"Dazzle Gradually": The Poetry of Gerald Barrax

1. Whos

I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you—Nobody—Too? Then there’s a pair of us? Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know!

How dreary—to be—Somebody! How public—like a Frog— To tell one’s name—the livelong June— To an admiring Bog!

This famous Emily Dickinson poem might well be spoken by poet Gerald Barrax, especially the second stanza. Whereas other poets (in the small and obscure bog that is poetry, in the larger ecosystem of contemporary literature) seem eager “to be—Somebody,” to be as public as possible, croaking their names and poems to admirers, Barrax is quite the opposite. He has published his quietly excellent poems in four quietly excellent books over the past quarter of a century; and even though his last book was nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, his name is rarely listed among the best contemporary poets, African-American or Southern or American or otherwise. Though I’m sure he’d like to be recognized for many years of fine writing, I’m also pretty sure he’s forsaken pursuing (or being pursued by) such fame because it would involve a “livelong June” away from his home, his family, his work, the locus and focus of his world. And I suspect that he’s happy to be (or seem) “Nobody” if it means that his words can reach a fellow mortal trying, like him, to answer the simplest but most difficult question, “Who are you?”

So who is Gerald Barrax?

He is an African American. (Though, as he notes in one poem, his skin is “an indifferent tan / Of African, Indian, and Dutch ancestry.”)

He is a Southerner, born in Attalla, Alabama, in 1933, where he lived until he was 10, and a resident of Raleigh, NC, from 1969 to 1997. (From age 10 to age 35, he lived mostly in Pittsburgh with his families, which renders him not particularly “Southern” at all; and he has recently retired to the Philadelphia area with his wife, a college administrator.)

He is a husband and father, with three sons from his first marriage and two daughters from his second current one.

He is a veteran, with four years in the Air Force as a radio mechanic (1953–1957).

He is several times a college graduate, with a BA from Duquesne (1963) and an MA from Pitt (1967) and many hours toward a PhD he doesn’t need.

He is a teacher, an emeritus Professor of English at North Carolina State University, where he began as an Instructor in 1969 and where he was Poet-in-Residence for many years. (Though he has extensive non-academic work experience, which he once listed as “steel mill laborer, cab driver, mail carrier and postal clerk, substitute teacher in Pittsburgh Public Schools, encyclopedia salesman (sold: 0, none, zip), awning hanger.”)

He is an editor, of Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review, as he has been since 1986.

He is a writer, having published articles and reviews and poems in many magazines, and having published four full-length collections of poetry: Another Kind of Rain (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970), An Audience of One (University of Georgia Press, 1980), The Deaths of Animals and Lesser Gods (Callaloo Poetry Series, 1984), and Leaning Against the Sun (University of Arkansas, 1992).

—No: that’s WHAT he is. WHO is he, really?

That’s exactly what his poetry is about: who he is. From his first book to his most recent, Barrax has been wrestling with the nature of his identity—who he is, why he is the way he is, what he should do about it, and how he should live in the world. His struggle is always an individual one, never sterotypically “male” or “African-American” or “academic,” whatever those labels (which could all be applied to him) may mean: each poem is a quietly radical encounter with whatever is, on its own terms. And yet that struggle is a representative and not a private one: he is addressing “the things that make us men,” in the old...