Poems by Gerald Barrax
I happened upon Gerald William Barrax’s poems this winter, while I was reading through Camille Dungy’s brilliant anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009), which contains four poems by him. Finding Barrax’s own books was more difficult. There is only one volume at the Brooklyn Public Library (and no way to request it, for reasons still unclear to me). While the NYPL has several hard copies of Barrax’s books, they are all in research collections, so none circulate; in a pandemic, therefore, you can’t get them. His first collection, Another Kind of Rain (1970), currently seems to be unavailable for purchase anywhere, and I could find exactly one copy of his fourth book, Leaning Against the Sun, though it was nominated not only for the Pulitzer but for the National Book Award. His other books — An Audience of One (1980), The Deaths of Animals and Lesser Gods (1984), Epigraphs (1990), and From a Person Sitting in Darkness: New and Selected Poems (1998) — are sparse in online bookstores as well.
Barrax was born in Atalla, a small town in northern Alabama, on June 21, 1933. He spent his teens in Pittsburgh. After graduating from high school, he worked for a year at a steel mill, where another worker introduced him to Walter Benton’s poetry. Barrax then attended Duquesne University as a pharmacy major, but lacked the money to keep going for his second year, and joined the Air Force in the hopes of later returning to college on the GI Bill. In an interview with Joyce Pettis for Callaloo, he describes being stationed at a South Carolina Aair Fforce base and finding a used copy of Clement Wood’s Poets’ Handbook (1940) in a used bookstore: “It changed my life. I was fortunate enough to recognize that book as what I needed. In it I found things I had known nothing about: meter and scansion, assonance, consonance (slant rime), fixed forms such as sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, terza rima stanzas.” He began working through the book and teaching himself how to write in forms.
After four years in the Air Force, Barrax spent two years in Pittsburgh as a postal worker before returning to college, where he received his BA in 1963 — now as an English major. Supporting himself with a variety of odd jobs, he received his MA in English from the University of Pittsburgh in 1969. Here he was influenced by the Black Arts movement: a March 1969 issue of Ebony includes a photograph of Barrax, Haki R. Madhubuti, and Gwendolyn Brooks, at the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh (Brooks is signing In The Mecca for Barrax). Shortly after graduating, he published his first book and began teaching English at North Carolina State, where he spent more than twenty-five years. He was killed by a car while crossing a Raleigh street in December 2019, when he was eighty-six.
Barrax, Haki R. Madhubuti, and Gwendolyn Brooks at the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh, 1969.
Barrax’s poems struck me, at first, because of the subject that brought them into the Black Nature anthology: he looks frequently at nature. And he looks at parts of nature where most people might be inclined to turn away: at harm done toward animals, and at his own roles in animal lives. In “What More?” the speaker finds a “small bird” while mowing the lawn, and watches a brown thrasher (implicitly a parent) “come and stand over its body.” The poem considers both the speaker’s active role in harm — that the bird was found in a swath of just-cut grass — and the more muted ways that human emotions infiltrate our interactions with animals. It ends with a corrosive view of poetry: “I’ve described / it all accurately. What more could anyone expect of me?” In Dungy’s anthology, Barrax describes natural and domestic worlds with grave, scrupulous attention.
When I looked up Barrax’s collections, I found that his work spans not only relatively traditional-looking lyrics, but formally experimental poems that disarrange syntax and disperse words across the page. While Barrax’s published poems rarely fit neatly into the forms the twenty-year-old encountered in his poetry handbook, they are animated by typographical innovation, by the rhythms of speech, and by keen attention to the shapes a poem makes on the page. And sometimes echoes of those traditional forms do appear: “The Postal Clerk Mourns His Lost Love” begins with four lines from the blues before moving into irregular free verse — but it also, it turns out, suggests the fourteen lines of a sonnet.
Many of the more experimental poems confront racist injustice, in multiple tonalities. “First Dance Poem,” which begins by remembering “musicspheres that made the sound / for us to dance, to touch” builds to encompass a vision of
[...] the Cattleprods of the Burnedcars
of the Snarlingdogs of the Firehoses
of the Nightsticks of the Lockups [...]
These poems can stretch from satire to introspection, from the vulnerable to the furious, often within a few lines. “Filbuster, 1964” reacts to the senators responsible for a fifty-four-day filibuster of the Civil Rights Act; “King: April 4, 1968” considers “the soft thing” inside the speaker, which thwarts the violence he wants to be able to summon: “I wished I could do it I wished I / could.” As Barrax remarked to Jacob R. Rayapati in an interview in 2000, “Being Black in America is poignant experience enough and I’ve written about it as long as I’ve been writing.”
Further reading:
Gerald W. Barrax and Joyce Owens Pettis, “An Interview with Gerald Barrax.” Callaloo 20, no, 2 (spring 1997): 312–326.
Michael McFee, “‘Dazzle Gradually’: The Poetry of Gerald Barrax.” Callaloo 20, no. 2 (spring 1997): 327–340.
