I combine events, combine people, for the sake of focus and simplicity.  I may take a problem I've had with five different co-workers and talk about it as if it was all with this one, fictional co-worker.  Thus, the reader can assume that I'm basing the poems on actual autobiographical experiences, but can't assume that it actually went down the way I present it.  I wouldn't want anyone I work with to feel they recognize themselves in one of my poems.  It isn't about them, individually, although it may be about people like them that I've worked with.  Maybe I should put a disclaimer in the front of my chapbooks, like publishers do with fiction, saying nothing in here is real, it's all make believe.

Now, the reader can assume that I do indeed work in an office and have for many years.  I've been mainly a white-collar employee, doing clerical, administrative, and informational types of work.  I have had a few jobs in the blue-collar world, but they didn't last long because I quit them.  The work itself was tolerable, but the people were utterly insane: dull, frustrated, hostile animals out to inflict physical or psychic harm on
everyone around them.  On top of that, the work was physically demanding, the hours were long, and the pay was terrible.  My blue-collar jobs included laborer in a mushroom growing plant, which is like being a coal miner in a dark cave filled with manure, fungus and fog, and tree planter, which is like being Johnny Appleseed, carrying around a bag of miniature trees that you stick in the ground while climbing over the ruins of decimated forests with a ragged band of merry woodsmen swigging muddy drinking water. Short
answers to the question: sort of, kind of, maybe, not really, okay if you want to think that.

4) Okay, so let's switch gears and talk about David Barker "the person". Who or what initially turned you onto the art of poetry and the written word?

I started writing in high school, in tenth or eleventh grade.  All of a sudden, about 1964, I began writing poems.  I have no idea why.  The words just came to me, unbidden, and I was compelled to write them down.  Poets who excited me in those days,  who I wanted to emulate, included Blake, Shelley, Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas, E. E. Cummings, Kenneth Patchen, and the Beats.  I began reading the Beats when I was about 10 years old.  My older brother, Dan (a painter), had a paperback anthology called THE BEATS (1960),
that intrigued me.  It was edited by Seymour Krim and it had a great black and white photo on the cover showing serious and thoughtful bohemians sitting around their pad talking life and literature and smoking cigarettes.
I remember sitting on my bed in our Lakewood home, devouring that book.  The first two books I ever bought were a T.S. Eliot collection and Gregory Corso's GASOLINE.  I still have the Corso book.  My favorite Beat writer has always been Jack Kerouac, then Corso, then Ginsberg.  Also Richard Brautigan, who was a lesser known Beat before he became a Sixties icon. That period lasted until I discovered Bukowski.  My brother Dan loaned me the underground newspapers he got up in L.A. and that's where I first read
Charles Bukowski, in his "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" columns.  Once I had read Buk's poetry, a few years later, it was all over; he was my new God.  The two writers I learned the most from in my college days (1966 to 1973) were Bukowski and Gerald Locklin.  Both are still a strong influence on my writing.  From Buk I learned the value of honesty (always achieved at a great cost), and the value of the clean line.  From Locklin, the value of humor and irony, and again, the well-crafted line.  Both are master poets, I believe.  I also want to mention Steve Richmond, who has been a huge influence on my work.  I feel he is terribly underrated.  Richmond is a great American original.  I learned much from him that has freed me up as a poet.

5) Can you describe for us what the writing process is like for you? Do you prefer to write alone or in a workshop setting? What does it take to invoke your muse? Any quirky rituals we should know about?

My writing process is different for fiction and poetry.  When I'm doing fiction, I write in a mad burst, at breakneck speed, never stopping to fix anything, using whatever words immediately come to mind.  I've learned the hard way that if I slow down to polish, to ponder word choices or alternate sentence structures in the middle of the initial unfolding of the story, I lose the flow, the spontaneity, and the piece goes dead on me.  My goal is
to get it all down on paper before the idea fades, as a living thing, and only then, after the rough draft is done, do I  go back over it and refine.  With fiction, I revise a lot.  I may go through anywhere from three to twenty drafts before I'm satisfied with it.  Once I get there, I stop.

Poetry is a whole other thing.  I have two distinct ways of writing poetry.  The slow way, in which I have a vague idea in the back of my brain, and it lingers there for a long time, months or years, but it's just a half-formed idea that I recognize might become a poem some day; there are no words yet.  Finally, the time arrives when the words emerge, gather themselves into phrases that have a rhythm to them, and I write it down.   That's the slow way, and it usually results in longer poems.  Some of these are good (in my view), some of them are not.

The other way I write poetry is that I have an idea that comes straight out of my immediate experience, and I write it down very soon afterwards.  It could be a minute later, or, at the longest, a couple of days.  Most -- or all -- of the words are already there, "at  hand" as it were, when I write the poem.  I write poetry very fast, as fast as I can type or scribble with a pen.  I always write a complete first draft in one sitting.  I never write
a stanza one day and then add another stanza another day; that's just not me.  I don't revise my poetry very much, and I realize it is heresy in some circles to admit that.  Some poems are published as first drafts.  Others, I may change a line or two.  I almost never add anything.  My revisions consist almost completely of minor changes of wording, simplifications and clarifications.  If I can say it better in two words than in four, I'll make that change.  If, on rereading, I suddenly see an unintended meaning in a word, I'll change it.  I cut out all unnecessary stuff.  For me, less is always more with poetry.  If I can take something out, and the poem still works, out it goes.  Now, at times, I violate this rule by writing long rambling poems, but generally, it's how I operate.  The reason I don't revise much is that it seldom helps the poem.  My poems seem to be either right -- or close to it -- at first draft, or they will never be right.  I can't take a bad poem and make it a good poem.  Some poets can do this.  It doesn't work for me.  I think my poems have their fate determined at the moment of creation.  Either I hit the target, or I don't.  Either it's a good idea, or it isn't.  Because I sometimes hit the target, I don't question this attitude too deeply.  It works for me, and I go with it.  This is not to denigrate poets who revise heavily.  Some of my favorite poets do exactly that, and the result is art. It's an individual thing.

My esthetic is this:  say something, and say it well.  Clarity and simplicity.  Get out of the poem as soon as you can.  Don't give the reader the chance to get bored.  Humor never hurts.  Like Jim Rome (radio sports talk host) says:  "have a take and don't suck."

At the same time, I think it's possible to be operating on several levels of meaning in a poem.  The obvious surface meaning.  The subtext that can be discovered with a little digging.  Concealed personal meaning that the reader will likely never detect.  And then some mystic, etheric channel where the writer communicates psychically with the reader.  What plays into these layers of meaning is not only what is said in the poem, but what is not said. What the poet leaves out may be the most important thing.  But I'm starting to sound way too serious here.
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