Katherine Barrett Swett

July 19, 2019

“City of Refuge” by Katherine Barrett SwettPosted by

Katherine Barrett Swett

CITY OF REFUGE

I dream we’re exiled to a distant land,
a home for careless parents searching for
the lost, a place where locals understand
we’ll never find what we had years before;
and when a stranger there makes idle chat,
we know he’ll know that we have a dead child
or two and he does too and he’ll know that
you talk about the dead as if alive.
For in the waking world we hesitate
to mention her; we have to make a choice
between our neighbor’s staring at his plate
and somehow seeming to have lost his voice,
or our just saying that we have no daughter,
the way a drunk might say his gin was water.

—from Rattle #63, Spring 2019

__________

Katherine Barrett Swett: “I write a poem every day. I always write in a notebook, on lined paper, with a sharp pencil. Some days I do not get to my notebook until late at night and have no more than ten minutes; other days I spend more than an hour on a poem. I write in the house and outdoors, at my desk and on the subway, before my first cup of coffee and after my last glass of wine. I write free verse, haiku, sonnets, villanelles. Subsequently I choose the better efforts, and revise and edit on the computer. I can go a month and write nothing that will ever leave my notebook, or I could have a week where every day I write something that I want to type up. I live with a photographer, and I think my notebook is a bit like his contact sheets—you look for the image that is worth working over in the dark room—or nowadays in Photoshop—and then printing.”

 

Katherine Barrett Swett is the guest on episode #37 of the Rattlecast! Click here to watch …

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October 5, 2018

“Marginalia” by Katherine Barrett SwettPosted by

Katherine Barrett Swett

MARGINALIA

I read my daughter’s old Freud,
her college book, an introduction
to parapraxes, how we avoid

significance in small disruptions.
I read her margin notes,
quick summaries and explanations

of his points. What’s lost
is her. I want to hear her
make some crack to roast

the guy. I turn the page. Nearer:
she’s written Dad by forgetting names,
and something made her jot down Flubber.

I also look for hints of blame,
some scribbled clue about intent,
the words that might help me to frame

the subsequent event.
Then this: if worried about a slip—
tend to—does that make it real?—or accident?

A friend said she stopped at the top.
We’ll never know why she paused—
To catch the sun? Check out the slope?

Likely a patch of ice caused—
No way to know or to avoid—
She used to “why” and I “becaused,”
but now all answers are destroyed.

—from Rattle #60, Summer 2018

__________

Katherine Barrett Swett: “I write a poem every day. I always write in a notebook, on lined paper, with a sharp pencil. Some days I do not get to my notebook until late at night and have no more than ten minutes; other days I spend more than an hour on a poem. I write in the house and outdoors, at my desk and on the subway, before my first cup of coffee and after my last glass of wine. I write free verse, haiku, sonnets, villanelles. Subsequently I choose the better efforts, and revise and edit on the computer. I can go a month and write nothing that will ever leave my notebook, or I could have a week where every day I write something that I want to type up. I live with a photographer, and I think my notebook is a bit like his contact sheets—you look for the image that is worth working over in the dark room—or nowadays in Photoshop—and then printing.”

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May 30, 2016

“Dust” by Katherine Barrett SwettPosted by

Katherine Barrett Swett

DUST

Constance Woolson died
in Venice January 24;
an apparent suicide,
she was not 54.

Henry James said half one’s feeling
for her was anxiety.
He wrote it repeatedly
in letters that scholars find revealing
of James’s ongoing anxiety.

He thought her cheerful manner a facade
as flowers set in the window
have nothing to do with what’s inside.
Did he think how
the pots might fall below,
the careless maid knocking
them off the windowsill?
His metaphor is shocking
as Woolson was the pot that fell.

She would hate the bios and novels
about her love-lorn melancholy.
She was a writer who wanted readers;
and, of course, she was lonely,
living abroad, far from home, to save money.

I reread her novels most years.