“Special Section on Gerald Barrax.” Obsidian III, 1 no. 2 (fall/winter 2000): 10–52.
Gift
What does it mean
that there is a snake lying among the wild strawberries;
Spring has laid smooth stones
at the edge of the pool;
there are birds who see farther at night
than the warm things under cover of purple leaves?
Some god has bitten this mottled apple.
We swim in these summer days, its juices.
What does it matter where the snake hides:
I was out of place until a blue jay
in return for my seed
left that black banded feather from his wing
in my back yard.
First Carolina Rain
and
so
this is the way
it rains in carolina
23 sept 69
school started for them
in pittsburgh too
and they dont need this kind of rain
especially my second son
the grave serious one
needs dry weather
to carry his busted arm to school
(glad I tried to teach all three
ambi
dexterity)
need it or no
i carry the rain to school with me
sometimes seeing in students’ black faces
my own sons
wondering how it will be to face them
when they reach this age
Filbuster, 1964
for a number of Senators
Knowing all the ways Black men die
we hold back the impulse to laugh
when jackasses debate our existence.
If Samson slaughtered a thousand men
with half your equipment
and our benevolent Sam has eighteen of you
and one rebel pachyderm in his southern stables
who intend to surpass Samson’s kill a thousand times
simply by talking us to death
we don’t laugh.
If you’re offended by “jackasses”
remember it’s your party
and the shibboleth and masquerade you’ve made of it
have forked your tongues
and betrayed the fraud of braying our deaths
for tradition’s sake
in the voices
of the image
you call God.
What could we expect.
We lost the luxury of disbelief
too long ago for surprise
too soon to suppress the prophetic horror
that you will talk now now even knowing
the bastard you get from delay may be Death.
Spring will overtake you in the Senate
while we move toward the splendor
and fury
of the kind of summer
your surprise admitted
only last year.
(When for your amusement
we seduced your bullets into our backs
and consecrated the churches your god built
to your bombs)
While you talk
we discover better ways of dying
than you ever invented for murdering boys.
Boys! Boy / that really kills you
like pulling the trigger
thinking the thing is pointed at me
and finding yourself with more shattered images
that bring luck and me another 100 yrs.
Boy / equal to the noble use
you’ve made of a war and civil filbuster
Talk another summer to death
and we may quibble among the ruins of your rhetoric
after the plague on both your houses leads
both black and white
down the path of your prattling glory.
When you have done
and your last shard of eloquence falls
from
the
air
the applause you’ll hear will be the one hand clapping
of your hooded constituent
horribly grinning in the gallery.
King: April 4, 1968
for Eva Ray
When I was a child
in the Fall the axes fell
in Alabama and I tried
to be somewhere else,
but the squeals of the pigs dying
and hogs and the sight of their
opened throats were everywhere.
I wasn’t given that kind of stomach.
When I was 14, I killed
my last thing bigger than a mouse
with my Daisy Red Ryder,
a fat robin on a telephone wire,
still singing,
as my first shot went high
I sighted down and heard from where I was
the soft thud of the copper pellet in his
fat red breast. It just stopped
and fell over backwards
and I had run away
before it hit the ground, taking
my stomach with me.
I’ll never know about people–
if the soft thing in the stomach can be cut out–
because I missed all the wars–
but when I learned that non
violence kills you anyway
I wished
I wished I could do it I wished I
could
do you know what it means to wish
you could kill to
wish you were given that?
But I am
me. Whatever made me made
you, and I anesthetize the soft thing
to stop squirming when
you do it brothers I shout
righton righton rightON
my heart is with you
though my stomach is still in Alabama pig
pens.
What More?
My lawnmower has awakened the resident god of my yard
who rubs its leafy hand in anticipation
of troubling me again with one of its cruel koans,
this one a small bird dropped
from the sky, or thrown out,
out of the sweetgum tree
where I was cutting
that long triangle of grass outside
the back fence: put there
when I wasn’t looking, it lies
on its back twitching half in and out of the swath
I cut a minute before.
I’m being tampered with again,
like an electron whose orbit and momentum
are displaced by the scientist’s measurement
and observation. If I’d found something already stuff
and cold on the ground
I’d have kicked or nudged it out of my path:
but the just-dead, the thing still warm,
just taken its last breath, made its last
movement, has its own kind of horror.
I leave the small patch of uncut grass around it.
Back inside my enclosed yard
I see a brown thrasher come and stand over the body,
with some kind of food in its bill.
(I was careful to say “bill” and not “mouth.”)
By the next time I cut myself around the yard,
I see the thrasher sitting on the fence above the still dead,
still holding whatever it has in its bill. I’ve described
it all accurately. What more could anyone expect of me?
Barriers
I go out for the news this morning
and find what’s left of the slaughtered bird,
guts and wings, on my walk.
I know what did this.
