INTERVIEW: LOCAL POET BARBARA UNGAR talks “after naming the animals”
“It seems to me to be the role of the artist to communicate in a way that people can understand clearly and take to heart, so that we can change our ways and save ourselves, along with other species.”
For our first poetry interview, I sat down and spoke with area poet Barbara Ungar. Barbara has been a part of the Upstate New York scene for many years now and I finally got the opportunity to ask her a few questions about her life and her work. Barbara has a new book of poetry out entitled “After Naming The Animals“ just in time for Christmas and for people who love poetry, it would make a perfect gift. In the future, we will be interviewing more local writers and poets that are currently creating a community here in Albany, NY and the Capital Region. So, with no further introductions, here's an interview with an area poet of much interest and a few words about how writing her poetry came into being. Thank you Barbara for your time and for sharing your thoughts with our readers.
[R.M. Engelhardt]: Your new book of poetry is called After Naming the Animals. Would you tell us a little bit more about it?
[Barbara Ungar]: “In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it is perched,” the scientist Paul Ehrlich writes. After Naming the Animals attempts to confront this, the sixth extinction, without despairing. This book grew out of a chapbook, EDGE (named for the EDGE lists of Environmentally Distinct and Globally Endangered species). Many of the poems focus on one particular endangered or extinct species. For example, “The Last Jaguar,” concerns the last jaguar living in the United States, while “Lonesomest George” relates the life and death of a Hawaiian tree snail, the last of its kind, in a laboratory. “El Zunzuncito” is devoted to the smallest hummingbird, while “Calling Blue Whales” is about the largest mammal on our planet. Other poems deal more broadly with living in these times and coping with what has been called “climate despair”: how do we confront the truth about what we are doing to our home, yet find the courage and strength to continue?
While my prior book, Save Our Ship, (which launched in fall of 2019, right into the COVID void) concerns the dire state of our planet, the poems in After Naming the Animals focus more specifically on the sixth extinction. I became more acutely aware of this after reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, E. O. Wilson’s Half Earth, and David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth, all highly recommended. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) estimates that we have less than ten years before climate change will become irreversible, setting off cascades of interconnected catastrophes, which we are only beginning to experience, (fires, floods, hurricanes, droughts, etc.) and which will continue to get worse throughout our lives, even if we start doing the right things, which we haven’t, yet. The question is, how much worse, and that is up to us: we have the knowledge. We lack only the political will to save ourselves (bizarrely enough). This has become the focus of my writing, and was the focus of my teaching as well, until The College of St. Rose went under, in June of 2024, when my book was published by The Word Works.
[RE]: How long did it take to write?
[BU]: Four years, which is about average for me for a full-length book of poems. I began working on the poems for EDGE in 2018, and it was published by Ethel Zine as a limited-edition chapbook, in 2020. (A chapbook is generally about half the length of a full-length collection, which is at least 48 pages). Those animal poems became the core of this book. After Naming the Animals was finished by 2022, but there is often a significant lag between the writing and publishing of poetry, as there was in this case.
[RE]: Do you have a writing routine?
[BU]: Yes. Daily free-writing. My bible is Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg; I’ve been free-writing daily for decades now, as a kind of meditative practice, and as a way both to warm up and prepare for other writing. I try to write first thing in the morning, but sometimes it doesn’t happen ’til night, and if I miss a day, I don’t beat myself up over it. I think of it like fishing: you’re
casting out lines, waiting to feel a tug. If I’m lucky, and hook something, I can happily work on it all day; I love to revise. Then, on either the last or first day of the month, I go back (highlighter in hand) and reread that month’s scribbling: 99% of it is compost, but I look for individual lines or images that might spark a poem, or sometimes I can collage lines from the journal into a poem. Overall, it’s a way of staying in writing shape, being present for inspiration if and when it hits, and also getting to know your own mind. I have over 100 volumes of journals (going back to when I was 17) that I keep meaning to reread, but haven’t managed to yet.
[RE]: Most of all, why do you write poetry?
[BU]: It’s just what I do. I started as a child and never really stopped. I enjoy it. It makes me happy. It’s therapeutic. William Stafford calls it The Golden Thread that will see you through the labyrinth, and that has been true for me. My first marriage ended disastrously, and that was when I really lit on Goldberg’s daily writing practice as a way to save my own life.
[RE]: Who are a couple of writers or poets you admire?
[BU]: Sappho and Catullus. Li Bai and Tu Fu. Rumi and Kabir. Issa and Basho. Dickinson and Whitman. O’Hara and Bishop. Clifton and Komunyakaa. Sean Thomas Dougherty and Patricia Smith, who come out of the performance scene, and are equally powerful on the page. Way too many to list here. Of my peers, I am currently in awe of Martha Silano, who also writes eco-poetry, most recently This One We Call Ours. She was recently diagnosed with ALS and is writing astonishing poetry about that, like a series of self-elegies just published in POETRY. Another poet I admire is Jessica Cuello, a high-school French teacher in Syracuse, NY, who has been releasing a string of amazing books – most recently, Yours, Creature, an epistolary biography of Mary Shelley in poems. There are also many local poets I began to name, but I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings by leaving them out, because really, I could keep going on for pages.
[RE]: And what or who inspired you to become a poet?
[BU]: My mother read poetry to me, one of my best early memories. My mother was pretty crazy, and I think the rhythm of poetry calmed her down and made her able to hold me and interact with me in a way she couldn’t otherwise. Her father had also written light verse, so maybe it’s in the genes. We had a big yellow book, Time for Poetry, for children: some favorites included Edward Lear, his nonsense alphabet and especially “The Jumblies”; Robert Browning’s “The Pied Piper of Hamlin,” a long narrative poem about rats and mass child abduction I adored; Lewis Carroll; Dr. Seuss; and many more. I loved them so much that as soon as I could write, at six or seven, I began to imitate them. I illustrated, too, lots of rhymed metrical verse about elves and fairies and such.
