Image by Lily Stone
Barbara Siegel Carlson is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Current published by Lily Poetry Review Books, 2026. Her previous books are What Drifted Here, Once in Every Language, and Fire Road. She is the co-translator (with Ana Jelnikar) of Look Back, Look Ahead, Selected Poems of Srečko Kosovel. Her poetry and translations have appeared in On the Seawall, Verse Daily, Mid-American Review, Salamander, 2River, The Poetry Porch and other journals. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Carlson is a Poetry in Translation Editor of Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices. She lives in Carver, Massachusetts.
Kristina Marie Darling: What are three things you’d like readers to know about your new book, Current, which just launched from Lily Poetry Review Books?
Barbara Siegel Carlson: I’d like readers to know these poems invite the reader to come with a quieted and open mind to experience each one on its own terms. A poem may start with an image I’m struck by or something that has happened that stirs or disturbs me. I have to write my way through to discovering something, trust the language will somehow lead to the heart and soul of the matter. I intuit my way through words that embody what is physical—that is, through the images that reveal themselves slowly to help me see what else they connect to, something larger. I often feel like the spider in Whitman’s poem casting out my threads, hoping they’ll catch to form bridges to deepened perception and awareness that others may see. Each poem then creates a current of something that hopefully moves the reader to see in a new way.
KMD: Many of your poems move between the personal and the historical, often within a single breath. How do you approach balancing intimate experience with collective memory in your work?
BC: When I get inspired, I jot down the words pretty quickly freely associating and without censoring anything. I almost go into a trance, a kind of stream-of-consciousness that often leads to another time, situation or space that opens further. That development from personal/individual to collective/communal enacts the evolution of the human to the higher self, aware that it is part of humanity. The current of the river becomes part of the ocean becomes part of the movement of the cosmos. In my earlier life, I often felt lonely. I began writing out of that loneliness and need for a friend who could understand me in a deep way. Over time, through reading, learning more about history, traveling, listening to others’ experiences we find parallels, becoming more enriched, empowered and connected, as we realize we are a link in the chain. Keats famously wrote, “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination.” The love we feel in our hearts and the ability to imagine help us empathize, balance and move from intimacy to immensity. Drawing on that help me realize each of us is a microcosm of the macrocosm.
KMD: In poems like “Carrying My Abyss” and “Refuge,” there’s a remarkably seamless movement between dream, memory, and myth. How do you know when a poem has found its final form within that fluidity?
BC: I don’t always know, and certainly not right away, but I let my mind wander, I may associate something that happened on a personal level to a dream, which then reminds me of something I observed, read or heard about, or experienced in childhood, or someone I knew who experienced it or something similar. Then I may bring in a literary or historical character I’m reminded of that is a kind of response to the earlier statement, or something about clouds, an animal, art or philosophy, for example, so the poem may seem like a collage whose parts start to interweave where layers of meaning may accrue and the energy gather. In a poem every detail is metaphoric, always reaching out of itself to illuminate but also bring out the mystery. I’m seeking something essential within, some truth or reality of an experience in all its contradictions and ambiguities as authentically as possible, to enact an experience viscerally, knowing the limitations of such an exercise. I try to cut out what is superfluous or flat. But it is in the imaginative striving I arrive somewhere unexpected that startles me into a deeper perception that I couldn’t have arrived at without the particulars of the memory, dream and/or story. Then I may go back, cut more, shift things around for drama, impact or emphasis before putting the poem down for a little while, then reviewing the next day, a few days or sometimes weeks or months later to see if and where it still has energy. If after I have emotionally detached from it, I am surprised or feel or sense of wonder that I may have captured some vital piece of reality that in Wallace Stevens’ words “almost resists the intelligence.” But I’m not always sure. I have to trust in the process, and sometimes I just have to let the poem go before I know.
KMD: Current is populated by recurring mentions of war, displacement, and inherited trauma. How do you approach intergenerational memory as a poetic subject?
