Courtesy of Rick Barot
On Feb. 9, the Lewis & Clark English Department resumed programming for the 2025-26 Visiting Writers Series, hosting award-winning poet Rick Barot. Barot has published three books of poetry. At LC, he performed a reading from his prose poetry collection, “Moving the Bones,” which was written during the COVID-19 pandemic and published in 2024.
The evening began with a round of introductions given by Administrative Coordinator Amy Baskin and Associate Professor of Humanities Jerry Harp, who both praised Barot’s work.
“It’s like inhabiting the sacred space of ancient tragedy, complete with chorus and complex dialogue, though Barot skillfully and mindfully leads us through the tragedy to the edge of what some might even call the precincts of the sacred, giving words to what cannot be named,” Harp said.
Barot took to the podium, expressing appreciation for Harp’s words of praise.
“I always know I’ve got a good introduction when I feel embarrassed. I feel deeply embarrassed right now. Thank you very much, Jerry,” Barot responded.
Barot prefaced his reading with a simple request: that the audience withhold from reading along as he performed his poems. Later, during a pause for discussion in between poems, a student asked Barot why he made this request.
“(The poems) have slight differences from the text which are in the book. And I’ve been doing this for a long time now where I will have a reading version that is tweaked just a little bit so that certain kinds of syntactical complexities are smoothened out or certain,” said Barot.
Barot continued, adding that this mindful diversion from reading along was influenced by generationally recognized poet James Merrill, whose reading Barot had the pleasure of attending in New York City.
“He said something that was very profoundly moving to me. He said that, when you’re reading a poem on the page, you can take your time to read it carefully and to go back to things. And that’s a very different sort of relationship to the poem when you’re listening to it, that’s a very different experience, right? I want to honor the listener’s experience of the poem by making the poem legible to them in that way,” Barot said.
Barot launched his reading with the first poem in “Moving the Bones” titled “Pleasure,” which was followed by nine selections from his 30 pandemic prose poems, each beginning with the line “During the pandemic.”
These poems were complimented by an interlude of questions, during which Barot spoke to a comment regarding his attention in his writing, stating that he sees his mode of writing to be in the style of a “junk collector.”
“I love gathering glossy, glittery things. But not everybody is going to feel that way about those things, meaning that there’s a story or a question or emotion attached to that thing that I’ve noticed. The poem is then an occasion to figure out, ‘why is that?’ … The question becomes what is the significance of that? So I think the space of the poem is a place where you can have that space of inquiry, attention and inquiry coming together. That’s what I think the poem tries to be,” Barot said.
When asked by an audience member if he has images or objects he has been called to repeat in his work, Barot shared that he thinks of his writing as a kind of thrifting, sorting both beauty and junk. He implored writers in the audience not to feel ashamed of their compulsive tendencies while writing.
“Don’t demonize your own obsessive tendencies as a writer or as an artist. In fact, those are the things that make you who you are. So in fact, you should lean into them, right? Rather than treating them as flaws or problems in your art, they might be the reason why you’re doing it at all,” Barot said.
The reading resumed, and Barot continued with the title poem from “Moving the Bones” followed by “The Field” and ended with two unreleased poems titled “The Cellists” and “Ghost.”
In the audience, I could not help but get swept up in visualizing the carefully crafted images laid bare in Barot’s prose: the hazy black figures in the field; the child eating a mango, time on his lips; the faces of students checkerboarded on a computer screen. As the reading progressed, I kept returning to a series of lines in “Pleasure,” which are as follows:
“My mind has a slow metabolism. It is slow to understand what anything means. But it understands that if you look at something long enough, it will have something to say to you.”
As the event drew to a close, Barot answered the audience’s final questions. Responding to an inquiry about his role as a poet and writer, Barot recalled a quote from poet and critic Allen Grossman:
“‘The work of poetry is about valuing the human.’ And I love that, and I believe in it, and sort of my take on that is to think of my work in poetry as a way of preserving what I call the face of the beloved. Being the people I love, the ideas that I love, the objects that I love, the stories that I love, the poems that I make. They’re kind of like these safe deposit boxes where I put those things and they can be held and guarded there. That is an idea that I think is consistent for me all through my life as a poet,” Barot said.
The Visiting Writers Series for the 2025-26 academic year has two remaining events: poet and novelist Joe Wilkins on Feb. 24, and author Elizabeth Willis on March 12.
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