I like the smell of old papers and books,
of library stacks, forgotten lives.
I take them like snuff in the afternoon,
the past boxed up like Bluebeard’s wives.

Who isn’t lonely as she grows older?

I clean the embossed spine
of East Angels, bought for nothing
when second-hand books first went online.
I spend hours dusting
and wiping each shelf with lavender oil
to fight off mildew and soil.

The last Christmas she turned down
all invitations. She wanted to be alone
with her things and memories.
Her gondola wound
for miles around the lagoon.

I am now her age, and I don’t believe
she killed herself for love.
Hers was a deeper grief,
and she was not afraid to die;
she wrote that repeatedly.

James couldn’t get over
that suicide is very impolite
—it seemed so out of character—
like refusing to eat your host’s meat.
I think she reached the limit
of memory, writing and stuff.
Even a gentle lady has the right
to say enough, not enough, enough.

—from Rattle #51, Spring 2016
Tribute to Feminist Poets

__________

Katherine Barrett Swett: “For me the most interesting work of feminism is the recovery of lost lives and lost writing. I have studied the writings of 19th century women for 30 years. I am amazed by the bravery and tenacity of women who wrote and still write against enormous pressures to be silent. I love to enter into their worlds and break that silence.”

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August 17, 2015

“The Poe Cottage, 1992” by Katherine Barrett SwettPosted by

Katherine Barrett Swett

THE POE COTTAGE, 1992

The country has abandoned it,
but not the wild.
Crackheads sit

on ruined benches in the park,
crows call from plane
trees, pitbulls bark

at children playing in the glass,
the dirtied dream
of bureaucrats

who hoped once to commemorate
local genius,
not recreate

the House of Usher, death, unrest,
delirium.
Our guide confessed,

“I sleep in the house when I can.
I have a room
in Manhattan,

but it’s quiet here and near Fordham
where I’m in school.
At four a.m.

I even play my violin.
No one complains.”
We followed him,

stooping as we came inside
the dark, low walls
where his child bride

lay in a room three paces wide,
only a coat and cat
for warmth, and died.

—from Rattle #48, Summer 2015
Tribute to New Yorkers

__________

Katherine Barrett Swett: “I have lived in New York City for my entire life. I was born in the same hospital where my children were born and teach at the same school where I was a student. These facts make me that rare creature, a provincial New Yorker. I like to write about the intimate aspects of New York life, not about ambition or skyscrapers, but about caged animals, anonymous ailanthus trees, obscure museums. To someone like me, New York can seem as small, as intimate and as unexpected as a brief poem. How do you make sense of chaos? You divide it into lines, what the city fathers called a grid plan.”

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August 13, 2015

“Central Park Zoo, 1970” by Katherine Barrett SwettPosted by

Katherine Barrett Swett

CENTRAL PARK ZOO, 1970

Back in the old zoo—the place the child
of New York’s Parks commissioner once called
Sing-Sing for beasts, where elephants and wild
cats, bears and rhinos were all jailed,
sliced into strips of pacing fur, the shriek
and stink of monkeys everywhere, a mess—
it was not pastoral or picturesque,
and unprotected by a wilderness,
forced to face a hungry, hot stare,
we felt them close and thought, we are like this,
monkeys fighting, lions with twitching haunches,
their paunches swinging; and while we ate our lunches,
children circled round the chipped green benches,
taunting each other, “you belong in there.”

—from Rattle #48, Summer 2015
Tribute to New Yorkers

__________

Katherine Barrett Swett: “I have lived in New York City for my entire life. I was born in the same hospital where my children were born and teach at the same school where I was a student. These facts make me that rare creature, a provincial New Yorker. I like to write about the intimate aspects of New York life, not about ambition or skyscrapers, but about caged animals, anonymous ailanthus trees, obscure museums. To someone like me, New York can seem as small, as intimate and as unexpected as a brief poem. How do you make sense of chaos? You divide it into lines, what the city fathers called a grid plan.”

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