Gary Barwin
Gary Barwin
Biography
Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, musician, and multidisciplinary artist and has published 25 books of fiction, poetry and numerous chapbooks. His latest books include For It is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems, ed. Alessandro Porco, Ampers&thropocene (visuals) and a new novel, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy. His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award and was also a finalist for both the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. It was also longlisted for Canada Reads 2021. He has released several recordings, including Blind Willie Johnson’s Consonants and the Tree Frogs of Jamaica. A PhD in music composition, his writing, music, media works and visuals have been published, presented and broadcast internationally. He has been Writer-in-Residence several universities and libraries and has taught creative writing at a number of colleges and universities and to at-risk youth. Barwin is the publisher of micropress serif of nottingham (since 1985) and a member of the Meet the Presses Collective. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario and at garybarwin.com
Poetics Statement
“Sometimes when I wash the dishes, I am seized by the notion that I can attain some kind of transcendent absolute, will have brushed my scrubby against a joyful, radiant beauty if I can just clean every speck, every burnt skirmish from the surface of the pots and pans. It’s a lovely idea really, but perhaps I’d be better off cleaning the dishes reasonably well, learning to appreciate the imperfections and burned-on rice fragments, and then leaving the kitchen and playing saxophone or organizing poetry readings which have a stubby, spattered, ill-attended beauty all of their own. Poetry is great at asking questions, at destabilizing and making us look things (language, life, baboons, dishes, abstractions) in a different or renewed way, asking where is the poem coming from –who and why are behind or in the poem—and what is the occasion that it was made for or presented. And how do we read things, including ourselves? What is stuff: language, the world, ideas, values, communication, looking, reading, hearing, speaking, listening, witnessing, making, power, bodies, hierarchies, values, life, poetry, thinking. And how are things connected to other things. What’s going on and what isn’t. Creative rioting, writhing, riting. Rising.”
Sample of Poet's Work
Blackbirds (video poem)
Saying Chaos like Cows (video poem)
Shopping for Deer
I went shopping for deer
there were no deer
the shopping cart became the deer
I brought it home
climbed inside
and turned off the lights
the seasons changed
I lived on earth
sometimes the bright sun shone
I became old
when I die, I will remember the deer
I will remember its wheels and antlers
I will remember its flesh and lightning
its womb of silver bones
Commencement for Cootes Paradise
1
Fish hovering above silt. Their mouths open, hoovering the almost dark.
10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. If humans are 60% water—heart 73%, lungs 83%—how many humans is that? Varicoloured humans reaching forward, displacing the river, swimming, floating in liquid sky.
Someone left a valve open.
They told us in science class: Love + Time = Death.
No, that was my grade 9 girlfriend. Our world is sensation and memory, our 73% brains, our 31% bones.
Stellar nucleosynthesis resulting in the complex organic molecules necessary for life formed in the protoplanetary disk of dust grains surrounding the Sun before the formation of the Earth + energy = city counsellors.
24 billion gallons of sewage is what is going on inside of us, while 24 billion gallons of sewage is what we do on the outside. Or, according to David Kessler, grief.
Old David Foster Wallace fish: Morning, boys. How’s the water?
Young DFW fish: What the hell is water?”
2
The moon fills bedrooms, kitchens, basements with its silver, staircases slick with shine. 24 billion gallons of fish slide into our homes, our 73% brain a stippled perch spawning at night.
Here’s the heart pumping under its sheath of shad.
Here’s largemouth bass slithering upstream toward heart chambers. A thousand vena cava tributaries, the watershed of our fist-size swims.
A valve releases fish and eels, frogs and water voles into our chests, our “forever” mudrooms and rec rooms. Here fish + eels + frogs + voles = 24 billion gallons of sewage and runoff.
A mouth a kind of valve, open—largemouthed, duckfaced—to the dark everywhere. Here our breathing strained through the weir of our teeth. How many breaths fill an Olympic pool? No. We breathe air, it’s the gills of our Grade 9 girlfriend where water fins.
City counsellors stock pockets with frogs, fish, eels, water voles, lift glasses from their civic desks, tip lakewater in. A sidereal biome. Removeable. A hands’ worth of pond or river. Shh, the susurration of rippling. Shh, the secrets held in a closed mouth, a net, a Celtic knot of fish.
What-the-hell water where fish glug and burble, tell-it-truth light slanted toward silt. What is river, is lake, is marsh, is Time + Death = Love.
My grade nine girlfriend and me on the shore of Cootes Paradise, human as driftwood, twig-sized toes sunk and wet in the near shore sandy muck, blood circulating under our high school skin as if across the upper city, combed by waterfalls raked over escarpment cliffs, runnelling down rivers into a lake where our feet stand in the cool and, hands in each other’s hands, we open our mouths to the dark, breathe stickleback, tadpole madtom, green sunfish, finescale dace, northern hognose sucker.
How much dark in a river, in a lake or marsh? How much light? Watershed of night, of day. Those with veins. Those without.
No, it wasn’t my grade nine girlfriend. It wasn’t me. We weren’t looking at 24 billion gallons, its dark surface, 100 billion pounds of starlight gone. A nearly 100% full moon.
What + what = this? What + what is here to breathe the silt of this dark night?