Poet Spotlight: Barbara Crooker

This is part of a series highlighting some of the poets anthologized in Poetry of Presence. We thank the poets for providing the material. Today we shine the spotlight on Barbara Crooker.

Short bio: My work has appeared in a variety of literary journals, including Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and The Bedford Introduction to Literature. I’m the author of eight books of poetry; Les Fauves is the most recent. I’ve received a number of awards, including the 2004 W.B. Yeats Society of New York Award, the 2003 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships.

Thoughts on mindfulness and poetry: The practice of poetry and the practice of mindfulness are, for me, intertwined.  I can’t imagine one without the other.

A favorite quote (from my own work):

WHAT ONLY POETRY CAN DO

Make us stop, in our harried multi-tasking modern
(or post-modern) lives, away from the ambient light
of electricity and all that follows, and look up,
into the great glass eye of night, gazing in dumb
struck wonder at the coded messages of the stars.

Fun fact: So far this summer, I’ve picked seven pounds of strawberries, a whole tree full of sour pie cherries (with my husband)(and granddaughter), enough red and black raspberries for jam, and am about to pick blueberries next week.

Current work: I’ve been doing readings from my new book, Les Fauves, which features poems about France and ekphrastic poems on Fauve and Post-Impressionist paintings. (Ekphrastic poems have a conversation about paintings.)

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