Tiny Sparks of Light:
an Interview with Barbara Crooker
Barbara Crooker and Dale Trumbore on Zoom, 2/11/25.
The interview below has been edited and condensed.
Dale Trumbore: Barbara, it's a joy to have worked with you for fifteen years now. How does it feel to have your poetry set to music?
Barbara Crooker: The word that I'm thinking of is “weird.” It doesn't seem like I wrote the pieces anymore. It becomes somebody else's, and that's okay. I did have a moment during [Los Angeles Master Chorale’s performance of] How to Go On where I found myself in tears over my own work because I was listening to it with very fresh ears, as if someone else had written it—at that kind of removal and distance. And then I thought, "This is weird, crying over your own work!"
I think if I were on purpose writing lyrics for music, that would feel different. But what this feels [like] to me is as if we collaborate. You take my words, and they allow you to do something musically that you want to do, and I'm happy that it works that way.
DT: Can you talk a little bit about your relationship to music? I know you love listening to music, but you don't consider yourself a singer or a musician.
BC: I am cursed by the ability to know all the lyrics from all sorts of songs or all the verses to hymns, but I can't carry a tune at all. So I gain a lot of particularly meditative and spiritual things out of listening to music, but I come as a tabula rasa with no knowledge and no critical acumen whatsoever. I just let it wash over me and go with it as on a journey.
DT: I always say it’s just as important to have people listening to the music. Otherwise, what composers do is for nothing.
BC: And the same thing with poetry. If we had no audience for poetry, then what are we doing? Walt Whitman said something like either great poetry or great literature needs a great audience for it to exist. There's a dialogue and a relationship, and I very much like that.
Excerpts from A Calendar of Light, with a libretto by Barbara.
DT: Your work lends itself really easily to musical settings. How much do you think about the rhythm?
BC: I think a great deal about it. And that's actually an interesting thing for me, to see what you and other composers do when you set it, because the rhythm completely alters. While I'm really careful about how I break lines and what kind of rhythm I'm going for, you're working to a totally different purpose, and that's also fine.
I have two threads going in my work, I think: the lyrical, the nature poetry, but then also the narrative. And I think the narratives maybe don't lend themselves as well to being set to music. Maybe they seem more personal. But then here I find myself as a lyric poet: a poet that really responds to nature at a time when we may be seeing the death of nature. You know, pure poetry doesn't exist. We have to exist in the real world. And in the real world, terrible things are happening to our planet. So that's a real struggle and dichotomy that I'm always having to deal with.
SOME OCTOBER (from A Calendar of Light)
Some October, when the leaves turn gold, ask
me if I've done enough to deserve this life
I've been given. A pile of sorrows, yes, but joy
enough to unbalance the equation.
When the sky turns blue as the robes of heaven,
ask me if I've made a difference.
The road winds through the copper-colored woods;
no one sees around the bend.
Today, the wind poured out of Canada,
a river in flood, bringing down the brilliant leaves,
broken sticks and twigs, deserted nests.
Go where the current takes you.
Some twilight, when the clouds stream in from the west
like the breath of God, ask me again.
—Barbara Crooker
DT: How do you reckon with your love of the natural world and everything that's going on now? There are lines in A Calendar of Light like “the only thing I know how to do is tend my garden,” and this line about writing poems: “They might become something that will burst into flame.” My interpretation of that is: We fight back with what we have, whether that's planting a garden or using your skills as a writer to write these words that will "burst into flame."
BC: The only thing we can do is be in the microcosm and do things in our own life, in our own world. I have to hope the ship will right itself, but I'm afraid it's going to take a long time. So, you know, all I can control is what I write and who I vote for and how I am in the world. I have to think that art, music, and poetry [are] that statement. Frost said it was a momentary stay against confusion. But yeah, we are the tiny sparks of light in a very dark world right now.
