the sonnet. Same goes for Diane Seuss’ poems in frank: sonnets, which is an even looser interpretation of the form. The reader gets to experience the energy that comes from a prose line pushing against the compactness of the sonnet.
My own poems tend to find their own form and I’m not very experimental, though sometimes I’ll try something new. My poems “These Days” and “Built-in Obsolescence” had originally had the usual left margin and were fairly static until I saw some poems by Linda Gregerson with her three line stanzas flowing in and out and I thought they looked so elegant yet natural at the same time. I tried it out and saw that they gave my poems the air they needed. Now that I’m thinking of this, I should experiment more with form!
TT: I agree that the three-line stanzas flowing in and out have this elegance and naturalness to it, in both “These Days” and “Built-in Obsolescence.” And isn’t it wonderful that we can always think of ways to experiment with form?
I, for one, am often so engrossed in the stories that you are telling and the puns that you throw at us (“teach in a cloud,” “It’s hard to unmute for the joke”) that I’m wondering if you could tell us about how the motifs of teaching, healing, and womanhood prefigure in your collection. I’m thinking, in particular of “Archeology,” “Clearing the Square” and “A Stranger’s Comfort.”
JB: It’s interesting that you mention these three poems, as they are really different from each other and reflect different realms of life. But now thinking about them, I can see they are all forms of protest. “Archeology” is a sort of rant, disguised as an imagistic poem. When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, feminist literary criticism was at its height, and some of the theories we studied have become, in retrospect, fairly ridiculous. At least, that’s my opinion. “Clearing the Square” is a response to the incident in Buffalo, NY, when several police officers pushed a peace activist, who fell back and hit his head on the concrete sidewalk. He was unconscious and bleeding from his head and obviously needed immediate medical attention, yet when one of the officers paused, possibly to help, another officer wouldn’t let him. The attack reminded me of the Biblical story of Lot’s wife who, out of human feeling, looked back on her burning village, only to be turned to salt by a punishing god. “A Stranger’s Comfort” came from watching an impatient mother who couldn’t get her toddler son to take medicine. We were all at a gathering at a friend’s house–not the best occasion to get a fearful child to swallow medicine. My husband is a doctor and a caring person, so even though he was a stranger to the boy, he was able to calm him down and succeed in giving him the dose.
With regard to poems about teaching, I’ve written only a few, but during the pandemic, when we were all trying to teach online, the experience was so novel and normal communication was so disrupted that I felt moved to write about what was happening. I guess those are protest poems as well!
TT: In “Getting Up There,” you write, “Climbing a tree / can’t be easy / when you’re fifty.” In “Family Photo,” you write, “The past is gone, it’s not a noun / or verb, not a stalled car, / not a locomotive on weedy tracks.” Do you feel the same when you write–or does writing provide a possibility to have the tree say “Whoa, Nelly!” and contemplate upon the past? Do you have any tips for poets who are writing about family, memories, and change?
JB: I have such a terrible memory about my life! Ask me to memorize a poem, no problem, but I can’t remember much about anything I said or did in the past. I tend to write about what’s currently going on in my life and envy people who have good memories. The great Southern writer Eudora Welty was once asked what she treasured most as a writer, and she said “memory.” That’s especially important for a fiction writer and of course for a memorist. There are poets who draw beautifully from their past, even when it’s painful–I’m thinking of Sharon Olds and Ruth Stone. And there are poets like Joy Harjo, whose writing about the past reaches back into ancestry.
As for tips, keeping a journal is probably the best way to preserve your past. It will serve as a resource for your creative projects.
TT: In closing, do you have any closing thoughts you’d like to share with your readers of the world?
JB: Although our government gives little support for the arts, we really live in a golden age of literature. For the past couple hundred years, the populace has become more literate, literature itself more diverse, and now the internet offers a platform for all kinds of writers and poets. The writing scene is fabulously invitational. We’re very lucky to be writing–and reading–at this time.
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and co-translator of Santiago Acosta’s The Coming Desert /El próximo desierto (forthcoming, Alliteration Publishing House), in collaboration with Acosta and the 4W International Women Collective Translation Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, and Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote. She co-edits Matter with Darius Phelps.