By Barrie Cole
Once, a writer named Barrie Cole, who, even though she wrote poems, essays, short stories, performance monologues, and hybrid pieces, mostly identified as a playwright. She’d written more than 15 of them and that seemed like quite a few to just abandon ship on the role. It didn’t make sense.
In 2024, Barrie Cole was lucky enough to have two theater companies put on a festival with 5 of her plays. Seeing so much of her work at once, she was struck by how much the stuff of not only language, but poetry in particular appeared in them:
In Elevator Tours, Ruth and Will analyze Wallace Steven’s poem, “Of Mere Being.” In Fruit Tree Backpack, Ceil and Anna discuss Anna’s strong feelings about punctuation and metaphor. Later, Anna describes beaches as embarrassing graduate thesis projects and ellipses as stepping stones leading into the unknown. She talks about her failed relationship as an empty vending machine. In Capacity, Shelby and Vivian go on about their enthusiasm for abbreviations and decide they’d like even more words abbreviated. They are also utterly convinced that the best thing a person could ever turn into, were it possible, would be a Shimmering Aspen tree. In Meaning is Tricky, Clare and Mark discuss the concept of binge-watching the world.
This should not have been nearly as surprising as it was because in 2018, she wrote a play called Reality is an Activity, about two middle-aged women who decide to use what they deem poetic interventions to save the world from fascism. They have a dining room table with a removable leaf. The space without the leaf becomes, through the power of imagination, charged with strangeness and transformation. Early in the play, Miranda talks to Mr. Howard, about a tiny magnifying glass as a metaphor for a poem:
Miranda: “Oh, how I love tiny things! Once, I saw a photograph of a tiny magnifying glass and it was as small as the tip of a finger. It was resting on the palm of someone’s hand. I thought it was deliciously ironic that something so tiny could be used as a thing to make other things look larger. Do you enjoy when things are magnified, a leaf for example, or a word in a book? I do. I like to see things up close. And do you love tiny things too, Mr. Howard, yes or no? And do you think irony is fortifying in the same way iron is? I do. How about a paradox? Would you like one? And wouldn’t it be wonderful, Mr. Howard, if a roll could be sliced in the same way bread is sliced? The slices would be so incredibly tiny! I believe adorable, sliced rolls would be the best things since sliced bread. Don’t you agree? What a lucky hand to have had a tiny magnifying glass resting upon it. And isn’t it peculiar Mr. Howard that magnifying glasses cannot magnify themselves but only things other than themselves? What a generous sort of object!”
Okay, I’ll stop writing about myself in the third person now because I am who I am writing about. Sometimes, I find beginning in the third person a useful tool. It’s a trick to gain perspective through mild distancing. And then, after some time, I can allow myself to get nearer bit by bit and jump back into the first.
The truth is somewhere along the line, I must have rejected even the notion of identifying as a poet. So, I just snuck poetry into my plays and other writing wherever I could, like some kind of midnight graffiti artist. The idea of making poetry central to my life and work seemed radical, impossible, slightly embarrassing, and even a little reckless.
I wouldn’t let myself have poetry. I wouldn’t call myself a poet. It wasn’t rational. I was already in my 50s. The festival had received great reviews. We could explore remounting these plays. I could write another and another.
What’s funny is, I really thought there was a choice. There wasn’t. I understand now why nuns become nuns, why birdwatchers travel thousands of miles in the hopes of seeing a particular one, their favorite maybe, with a rainbow crown, turquoise speckled wings, and a mating call that sounds like laughing underwater.
And sometimes, I realized, just like a dog, a leash is placed around your neck, and you are taken. I was and I seem to be still on the walk. The genre of poetry itself seemed to become a miles-long salad bar meant for my fortification. I had no choice but to go with the all-you-could-eat poetry package. This was where meaning was, where what mattered most lived. The alternative was bound to lead to angst at best or a miserable depression at worst. I’d been depressed before. No thanks.
I had revised a great number of old poems, sometimes reworking them past recognition. I wrote dozens of new poems, read a zillion books, applied for residencies, went to one in Oregon, took so many online workshops that I thought about putting a bed in one of the squares on zoom so I could rest. Soon, I began submitting poems. I wrote “Lacquer is a Thrilling Word” to learn how to put together a book of poems. I did not think it would be accepted for publication for a very long time or perhaps ever. I made all kinds of mistakes. Still, the book is a celebration of language, imagination, experimental forms, images, and sensation. It’s a celebration of seeing and seeing is high-level caring.
The best poems can make the reader care about anything: garbage, a blade of grass, a speck of dust. Once, I looked at a bandaid as deeply as I could. I marveled at the tiny little air holes, the packaging with its hard to grasp red thread like a tail and a smile, the stretch of the elastic, the tiny little square of cotton like a pillow for a dragonfly. Then, I discovered the late Tony Hoagland’s poem “Bandage,” which made me care even more about bandaids and in his poem, the bandaid written about isn’t even new.
Wallace Steven’s wrote “Description is revelation.” Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
In his book Best Words, Best Order, Stephen Dobyn’s writes, “When we pick up a poem for the first time we are in a wonderful paradox. We have our defenses, opinions, prejudices, yet we want them challenged and overthrown.” Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
In Ten Windows, Jane Hirschfield writes, “A metaphor is language that simultaneously creates and solves its own riddle within that minute explosion of mind is both expansion and release.” Yes, yes, yes, and yes again.
Some poets and lyrical writers I’ve been inspired by, influenced by, and recommend reading or eating at the poetic salad bar:
Mark Doty, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Jason Shneiderman, Diane Seuss, Ellen Bass, Marie Howe, Mary Ruefle, Tony Hoagland, Dorianne Laux, Mary Oliver, Linda Pastan, Toni Morrison, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, Clarice Lispector, Virginia Woolf, Chen Chen, and many others.
A big thank you to Barrie for sharing her love of poetry.
Stay tuned for my review of Lacquer is a Thrilling Word next week.