DT: It's a horrible situation, but I think finding poems that echo back to us how we're feeling is so important. It's almost like when you're ill and you get a diagnosis and you know, “Okay, I'm still sick, but at least I know what I have.” Maybe that's a flawed metaphor, but it's how I feel reading your poetry that speaks exactly to a feeling that I've had, particularly ones of frustration or of great beauty, or an appreciation that I don't necessarily know how to put into words.
BC: You know, after 9/11, people started talking on the Internet about what the purpose of poetry was in a time like that. And it seemed like most people agreed it was either to give collective voice to our grief and fears, or to express moments of joy, because that's when we turn to poetry: weddings, funerals, or national mourning.
My favorites of Barbara's books: Gold, Some Glad Morning, and her newest, Slow Wreckage.
DT: I know your new manuscript addresses grief very directly, but that's [present] in so many of your poems and something I'm drawn to. Even if it's not a circumstance that I can relate directly to, the grief itself is so universal, and how you describe it taps into something really powerful and really visceral, too.
I'm thinking of the line in How to Go On, in Requiescat: “I am here by the phone, waiting for the call.” I lost a friend last year, and I can't tell you how many times that that line made it into my head. It's such a simple line, but I think anyone who lives long enough will have that experience. How do you look unflinchingly at grief? I'm sure it's not always unflinching, but your way of addressing death and grief is so honest. How do you cultivate the resilience needed to address that topic so honestly?
BC: I think of the poet Adrienne Rich, who had a wonderful seminal book called Diving into the Wreck. I think the grief books also say this: “There's no way out but through.” You have to go as deep as you can and not try to candy-coat or soft-pedal or any of that.
One of the things about my going through the grieving experience, losing my spouse, was how much I started to recognize: This is the human experience. Nobody gets out of this without going through this. We lose our parents, I lost a child, we lose our friends. It's one of the awful parts of aging that nobody wants to talk about. But the older you get, the more friends you lose.
DT: I think you have a meditation practice—is that correct?
BC: Part of my practice is walking. To me, walking is a huge meditative thing, and it's something I'm trying to bring to living here in a retirement community. I’m trying to bring things I learned from being at an artist colony, which are: You go to your desk, you work really hard, and then you go and take a walk. Not thinking about things as you're walking helps your unconscious really filter things and bubble things and come back to your desk ready to go. You're fresh again.
Hear Barbara's "rule of threes" at 1:51.
DT: My last question is about something that I noticed in your work—I think I first noticed it in Light of late November. You tend to list plants in your poems in groups of three.
BC: Do you know why that is? I can tell you exactly why that is. That's a gardening principle, to plant things in groups of three. But I don't think I noticed that I did that in my work, so, wow.
DT: It's like the poem itself is transformed into a garden. I just love that.
BC: I like that, too. You know, in some of my poems, I talk about returning to my garden. [Now that] I'm here in an apartment, I’ve given up my garden. But this complex is in a 63-acre arboretum, and I now find myself on the arboretum board. So I'm going to be planting—metaphorically, but also helping to fundraise—with giant things, with trees. How exciting is that?
DT: That makes me so happy—the idea that you're going from little lettuces and all the things that you’ve mentioned in your poems to these giant trees.
BC: I'm new on the board, but it's one of their overriding concerns to select new trees to plant that are the ones that capture carbon dioxide the most. I think of the poem that I'm pretty sure is by W.S. Merwin, [where] the world is ending, and that person would still be planting a tree.
So yes, we should all be planting trees. I read somewhere that every person should be planting at least three trees in their lifetime, which I've already done, but I'll plant some more.
DT: That feels like a good note to end on, the idea of planting, unless you want to add anything else.
BC: Art, beauty, poetry, music. These are the places we need to be going. So thank you for what you have brought into this world. Think about it: It's all magical, right? It all came from our heads.
DT: I know. It's wild, when you think about it that way. I get sort of stuck in the practical side of things where it's like, “No, I go to my piano and I sit down and I do my work.” But when you view it as magic…
BC: Let it continue.
