The business of poetry
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Barr returned to Harvard, earned his MBA, and then waded into the corporate waters at Morgan Stanley, where his ability to balance his artistic and practical sides was further developed. He spent all day in contact with people, and enjoyed working in partnerships, he says, recalling 60-plus hour weeks.
"I thought of myself as a salesman," he continues. "The act of selling is the act of persuasion, and without it the world doesn't go around."
Poetry could also be described as an act of persuasion, but it doesn't always arrive at convenient times. During his long workdays, Barr jotted down lines on 3-by-5-inch notecards and then transferred them into journals. Eventually those ideas would end up in poems.
His writing time typically began at 3 a.m. "The wee hours are a wonderful time to write," he explains. "You have the quality of silence necessary. The sounds of the day before have fallen out."
The business world also seemed to fall away in those early hours, as he worked on poems about life, love, war, and the physical world. He hints at his balancing act in this poem from his book "The Hundred Fathom Curve":
Driving in rain
End of a weekend, going back,
my two tracks sinuate as one.
Skin of rain drawn tight by wind,
the windshield wipers don't keep up.
Posed in this airspace, passing
Purgatory Gulf Pop. 125,
I wonder why observe the limits, why
keep pulling it back,
when, let go, it would go
straight for a time,
then wander
off without assumptions,
questioning first the need for road.
In the late 1980s, his business and artistic interests began to merge. Barr was preparing to leave his job at Morgan Stanley, after 18 years, to start his own company. That's when he began to hear the voice of Ibn Opcit, a fictional Caribbean poet and gardener who became the central character in his book-length mock epic, "Grace." Opcit's jailhouse monologues about justice, death, and creation gave Barr "a way to say everything that mattered in life during my late 40s," he says. "It became my declaration of independence as a poet."
It also allowed him to express his feelings about the business world and government, while making "a case for all of us to be decent."
America, an economy dat hum
like a hamper of flies, where the top line and the bottom
are in easy walking distance. Cause us to say,
Here is a cornucopia feeding on itself....
He tap his foot. He declare bankruptcy.
He say "This too will pass from corporate memory.
The thing about commerce is it doesn't care."
All of Barr's experiences culminated in a teaching position at Sarah Lawrence College, the first part of his second career. There, his balancing act proved useful, because it allowed him to "shake up preconceptions about how to write differently." He could "share things [his students] hadn't heard before."
He hopes to do the same at the Poetry Foundation, where the stakes and the challenges are so much greater.The question is: Can he do it?
Past performance is no guarantee of future results - according to the financial adage - but it does indicate whether someone has the necessary qualities needed to succeed. By that measure, Barr's record is reason to be optimistic. But so much depends on that balancing act. Artistic and analytical. Creative and conservative. It's a fine line to walk indeed.
