“Tina Barry on My Year of Drawing Swans”
Maureen Alsop asked poets to identify a poem that they feel captures the essence of their poetry in a particular collection, aka their ‘signature’ poem. Here the poets explore Tina Barry’s “My Year of Drawing Swans”.
My Year of Drawing Swans
When the need to render a beak lived inside me,
I’d swing one arm around a subway pole,
press the lead point of the pencil into the notebook
I carried.
A dark dot launched the curve of hard bill. Between its eyes,
the black knob, gateway to the swoosh of neck.
Stashes of swan studies filled the drawer of my bedside table.
I’d wake to the sky slouching off its cape and label their parts,
a new language I couldn’t stop writing: lore, nares. Covert:
its ledge of wings; the serrated lamella surrounding its tongue.
At jobs I loathed, I’d peek at torn pieces stuffed into folders;
darken a wing, shadow the water.
Once I had perfected the dusty diamond
of its foot, the center digit so real I could feel
its scalloped ridges with my finger,
I stood in the subway, poised to draw,
but the swans never returned to me.
MA: Please tell me how you selected this 'signature' poem to capture the book's essence?
TB: I choose “My Year of Drawing Swans” for the back of the book because it represented several themes that appeared frequently in I Tell Henrietta: An appreciation for the visual arts, and my own compulsive nature and need to create, that’s shown in the obsessive drawing of swans. The birds appear in many of the poems, often in unexpected ways, such as a date who showed up dressed as one.
MA: What would you most like for a reader to know about this collection? and/or what influenced your writing these poems?
TB: In early 2022, a young family member suffered a life-changing health crisis. Months later, after some of the shock had worn off, I began writing. The initial pieces were raw; one day I’ll revisit them, but as their recovery progressed, other stories evolved that needed to be told. I wanted to tell them, but to who?: Henrietta.
Henrietta is a character who serves as a portal into memories, ideas, questions, confessions. Many of the poems, prose poems, micros and hybrids are based on moments in my life, but I’m a storyteller by nature, so I had no qualms about leaping into fiction.
MA: I love process, please tell me about your writing practice? Where is this collection leading you next, what are you working on now?
TB: I wish I was one of those people who have a set time every day to work. That’s just not me. I try to write several times a week. Once I’m sitting at my desk, I usually start by telling myself I have nothing to say, and I will never be able to write another poem or story, then I write a couple of drafts that convince me I’m right. Then I start playing with them, and then I’m writing and I’m telling myself that every negative thing I said when I first sat down was nonsense, that no one could possibly write a better poem than the one I’m working on. Then I eat lunch, or a snack, or whatever, come back to the writing, and realize that the truth is somewhere in the middle, and I don’t care because I just love the act of writing, changing a word, cutting a stanza, finding a better title, seeing an image take shape.
I’m always working on several different projects at once. Right now, I have two books in the works: one that might be a chapbook or at some point soon, hopefully, a full collection of poems about ageing and relationships, that include my mother’s decline. The other is a lighter-hearted chap mostly written in the cheribun form. I also have a book that I started in 2020 and put aside. The timing isn’t right for it, for a number of reasons, but I’ll get back to it eventually.