An Interview with Gerald Barrax
- An Interview with Gerald Barrax
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Gerald Barrax
Gerald William Barrax is a writer committed to poetry as art. Marked by originality, introspection, and intellectual engagement with a wide range of subjects, his work draws from the best traditions of poetry writing. He shapes and reshapes the images, metaphors, and ideas of his poems until they satisfy his stringent requirements. His published books include Another Kind of Rain (1970), An Audience of One (1980), The Deaths of Animals and Lesser Gods (1984), and Leaning Against the Sun (1992). His poems appear in numerous anthologies and journals. He has been recognized by several prestigious awards, including the Raleigh Medal of Arts for “Extraordinary Achievement in the Arts” in 1993, the Sam Regan Award for contribution to the fine arts in North Carolina in 1991, and the 1983 Callaloo Creative Writing Award for Nonfiction Prose. In his role as a Professor of English in creative writing at North Carolina State University, Barrax strove to communicate integrity for the craft of poetry writing and passion for reading the best models of poetry. The following interview took place on April 6, 1997.
Jerry, let’s begin with your most recent book, Leaning Against the Sun, which was nominated for both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. How did you respond to the nominations?
Well, they took me by surprise. And of course I was very pleased. Because none of my books had every been nominated for anything, I felt I had received a recognition that had largely eluded me before. I guess I’ve always considered myself, in one respect, a “poet’s poet,” whose work has been appreciated more often by other poets than by the general public. The nominations gave me some hope that others would have the opportunity to appreciate my work more if I won those awards, one or the other. But I didn’t, so I don’t know if my audience is any bigger now than it was before. Probably not.
Has there been an immediate benefit to your being nominated? Has demand for you to read your work noticeably increased, for example?
That would have happened if I had won one of the awards. The benefit I got from them is that when I’m introduced at readings, the audience can be told that Leaning Against the Sun was nominated for the Pulitzer and National Book Award. That’s better than nothing. [End Page 312]
Which of your published poems have elicited the most favorable responses? I am thinking of listeners’ comments after readings or notes, perhaps, from readers.
I’ve received both kinds of responses. From them I’d say that the poems that have been most favorably received are “Uniforms,” which I wrote in 1988 for the occasion of the first celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday at North Carolina State University. Another is “King, April 14, 1965.” There is a poem titled “The Singer” dedicated to Black female singers (“Sarah, Nina, Roberta, Aretha, Ella, Carmen, Dinah, Billie, Bessie. And Ma”) that has been anthologized several times. “Spirituals, Gospels,” expresses first my ambiguity about the benefits Blacks have received from being “Christianized” and losing our African gods; and then the powerful, irresistible effect that music has on me. “Sportsfan,” a satire on sports fanaticism, has received favorable comments and has been anthologized at least twice. One of my most recently “popular” poems is “Strangers Like Us: Pittsburgh, Raleigh, 1945–1985” from Leaning Against the Sun. It’s a blank verse sonnet comparing my growing up as a boy in Pittsburgh where I could safely play outside after dark in 1945 with my fear of letting my daughters do the same in Raleigh in 1985, where “the monsters who hunt, who hurt, who haunt / us, rise up from our own dim streets.” The first time I read “Whose Children Are These?” in public, a woman in the audience told me it made her cry. I have had five children in two marriages and with each child I’ve stood and looked down at...
