Carla Barkman : part five

What poets changed the way you thought about writing? 

Erin Mouré: be weird, have fun, use all the words, get furious, cut and paste. Hilary Clarke, a professor at the University of Saskatchewan: say everything, leave nothing out. Christopher Dewdney: know the science, apply it, examine it in landscapes, bodies, brains, animals, insects. Anne Szumigalski: be a woman, be domestic, live through your creations. Anne Carson: cut to the chase. It can be hilarious, and powerful, to say exactly what you mean.

Carla Barkman : part four

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with? 

My work usually enters the world in ink on paper, my bedside journal. Often I record a mess of images and phrases first, stream-of-consciousness style, then start a poem. Sometimes I go back through old journals and find half-written poems there. Digging through the muck to find useful bits, assembling and reassembling, can be very satisfying. I feel fortunate to be meeting online once a month with Regina writers Bernadette Wagner and Shayna Stock to workshop new poems. Because of the pandemic, I’ve also been able to participate in sessions hosted in faraway lands that would otherwise be inaccessible, such as Columbia University’s narrative medicine series, which involve responding to a piece of literature as a group, then writing to a prompt, under the shadow of the text and in the company of writers and medical professionals from around the world. 

Carla Barkman : part three

How do you know when a poem is finished?

Like in a sonnet or a romantic relationship, once there is a reversal or a twist, it’s over. Like an essay, once the thesis has been restated in a different way and wider implications considered, it’s over. Thesis / antithesis must both be there in some form. Sometimes a powerful image merely threatens to take down what has been set up, and readers are invited to decide whether it will fall.  This is what I aim to do; I know I’m not always successful. Some poems are stories, with a protagonist and antagonist, climax and resolution, but I don’t seem to write these sorts of poems. 

Carla Barkman : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

Books were certainly important in my household - my mother was a high school English teacher, my aunt a professor of children’s literature - but I don’t recall that we read much poetry. Novels, definitely. I always had a sense that reading could transport a person to new worlds and lead to a deeper understanding of the self. During junior high, my friend Nadine Rae and I made up stories about boarding schools, riding academies, murders, witches, fairies, which led me to start writing things down. Another friend, Erin MacDonald, introduced me to poetry - that of the Romantics and of bands like Duran Duran. We wrote in tandem, finished each other’s poems, spurred each other on. After high school, a letter writing relationship with Reinhardt Heinrichs kept me going, generating words to share, trying to match his strangeness. During medical school, I often wrote during class, inspired by the scientific language and what I was learning about the mind and the body and how they are connected. 

Carla Barkman : part one

Carla Barkman: I’m a family physician and writer living in Regina, Saskatchewan with teenaged boys and too many cats. My poetry has appeared in nine cloud journal, Vallum, Grain, CV2, Stanzas, and other journals, the anthologies Collected Sex, Line Dance: An Anthology of Poetry, Groundswell: The Best of Above/ground Press 1993-2003, and is forthcoming in Apart: a year of pandemic poetry and prose. I am passionate about narrative medicine, multi-day hikes, swimming, and cats. 

What are you working on?

I have five or six things on the go, mostly to divert myself when one begins to feel cumbersome. Without an assignment and a due date, I find it difficult to bring projects to completion. So, I take university classes (just finished a B.A. in English, though, sadly, and can’t decide what, if anything, to do next) and enter contests. Currently, I’m editing and assembling old poems for submission, culling diaries for a creative non-fiction piece that I hope not to give up on because it’s getting huge, and playing with a group of Erin Mouré’s poems, massively expanding my vocabulary in the process.