Barbara Louise Ungar & Stuart Bartow
Stuart Bartow: After Barbara made a collage of lines from several of my poems, interspersed with responding lines of her own, she showed me the poem, and asked for suggestions. I edited the poem both for clarity and esthetics; we went back and forth with it several times.
Barbara Louise Ungar: Stuart takes part in the shaping of all my poems; we are partners, and each other's first readers. In this case, I had reread all his published work from the time before we met, and was astonished to discover that it seemed he had been writing "to" and "about" me during all those years. I pulled those lines, responded to them, then gave the result to Stuart, who reshaped it, as he always does with my work. He believes in the Blakean idea of "writing for the angels," and said, in this case, "the angel wrote back."
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Like Being Alive Twice
When you wrote the messages you heard in your sleep
There is another life you might be living or
Someone you never knew often wonders about you
they were my words
When you wrote
He senses someone in search of him,
his real body lost it was me
I flew eight thousand miles to Fiji
wings between the thighs
but you had gone
You searched strange kitchens
Doorways open in secret where ones
we are yet to meet
sleep naked under tables
Even after you gave up—
where the one I am unable
to stop loving
gazes forever through me
I was on my way
While you traveled widely in Salem
another earth
where wanderers are happy
in their lovesickness and sudden lunacy
Yes, I was walking barefoot by the purple Nile
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Stuart Bartow Stuart Bartow is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Whelk (Pgymy Forest Press, 2001) and Reasons to Hate the Sky (WordTech, 2008), as well as four chapbooks, including The Stars Belong to No One, winner of the Owl Creek Chapbook Prize (1994) and The Perseids, winner of the Palanquin Prize from the University of South Carolina (1997). This year his poem, “Shinto,” won the California State Poetry Sociey’s annual poetry contest. A professor of English at Adirondack Community College in upstate New York, and Chair of the Battenkill Conservancy, Bartow lives in trout-fishing heaven, Salem, New York.
Barbara Louise Ungar’s most recent poetry collection, The Origin of the Milky Way, won the 2006 Gival Press Poetry Award, the Adirondack Center for Writing Award for Best Book of Poetry 2007, and several other awards. Her manuscript in progress, Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life, was a finalist last year for the National Poetry Series and Sarabande Books’ Morton Prize. She is also the author of Thrift, and the chapbooks Sequel and Neoclassical Barbra, as well as the monograph Haiku In English. A professor of English at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, she lives in Saratoga Springs with her son Izaak.