BC: I believe we’ve had thousands of lives and within our soul we carry a record of our history. We also inherit the traumas of our ancestors. I believe in karma and that our souls are interconnected, so that what happened to us in a previous life or to someone in our family can influence our present life. My grandparents were immigrants from Jerusalem, Eastern Europe and Russia/Ukraine; there are stories of displacement and trauma they suffered which caused them to flee, which is part of who I am. In the poetic act much of what I imagine may on some level be ancestral memory. I do feel psychically connected to what happens in those regions. In “Elegy of a Scrap” I started with a tiny piece of paper I saw on my rug. Just questioning and exploring the scrap in all its aspects—its history, substance and structure somehow led me to the war that had just begun in Gaza, which I had been thinking about and felt anxious about, though at first I had no idea it would lead to a dream I had about being a survivor of a war, maybe part of the Holocaust, where I dreamt of banging on our locked door, yelling for my father, and having a hole in my chest. In writing about these subjects, however difficult it may be, gives one the chance to transmute the pain into art, which is a unifying force.
KMD: Your poems often situate themselves in specific places—Italy, forests, trains—yet feel untethered to a single geography. How important is place in your writing process?
BC: Place is important—it’s grounding. The unique features of any given landscape with its sensory details can be so inspiring. Especially when traveling, my senses are on high alert. At the same time, I think of myself as a spiritual person. Kafka said there is nothing but a spiritual world. The physical world is a manifestation of the spiritual. And as a spiritual being feeling “I am in the world but not of the world,” there is a distinction between being inspired by a place and being attached to it. I am attracted or drawn to something I see or hear, which I love to explore, that leads elsewhere, and I go with it. But it begins with the specific to take that journey in order to discover what links it to something greater and to perhaps the more central questions of existence and identity. “A Moment in Rome” was developed through details I observed while walking around a neighborhood in Rome but it then expanded into what has happened there that resonated well beyond the physical landscape that ultimately brought me inward.
I started writing “To a Bench on a Hill” on the bench outside the town of Fagagna in northern Italy, looking at the castle ruins on the adjacent hill and below that, a man mowing grass, a little ways away were some cypress and mulberry trees and further away the surrounding mountains. In that atmosphere I had also learned of the earthquake that devastated the region almost fifty years previous through my friend who lived there and through reading her wonderful book (Rhombo by Esther Kinsky). A few details from that book influenced the poem. The memories of the people who lived through the quake felt very present. It brought me to question what is real, what is imagined. Memories are fragments of lived reality that we re-experience in our mind’s eye. Upon reflection they go well beyond our senses into what feels like another dimension. The details of each place form a map guiding us to another, unseen world present at higher levels of consciousness I explore through writing.
KMD: Silence and the unsayable seem central—what a poem cannot fully articulate. How do you write toward what resists language?
BC: I’ve always felt that most of our lives our lived in silence. Verbal language is limited, so most of experience is unsayable. In “Village” I began with the music of the chimes out my bedroom window which I love for its pure clear tones. But it’s more than that. There is something compelling about it that makes me feel many emotions at the same time. How do you express that? The emotions are based on experiences, memories, observations, imagination beauty, purity, clarity, mystery. In poetry we are always translating from the unsayable which is really a complexity of abstract feeling into concrete words. Through images and word-music, the writer tries to enact the experience but in doing so creates an experience through the words that leads to a feeling of attunement with the universe. It’s a process of surrendering to a language of the subconscious that knows more than the mind—that has more direct access to the heart and soul to reveal something unknown before but true. You know when you touch on it. But it is so subtle you may overlook it at first. It can’t be faked or willed. It comes through close attention to the crafting of the images and how they link and unfold, working in concert with the sounds, lines, rhythms to discover something revelatory and resonant, accompanied by a feeling of elation that is in Frost’s words “a momentary stay against confusion.”
KMD: What are you currently working on? What can readers look forward to?
BC: More poems. I never know what is around the corner. I only know that I feel most alive when I am attempting to feel my way into and through the words and images, and after freely associating, expanding, cutting, rearranging, tightening, rereading, waiting, revising again, again, again, going back, tweaking, tweaking again, and again, I end up elsewhere, at another depth or register with a feeling of near elation, not really knowing how I arrived there.