On this episode of Awakeners, Lena chats with poets Rick Barot and Brian Teare, who met at Stanford University more than twenty years ago. Teare titled Barot’s first book, and the two have been collaborating ever since.
We discuss “horizontal” mentorship, ethical pedagogy, Adrienne Rich, their evolving approaches to writing about art and the environment, and how they’ve helped one another “re-see” another queer artist’s work. In the second half of our conversation, we hear a poem from both Rick and Brian written in response to the same museum retrospective, and which both appear in their most recent books.
“The real reward to me of being in an MFA were the friendships I made. I don’t think it’s a controversial thing to say that they were my real mentors.” —Rick Barot
“Material culture, print culture, teaching, politics, the actual practice of poetry, the role of visual art in work and in our lives… there are so many overlaps that we never run out of things to talk about.” —Brian Teare
A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of seven critically acclaimed books, including Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize. His most recent publications are a pair of book-length ekphrastic projects exploring queer abstraction, chronic illness, and collage: the 2022 Nightboat reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and the fall 2023 publication of Poem Bitten by a Man, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award. An Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia, Brian lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.
Rick Barot's most recent book of poems is Moving the Bones, published by Milkweed Editions in 2024. His previous collection, The Galleons, was longlisted for the National Book Award. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The New Republic, The Adroit Journal, and The New Yorker. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Stanford University. He lives in Tacoma, Washington and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University.
MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE:
Introduction to the folio Teare commissioned in response to the PMA Jasper Johns retrospective
Rick Barot’s poem “Looking at the Romans”
Jasper Johns’s cross hatch works
Jasper Johns’s White Flag (1955)
Brian Teare’s poem “White Flag (1955)” from Poem Bitten By a Man
Adrienne Rich’s poem “Rauschenberg’s Bed”
Martin Mitchell’s review of Rick Barot’s During the Pandemic in Phoebe Journal
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