Books by Rutgers Faculty
Poetry describes the commonplace, transcendent
Archived article from Oct 24, 2005
By Cathy Karmilowicz
From verses about coaching Little League and putting one’s child to bed to reflections on politics, religion and 9/11, “The Black Beach” (University of North Texas 2004), a book of poetry by J.T. Barbarese, is about everyday aspects of life.
“There was no preconceived theme,” says Barbarese, an associate professor of English in Camden. “But most of the poems are about longing for transcendence beyond what is available through love, the senses and experience.”
Released last spring, “The Black Beach” won the Vassar Miller Prize for Poetry from the University of North Texas. Judges for the prize say that Barbarese’s fourth book “constantly delights with its questing, surprising and not-easily-satisfied imagination.” Reviewers have praised it for “memorable poems of the human predicament” [Eleanor Wilner] and its “uncanny ability to size up the urban scene, then hallow and harrow it” [Maxine Kumin].
“The Black Beach” differs from Barbarese’s last three books in that it isn’t full of the formalist poetry for which he is known. “It’s better than ‘A Very Small World,’” he says, referring to his last published collection of poems spun from events spread over a decade, including the death of his father. “These poems are more now.”
What place, though, can poetry occupy in mainstream culture when that “now” places less and less emphasis on the written word, especially the written word when molded into formats and formulas that are hundreds of years old?
“Poetry is about memory and remembering what goes on in this world. It’s also a means of self-expression. There’s something about poetry and its truthfulness that can’t be reached in any other form,” Barbarese says. He explains that he has always written poetry but that he has focused on formal poetry – sonnets, sestinas, villanelles – because there is comfort in the form. “There’s an aspect of playing to it, of gaming with language that makes it attractive.”
Barbarese, who was born and raised in South Philadelphia and contributed to “The Italian-American Reader,” finds poetry is also a way for immigrants or children of immigrants to become visible to a culture that is committed to excluding them. “It’s about representing yourself as part of the mainstream and recouping yourself in a culture that is not your own,” he says.
While “The Black Beach” emphasizes free verse over formal poetry, Barbarese says that the form his poems take is always a factor in his work and in the work of other poets writing in free verse. “Much of 20th-century poetry is not formless, but is poetry that for the most part abandoned the traditional forms for patterns that more or less discovered their shape or form as they moved.”
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