An Interview with John Wall Barger

John Wall Barger is the author of six collections of poems, including Smog Mother (Palimpsest Press, 2022). His most recent book is The Elephant of Silence: Essays on Poetics and Cinema (LSU Press, 2024). Barger lives in Vermont and lectures in the writing program at Dartmouth College.

What’s a poem by someone else you wish you had written?

I really like James Tate. I love his poem, “It Happens Like This.” That poem is about a goat, where Tate does this kind of magical thing. The speaker doesn’t know the goat, and then at some point during the poem he does know the goat, and the goat shifts into something precious. By the end, the goat is maybe Christ: something incredibly precious and amazing. And somehow during the poem that change happens. So, I realize I keep trying to do that in my poems.

Do you write on the computer?

I do a lot of my deeper editing on the computer, but I use everything at my disposal: I use my phone. I write a lot of little poems on the Google Keep app. I take little notepads everywhere. I have empty journals that I fill.

Would you say, generally speaking, you start out longhand and then move over to the computer?

It really depends. I have bits of poems, ideas for poems, here and there. And then if I’m in a meeting, say, with a notepad, I’ll also be writing ideas for poems. I just read Alice Rahon’s Shapeshifter and wrote a poem in the margins there. Often, it’ll be just the beginning of a poem written longhand, then I’ll drag it onto the computer to do the deeper work.

Do you try to write a certain number of poems per week? Per month?

I started a log in 2011. I thought, “I’m a writer. I should keep a schedule.” My idea was that I would write five days a week. But that’s complicated because life happens: busyness and sickness and stress. Also, I was traveling in those years a lot. When you travel, it’s very hard to keep a strict writing schedule. And then, also, what is it to write for a day? Let’s say you sit down and only have ten minutes to write. Is that a “writing day”? I approached it obsessively: I needed to do at least three drafts of different poems for it to be a writing day and count as one of my five days per week. For many years, I kept that schedule. But lately, while teaching at Dartmouth, it’s much harder. And in Philadelphia too, there were whole months when I didn’t get to write because life carries you away.

What has been a setback or disappointment in your writing career?

Here’s the way I think about it: I’ve never been in Poetry Magazine, and I love Poetry Magazine. I’ve never been in The Paris Review. And there are amazing presses that haven’t published me: Graywolf Press, Copper Canyon Press. Is this a failure? No. You knock on doors. You knock on a door and that door doesn’t open. But another door opens or a window opens or a door behind the door opens.

How do you feel about teaching writing?

During the pandemic, while teaching at UArts in Philadelphia, I got to know some students really well and some of them are putting out books now and they’re just really cool poets and cool humans. So, that was a very good experience for me—kind of growing with them and watching them flourish.

Does teaching inspire you as a poet?

It does and it doesn’t. Sometimes I wonder if working at a post office might be better.

Does teaching hinder you in any way?

I’m a strong believer in negative capability—Keats’s idea that “being in uncertainty” is good practice for a poet. So, I feel like the sometimes-rigid over-articulation that’s necessary as a teacher or an editor isn’t always good for that state of mind because it rewards you for the certainty and over-articulation. Those things, if you take them too seriously, can hurt the wildness of the poem.

What is your weakness as a writer?

It’s all weakness. Just layers and layers of weakness. But I think the weaknesses are the ways in. The weaknesses are the strengths if we’re doing it right.

What is a lesson you’ve learned from publishing in literary journals?

When a poem of mine gets published, it starts to have an effect on my brain. I start to think that that poem has been approved by the world and so, for example, when I’m putting a book together, I tend to look at which poems have been published. So, it’s like, which ones have received the nod of approval from the world? Those must be the “good” ones. But we all know that’s not really how it works. If something is published, it doesn’t mean that it’s any better than any other poem.

What’s your favorite album?

I think Kid A. And Songs of Love and Hate, by Leonard Cohen, is also one of my favorites.

Are you spiritual at all?

I’m curious about Buddhism. And I meditate every day. My parents are meditators and they have a belief system that comes from India. So, I grew up with that—an offshoot of Sikhism—instead of Catholicism or Christianity. My sense of spirituality is partly Leonard Cohen, partly what I inherited from my parents, and partly my own disorganized idea of what Buddhism is.

Do you ever feel blocked as a writer?

There are long periods where I feel like a spider in a washbasin—just, you know, struggling to find traction. But blocked is a strong word. I very rarely feel blocked.

What are you working on now?

I have a book of poems coming out next year, which I’ve been editing. During the summer, I’ll have time to work on a second book of essays: on Italian film, David Lynch, and contemporary poetry. And then translating Italian. I’m translating a book of poems by Marina Pizzi, a fascinating poet who lives in Rome. I had a revelation a few months ago that Pizzi is a little like Sylvia Plath. So, I’m hoping this summer I can kind of use Plath as a key to interpreting Pizzi a bit better.

* This interview was conducted via Zoom on April 23, 2025.