Inside the poem: Jennifer Barber and A. Molotkov
Two poets come together to talk about two poems!
As Jennifer Barber wrote:
I’ve never met A. Molotkov in person, but we’ve been in touch. We discovered each other’s poems in literary journals a while back and we expressed our admiration and sense of connection to the other’s work. Later, we realized that we each had a poetry manuscript that had been accepted by The Word Works for publication in the spring/summer of 2022, and it has been a pleasure to stay in contact. I love the subtlety and urgency of the poems in Molotkov’s Future Symptoms, poems that I return to again and again. I am grateful to Nancy White, president of The Word Works, and Catherine Parnell and Max Frazier at Birch Bark Editing, for all they contribute to the world of letters.
What follows is their conversation, brief but brilliantly insightful.
A. Molotkov: “Untitled,” my favorite poem from your [Jennifer Barber’s] collection, alludes to the way our words on a page constitute a collaboration between reality and our minds, nature and time. Can you talk about this poem? What is it saying about our role as writers and, by extension, as human beings?
Untitled
These lines have been scrubbed
Of trees. Of their leaves.
Of a lamp glowing
in the hour before dawn.
Of prayers and pleas,
rain in the cupboard, snow
a future I can’t touch.
Where are the trees going,
what else will be erased?
My anguish? My joy? My store
of days like these—
the only days I know.
Jennifer Barber: “Untitled”—a title I hardly ever use!—was one of the last poems I wrote for The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made. I started writing it without having any idea where I was headed. I only knew that there were a few subjects I didn’t want to broach.
The first of those subjects was trees. I’d been obsessed by trees in recent years, in poems as in life, and I knew I needed to take a step away from my obsession. I’ve also written often about my tendency to wake at daybreak, so I didn’t want to go there either. And, in an earlier book, I’d engaged with the Psalms—“prayers and pleas” is a glancing reference to them—and I wasn’t ready to return to that territory. I decided to let “Untitled” stay unresolved for a while, to trust in a feeling of disorientation.
What the poem comes around to is simply the realization that time is passing and will keep passing. Maybe it’s similar to the experience of parenthood. Each phase your child goes through at a specific time seems monumental, decisive—and yet, as the years go by, those phases drop away. New phases and new challenges and new discoveries arrive.
I’m not sure if I have the right term to describe what the poem is trying to convey with its questions and almost-questions. Present-as-retrospective? Future-as-past? Flow-as-flowing-away? I only know it has something to do with getting older and becoming more aware of a vanishing point in the near distance. The last line is an attempt to hold onto something—the “days like these” are “the only days I know.” They are all I can know, even if they are constantly dwindling.
Anatoly, you ask about our role as writers and “by extension, as human beings.” In my view, as writers, we can’t help but take on the concept of transience, since it undergirds everything that happens in a lifetime. Our states of feeling and our ways of thinking, so urgent to us as we go through them, give way to the idea that these states don’t last, since we don’t last. You mention a “collaboration between reality and our minds,” and to me this is a central reality that has to be negotiated. Over and across poems, the ones I read and the ones I write, I need to see through the lens of the present into things that came before and the things that might follow.
Jennifer Barber: In your poem “Unchronology,” time seems to wobble, as if able to undo and redo itself. A river whose bridge has been blown up “grows a new one” and “our lost limbs…return.” Yet later in the poem, “Days stack on the sharp axis of being,” implying an accumulation. How would you describe your philosophy of time as it relates to this poem? And are you influenced by contemporary physics in your thinking about time?
Unchronology
If the bridge explodes, the river
grows a new one. Our lost
limbs, lost memories return. Time
is drawn out of us by the hook
of each breath. I love faces
of strangers opening to their lives. In
the gaps between memories, lie
opportunities we missed. Days
stack on the sharp axis of being. Time
draws on us in wrinkles the way
moments align along a string
that doesn't exist.
A. Molotkov: Although I used to study physics in my youth, my poetic relationship with time is defined by its impact, or the lack thereof, on a human life, or the continuity of lives we call human race. I’m reluctant to take on the interpretive work, which organically belongs with the reader, but in any case, to me, a literary work is an intuitive and not a logical project. From that angle, anyone is equally free to speculate.
The poem plays with the fact that time is both long and short, endless and endlessly passing. In our memories and in our meaning-making, we rely on a personal time that substantiates our path rather than the overwhelming flow of entropy that constitutes the time of the world as a whole observed by Walter Benjamin’s angel of history. We construct our own time in our planning and in our retrospective analysis.
The next question is of causality. Does the bridge exist as a meeting point between human race and the river? Does it belong to the water or to the land? Do we belong to time or does time belong to us?
Jennifer Barber is the author of the poetry collections Rigging the Wind, Given Away, Works on Paper, and The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made. She is co-editor, with Jessica Greenbaum and Fred Marchant, of the new anthology Tree Lines: 21st Century American Poems (Grayson Books, 2022). Her recent poems appear in On the Seawall, 32 Poems, and Ibbetson Street and are forthcoming in Upstreet and Post Road. She founded the literary journal Salamander in 1992 and served as its editor in chief through 2018. Her website is jenniferbarber.org.
A. Molotkov’s poetry collections are “The Catalog of Broken Things,” “Application of Shadows,” “Synonyms for Silence” and “Future Symptoms”. His memoir “A Broken Russia Inside Me” about growing up in the USSR and making a new life in America is forthcoming from Propertius; he co-edits The Inflectionist Review. His collection of ten short stories, “Interventions in Blood,” is part of Hawaii Review Issue 91; his prose is represented by Laura Strachan at Strachan Lit. Please visit him at AMolotkov.com