The singers I prefer are the ones who have to struggle. Famously, there is Bob Dylan, and Robert Plant who might have sung lower but didn’t. And now there is this Beth Orton who seems to be singing through a wall. Through a wall? I would really like to get this right. Granted, the perfect […]
With the hope yet of writing a poem this morning I am sitting in the middle of the kitchen where I can see from the window above the sink the early winter light bringing the old oak to magnificent relief and can hear the radio’s classical guitar asserting itself and struggling to reach doubt, and […]
We were so proud of our fifths of vodka lying next to each other in Tom’s trumpet case like two long crystals harvested from the dark cave of high school’s first three years and while less fortunate kids fingered over and over through that one difficult passage, Tom and I floated around campus cracking […]
Being ash, being dust, being what’s left on the plate, being the bungalow with a moss-eaten roof a stone’s throw off from the new glass house, being bone and gristle, being biomass, being something stuck to the fridge floor whiffing of a long-turned tide, being shredded, un-sought secrets, being car exhaust, being half-buried rusted-out […]
Can you love the dawn and hate the day? I do. “Addicted to the beginnings of relationships,” as I’ve been told. And told. And told. The new light looks as something else when it first hits, something more like Catherine standing up across a strangered room, that promising look she had before the promises, still […]
Christian Barter, author of The Singers I Prefer, talks about the formal strategy he employed in the title poem to that collection.
Christian Barter, author of The Singers I Prefer, talks about how he determines the form a poem will take.
Christian Barter, author of The Singers I Prefer, talks about the genesis of his poem, Band Camp.
