poetofthemonthintervfeb

interview with

David Barker

1) Your latest book of poetry "Lunch-Hour Poems" is due out anytime now from Bottle Of Smoke Press. From what I understand, it is a collection of poems that have been written during lunch breaks over the past few years. Exactly how many years does the book cover? Could you give us a time frame?

As I write this, the book has been out for a few days now. Most of the poems were written over the past year or two. A few are older, written maybe five or six years ago. I've written poems on my lunch hour for many years. I haven't written very much at home because I've raised a big family, four daughters, and there's always been plenty to do at home besides writing. I just don't find the time to write at home, except on rare occasions. But I make time for it on my lunch hours. My habit has been to trade off days. Write one day, go out walking the next, write the following day, walk the next, because I need the exercise. I don't feel any great need to write every day. Two or three days a week is enough to get my better ideas down on paper. I could be more prolific, but I'd probably just produce more crap as a result. My goal is to capture the best thoughts I have and let the rest of it go. So, to answer your question more directly, the book covers work produced over about a two year period.

This is somewhat misleading to say, because many of the poems are about generic kinds of incidents and situations that have happened to me again and again over the course of my life. In that sense, the poems cover thirty years of working, struggling to feed a family, battling to stay half way sane in an insane world. They summarize my take on life up to this point. And I stress "up to this point" because I am constantly changing my mind on things from day to day. I'm one of those people who never land on a permanent position. Every day I wake up a slightly different person. I look around and say "what the hell is all this?" and I force myself not to form a judgement on it until I've had two cups of coffee and an hour to gain full consciousness. Then I re-evaluate, adjust my perspective, start again deciding what I think about life. So the poems in LUNCH-HOUR POEMS are snapshots of where I was at on something at the moment I wrote that particular poem. I probably changed my mind about it a day later, or even five minutes later. I don't know if this is normal, but it's how I function.

The danger of writing at work, at your desk, is that co-workers will come up and say "Are you on your lunch break? Don't let me interrupt you," and of course they do just that, and you wind up spending half of your lunch hour working instead of writing. There's not a lot of privacy in an office. I have learned to tune out all the conversations, but the people who walk up and talk to you can't be ignored. After all, I'm at my desk. They see the cup of green tea, the sandwich with a bite out of it, me typing something that doesn't look like official business, but they go ahead and assume that I must be available for work-related questions. I'm a database manager and statistics guy, so everyone comes to me all day long wanting numbers.

I tried writing on a big tablet, sitting outside in a park, under a tree, but it didn't work out. I would sit there for an hour and no words came. I'd watch people walk by. The wind would stir the leaves. The grass would smell green. If I did get down a few lines, it was always mediocre or worse. At the time, I assumed the problem was that I couldn't write in that environment. I've since realized that the real trouble was the size of the notebook I was using. I do much better with a smaller notebook -- the smaller, the better. I learned this not long ago, during a vacation, when I brought along a little pocket notebook and jotted down short poems with lines of two or three words, and the whole poem being not more than five or six lines long. The smaller pages forced me to be as concise and to the point as possible. To go straight for the target, hit it, and end. My poems got better when I began composing them in little notebooks. Or am I deluded? Is it merely a coincidence that my writing improved at that exact time, and there's no real relationship between the notebook and the quality of the poems?

2) So what sparked the idea to assemble a manuscript full of poems written during your lunch breaks?

Bill Roberts (editor of Bottle of Smoke Press) had the idea to call the book LUNCH-HOUR POEMS, and I loved it. He knew I was writing these poems at work and many of them have to do with the stress and strife of working for a living, and he came up with this concept, Lunch-Hour Poems. I was sending him every poem I wrote, in small batches, once or twice a week, and they were accumulating, piling up until he felt he had enough of them to make a book. He's selective, so not every poem written during that period made it into the book. And that's a good thing. He has excellent judgement as an editor. He's also great at coming up with good titles. Titles have always been a problem for me. Either I have one right away, and it's fine, or I have nothing, and it's a struggle to find something half-way suitable. Bill has come up with some great titles for groups of my poems and stories. The title for the broadside of three poems called TIME-CLOCK BLUES was his idea. He's suggested good titles for a few poems that were originally untitled in LUNCH-HOUR POEMS. STORIES FROM THE BRINK was another of his titles. When I'm at a loss for a title, Bill will think up a good one that feels right to me, that fits my work. Bill gets the credit for the concept of LUNCH-HOUR POEMS. The best title I could have come up with would have been something like 48 POEMS WRITTEN WHILE STRANGERS WALKED PAST MY OFFICE WINDOW. Hey, that's not too bad! But LUNCH-HOUR POEMS really tells the story better.

3) Is it safe for readers to assume that the poems found in this collection are an accurate autobiographical account of your own work related experiences?

Yes and no. All my poetry is fictional to some degree. I start with real life situations, either things that have happened to me or that I see going on around me, and something about it rubs me, irritates me, troubles me, puzzles me, and I mull it over for some period of time (five minutes or five years), and then I formulate the words that represent that situation and my take on it at the moment. So if I'm writing about work-related events, as I do in many of the poems in LUNCH-HOUR POEMS, I am probably going to be thinking of a recent event, and another similar event that happened a year ago, and others like it that happened ten or twenty years ago, and they all blend into one event.

Continued on next page--