Madeleine Barnes : coda

What are you working on?

Along with my scholarly research on embroidery and textiles, I’m currently working on a hybrid visual art/poetry chapbook for Tolsun Books titled Women’s Work. It combines my own original embroideries, digital collages created using images from the public domain, and poetry. As always, I remain captivated by how women rebel in private and in public. This project has been in the works for years, as I had to create all of the embroideries first and master both hand collage and digital collage. I’m especially grateful to David Pischke, co-founder of Tolsun Books, for elevating my collage skills and supporting this project.

I also serve as Poetry Editor for Cordella Magazine (cordella.org), which features incredible women and nonbinary creators, and we are about to launch our first print issue. This space would not be possible without our Editor-in-Chief, Cate Clother, whose unmatched aesthetic sensibilities provide a gorgeous home for these essential voices.

Madeleine Barnes : part five

Why is poetry important?

I asked my Brooklyn College composition students this question recently to test the waters, as our class was not a creative writing class. A student’s hand shot up. He said, “Poetry is important because it gives people hope.” There was no hesitation in his voice. I feel super old saying this, but I think the younger generation gets it. As long as people are writing poetry there’s a chance that they're reflecting on their lives and on the world they inhabit. Poetry forces you to tackle bigger questions surrounding mortality and your inner life. Through poetry, we can encounter another person's thought processes and memories, and when that is accompanied by linguistic precision, musicality, and experimentation, this is an irreplaceable a gift. Or at least the right people will recognize it as such.

Another student followed up and said that poetry is important because it creates a community that capitalism can’t interfere with. Poetry readings give people a place to gather and share their creative work, and we need these supportive spaces more than ever under late capitalism. My student argued that poetry is a refuge, a way to channel pain and experience, and I could not agree more. Our class was full of secret poets. I will never forget them.

Madeleine Barnes : part four

How important is music to your poetry?

It’s vital. I learned to play the piano around the same time that I became interested in poetry, and this timing inspired a dedication to musicality, especially cadence, harmony, and prosody, in writing. I remember reading a book of poetry and realizing that a musical experience was taking place, and it depended on spatial arrangement, similar to sheet music. Even though I was classically trained, I loved playing in jazz bands and preferred to play by ear. When I would do this, my teacher, a nun, would scold me and say, “stop and read what’s there.” She insisted on perfect posture and wouldn’t let me hear a song before I muddled through the sheet music. If I didn’t practice and leaned on my ear during lessons, she put a neon green Mr. Yuk sticker beside my name for everyone else to see. Yikes! She required her students to write papers about dead composers and to describe in detail what we noticed about their music. I owe my obsession with craft and lyricism to her. Above all, she taught me that music, like poetry, has a history, and to before you improvise, you better read what’s there. Doing so will make your flair and style stronger when your moment arrives. Whether I’m engaging with music or poetry, I’m absorbed in the moment, connecting to something otherworldly. I don’t necessarily believe in God, but I believe that poetry and music are connected to divine creation. If we focus too much on interpreting art literally, or completely ignore its historical foundations, we risk losing the magic.

Madeleine Barnes : part three

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Holding space for creating is hard especially in a world that wants you to focus on producing things of monetary value. People will question what you’re doing and why you’re not making different choices, and they’ll pressure you to live a more prescribed life. Continuing on your path despite this pressure is tough, but I think the right people will celebrate your pursuit of an authentic life. From the outside, it’s difficult to understand the pressure that writers face or to fully empathize with how complicated and emotionally tumultuous the writing and publication processes are. It takes sheer resilience to continue. You must surround yourself with supportive, uplifting people who remind you of your purpose and your strengths. A great teacher once insisted that students block off time to write the same way they would make time for a dentist appointment. She was an outstanding teacher—if you’re a writer, making time to write is a matter of health. Finally, I live with chronic pain, which can provoke feelings of frustration. There’s so much I want to create, but sometimes my body and mind cannot be pushed further. I’m not a machine.

Madeleine Barnes : part two

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

Poetry gives us a way to voice and visualize experiences in a limited space. For me, the most transformative moments in writing and reading occur when there are restrictions. In poetry especially, you can focus on the joy of imagery, syntax, prosody, precision, and experimentation within the boundaries of a poem or collection of poems. I’m always interested in troubling genre and think poetry offers a brilliant arena for experimentation. You can incorporate different mediums into a piece of writing and call it a poem if it suits your creative sensibilities. Poetry’s visual components can radically change your perception of past and present experiences. Finally, I believe it was Wallace Stevens who wrote, “The purpose of poetry is to contribute to man’s happiness.” The idea that anyone needs to justify poetry is a reflection of intense problems in contemporary society.

Madeleine Barnes : part one

Madeleine Barnes is a poet, visual artist, and Doctoral Fellow in English Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her debut poetry collection, You Do Not Have To Be Good, was recently selected as the winner of Trio House Press’ open reading period, and will be published in May 2020. She is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Women’s Work, forthcoming from Tolsun Books. She serves as Poetry Editor at Cordella Magazine, a publication that showcases the work of women and non-binary writers and artists. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU in 2016, and she teaches at Brooklyn College.

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

Recently I’ve been writing collaborative poems with former students via email correspondence. We’ll devise an arbitrary goal, such as, “let’s compose a twenty line poem about an astronaut in iambic pentameter.” I’ll send one line, they’ll send the next, and we'll volley lines back and forth until we achieve our goal. This process is profoundly generative, and I love thinking about how a fusion of different voices creates unexpected journeys and dialogues. Collage is another way to begin writing—I like to hunt for unusual phrases in old astronomy magazines and medical texts. These days, I work on my writing alone, but when I lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I was part of the Madwomen in the Attic Writing Workshops. The Madwomen provided an invaluable safe space to me when I needed it most. I couldn’t have written the forthcoming collection without them.