Profile by Brooke Dowd, Class of 2005

Barbara Crooker writes largely about the concerns of ordinary life: raising children, planting a garden, mowing the lawn. She feels that in her work, the “I” in a poem is not a product of the imagination, but rather, comes from real experiences. As an analogy, Ms. Crooker quotes jazz musician Charlie Parker: "If you ain't lived it, it won't come out your horn." All of her writing exemplifies this ideal. She strives to make her poems true to events in her life, while allowing them to live on the page independently, as lasting acts of language.

Ms. Crooker is the author of more than 500 poems printed in anthologies, books, and magazines. She has also published ten chapbooks of poetry, starting with Writing Home in 1983. Her work has won numerous prizes, and she was even nominated for a Grammy Award for her participation in the audio version of the popular anthology, Grow Old Along With Me – The Best is Yet to Be. Recently, Garrison Keillor has read seven of her poems on NPR’s show “The Writer’s Almanac.” Her first full-length book, Radiance, was published in 2005 by Word Press.

In talking about her writing process, Ms. Crooker uses a baseball metaphor to explain that publishing is the last thing on her mind when she writes: “I'm just trying for a good poem, a solid base hit, each time at bat. If, rarely, it turns into a better poem, a triple or even a home run, I'm amazed, and can just say ‘thank you.’”

Her insistence on lived personal experience in poetry doesn’t require all of her poems autobiographical, or even constrain her subject matter. Ms. Crooker’s poems show a striking range of topics, including both the raising and the loss of children, travels through Paris, art, music, aging, childhood memories, and world events such as 9/11 and the war in Iraq. Some poems juxtapose diverse topics for surprising effect, as in “Nearing Menopause, I Run into Elvis at Shoprite,” a poem that compares the emotional states of growing older with those of adolescence.

Ms. Crooker’s faith shines through in many of her poems, though she is not an overtly religious writer. Rather, her spirituality comes out in a subtle form, as in her poem “Praise Song,” a part of her 9/11 series:

Praise the light of late November,

the thin sunlight that goes deep in the bones.

Praise the crows chattering in the oak trees;

though they are clothed in night, they do not

despair. Praise what little there's left:

the small boats of milkweed pods, husks, hulls,

shells, the architecture of trees. Praise the meadow

of dried weeds: yarrow, goldenrod, chicory,

the remains of summer. Praise the blue sky

that hasn't cracked. Praise the sun slipping down

behind the beechnuts, praise the quilt of leaves

that covers the grass: Scarlet Oak, Sweet Gum,

Sugar Maple. Though darkness gathers, praise our crazy

fallen world; it's all we have, and it's never enough.

As a student at Douglass College in the sixties, Ms. Crooker came of age during the Vietnam War. The events of her early life have shaped her politics; as she says: “I think we were misled in going to war in Vietnam, and I’m afraid we’re making the same mistake again.” Some of her current social concerns are the environment, and the lack of support for adults with disabilities.

Ms. Crooker’s poems make her readers realize that how we live our short lives, how we gather the experiences that become poetry, is what really counts. As she says in her poem “Sometimes, I Am Startled Out of Myself”: “All we do is pass through here, the best way we can.”

For more information on the poetry of Barbara Crooker, and for links to some online versions of many of her poems, visit her website at www.barbaracrooker.com.