There is someone’s black and white cat
that hunts the woods back of our house,
stalking beyond the fence and stealing
some of my admiration for its great cousins
who bring down prey twice their size;
or it perches on a stump
that’s a throne among the weeds, a power
in its dominion, but so visible
that I’d wondered if it ever made a kill.
Now here’s the proof at my feet
in these black and white wings.
Today I take my stand against relativists
who reduce moral questions to shades of gray.
Things like this belong in the woods,
and that creature has no right to bring its savagery
across the fence and leave it at my door.
I sweep the thing into the grass
before pregnant Helen sees it.
The ants have already started arriving.
It all bothers my stomach at first, but it helps
to see it as a little chicken.
Like the kind we sometimes dress for dinner.
Another Fellow
The almost whole skin
Lay right outside the window of my basement
Where I’d been entombed for more than a year.
Whenever it happened, if I had raised myself
And looked out of the groundlevel window
I’d have seen it crawling out of its year-old skin;
It would’ve seen a face marveling and envious
Up from a book behind the screen.
It would’ve been too busy
Doing what it was supposed to do
To bother me.
My ancestors, considering its immortality,
Would’ve welcomed it with food and drink
When it came as spirit of the living-dead from the forest
To visit their huts;
And I would’ve sacrificed a book to its wisdom
In return for a poem.
Dear Emily,
That was in September, months ago.
The grass after days of rain was high, wet, still growing
And had to be cut once more for the year. I cut it
In anticipation, wondering if I would drive him
Into the square of the yard, or out,
Half dreading both but needing
One or the other. This year I will be 43.
I found neither the spotted shaft in the high grass
Nor in my room your worm transformed
And ringed with power. I found an empty skin
That I threw over the fence.
A Pause of Silence
Sometimes the city lets me
dream
a green blaze of wildness
as a green lover
as the green lover
I am
embraced by her need to be seen
embraced by my need to be stunned
as a virgin
in a green lover’s limbs.
Sometimes the sea’s mad thing
I cry
over it in the voices of gulls and herons
frenzied for sea
sound
and the after taste of salt.
It rains
wet neon autumn
colors ripple
in the streets
I am maddened only by the small buzz of flies
and nature walks for me
on
one
leg
and the pigeons, the pigeons
take my heart away from hawks.
The Singer
for Nina, Roberta, Aretha.
Sarah, Ella, Carmen.
Dinah, Billie, Bessie. And Ma.
Black Angel
Doing what she’s gotta do
The sister sings
“Like a stone bird”
He said, intending to praise her.
But no bird has such a choice.
They speak, too,
Or whatever twittering means
But does that explain human song?
Maybe this more than natural impulse
Surprised even the creator
Who let the possibility
Slip his mind.
Not unintended.
Just not thought of.
Suppose
There was a creature
not yet human
who cocked his head, dimly quizzical
at birdsong
and did something—
roared, screeched, howled—
something purely joyous in imitation
and those birds filled the prehistoric air
in flight from his obscenity.
Who was to tell him
he wasn’t created for that? Or
suppose Eve.
Giving a name
to something dull Adam
didn’t know about:
What’s that? What are you doing?
And she, holding the doomed child,
stopped and looked at him as if listening
and smiled, and said
Singing.
Not like birds
Who are doomed to sing
Her doom and ours is our silence.
The sisters sing
Doing what they’ve gotta do
Black Angels
The Postal Clerk Mourns His Lost Love
(who has been going places)
“I love my baby, but my baby don’t love me
I love my baby, but my baby don’t love me
That’s why this song is called
Things ain’t what they used to be.”
it always happens
I get sentimental
and remember old songs
(whatever happened to Cootie Williams anyway?)
and I wonder how in hell anybody
can get anything done
even if suffering is supposed to create
something
when I look for mail going to where
she is
and send a letter for Ohio A-L God knows where
First Dance Poem
In our time there were musicspheres that made the sound
for us to dance, to touch.
We could hear to touch.
What we imitate should grow (because) flesh is mother of grass
(but) our dances imitated planets
instead. Now they dance the new way
the only way not to touch. They have discovered the use
of empty space committed to empty space (&)
space of bodies they sculpture the air
between them with suggestions of innocence.
There is no other way for them
not to touch.
The gods speak thru their oracles
fingerpoppin’ screaming soul bluehued sound
interpreted by their high priest
“This is the number five sound this week
baby.”
The virgins of their temples
dancing the new way with one partner
or another or none
make us remember
dry grinding under hot blue lights
and their suggestive innocence is disconcerting.
they dont touch.
But the fairways are lush and green anyway and fields as luxuriant
as the way the hair grows free and shows
the grass how to grow. The flesh that mothers grass.
Then they who have forsaken the old ways of touching
dance
their way the Dances
of the Cattleprods of the Burnedcars
of the Snarlingdogs of the Firehoses
of the Nightsticks of the Lockups
and then they touch. They have the touch to see
and our innocence makes them cover their eyes.
They show us we could just as well dance
the new way and show the grass. The touch
the flesh that mothers
it