I had two wonderful teachers: Mrs. Miller in grade school, who sent a poem, “Rain,” to a student magazine when I was eight, my first publication (I had a long dry spell after that); and Miss Anderson, in Jr. High, who saw me, and who assigned us J. D. Salinger. Through him, I discovered haiku, which I still write, and that became a window into Asian poetry. In my 20s I tried to write fiction instead, because I wanted to be read by family and friends, most of whom don’t read poetry. When I finally went back to grad school at 30, it was in both fiction and poetry, but Edna O’Brien was my negative muse: she convinced me that I didn’t have what it takes to write fiction, so I came out of City College writing only poetry. I learned that writing is so hard that you had best concentrate on what comes to you most naturally rather than try to become something you aren’t. Bill Matthews was a great poetry teacher at CCNY, and after I moved up here to teach at St Rose, I modeled my poetry workshops on his; I also studied with another terrific teacher and poet, Frank Bidart, at the New York State Summer Writers’ Institute at Skidmore.
[RE]: Do you think poetry can make a difference in these uncertain times? In people's lives?
[BU]: Oh, yes. While scientists have been warning us of the dangers of the climate crisis for decades, they have not been able to communicate the emergency in ways the general public seems to comprehend. Mass media hasn’t fared much better, particularly since the facts have been muddied by corporate-funded misinformation. Therefore, it seems to me to be the role of the artist to communicate in a way that people can understand clearly and take to heart, so that we can change our ways and save ourselves, along with other species.
I’ve been rereading Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, in which she contends that revolution really happens through culture first, before it bursts forth historically, and I believe that: poetry, like all the arts, is part of that underground change. There is a growing field of eco-poetry: my particular slant is to incorporate science in a way that is both fun and informative. My poetry is accessible, and my goal is to reach as broad an audience as possible, including those who don’t generally read poetry. I take it as a great compliment when someone tells me they don’t usually read, like, or understand poetry, but they get my work.
A key poem in After Naming the Animals is “Weight,” which I was particularly pleased to publish in Scientific American last year, to reach a broader audience. It is based on a scientific study that weighs all life on Earth, revealing that we humans comprise only one hundredth of a percent (.01%) of all life on the planet, though we tend to think only we matter. My focus in After Naming the Animals is the tragic loss of wildlife (which comprises only 4% of all mammals remaining on the planet), due to us (33% of mammals) and our livestock (another 63%) comprised mainly of cows and pigs. In other words, it is not a question of this or that wild species being endangered, but rather that our current unsustainable mode of agriculture has resulted in the endangerment of all wild species. And that, in turn, endangers us.
While writing and reading poetry may seem a quixotic way to attempt to save anything, I secretly believe the famous claim of Percy Shelley (Mary Shelley’s husband) that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” and I also believe that the best way to avoid despair is through action. I feel I can be most effective by doing what I do best and love most: writing and reading. I try to add my little Cindy-Lou-Who voice to the chorus, to try to wake people up to the fact that we have very little time left to stave off irreversible climate change, and its attendant catastrophes, as well as species extinction. Our species.
[RE]:Any big projects in the works?
[BU]: Besides saving the world and humanity? Yes. Stuart Bartow, my best friend and first reader for the last 22 years, and my consort for the past 18, died of cancer in January. I am rereading all his work to help my editor at The Word Works compile his The Whole Shebang: New and Selected Poems. It is due out in June of 2025, and will inaugurate The Bartow Prize for Environmental Poetry. It’s a labor of love, to help keep his name and words alive in the world. He was a wonderful nature writer, in many forms: lyric poetry, lyric essays, haiku, and haibun. He was also a Distinguished Professor at SUNY Adirondack, and an environmentalist who helped found and then chaired the Battenkill Conservancy for almost three decades.
It’s been a year of loss for me, beginning with Stu. I have also lost two cats (Gracie, mine, and Elvis, his); two dear poet friends; and my job at the College of Saint Rose. Oh, and possibly our country, or democracy, though it’s too early to tell, and we never really were a democracy, anyway. So I couldn’t write for months, apart from my journal,
where I’ve been trying to process all the losses. Then, I began to write mourning poems pieced together from my journals, and just this past month I’ve been able to write from scratch, more like my usual practice, so maybe I’m recovering a bit. I’ve got a chapbook of these mourning poems almost ready to send out, with a working title of If It Be Not Now. Or maybe Waiting for your Ghost. Then I expect I will develop that into a full-length book, with a somewhat broader perspective: we certainly all have a lot to mourn these days. I’m thinking of trying my hand at some essays, as well, to perhaps reach a broader audience, since a lot more people read prose than poetry.
[RE]: Do you have any readings or poetry events coming up in the future?
[BU]: Dec. 19 at the Center for Social Justice in Albany will be reading #17 for this book, since May, so I’m ready to take a break. I think my next reading is online in January. I’d like to do at least one reading in Boston and another in NYC, but I don’t have any dates yet. I haven’t wanted to travel; I’ve cancelled a few readings in NYC because I didn’t have the psychic energy, and my grief was causing too much anxiety. I am hoping that will change by spring. In the meantime, I’m just hanging on to that Golden Thread.
I’m also starting to think about teaching some poetry workshops, most likely online, but maybe in person. I had a wonderful crew for many years at the Schenectady library, and I might try to do something like that again in Saratoga. If anyone is interested, you can contact me through my website, www.barbaraungar.net. Also, if you’re looking for my book, please order through an independent bookstore like The Bookhouse in Albany or Northshire in Saratoga; Jeff Bezos doesn’t need your support, but they do. Or you could order directly from me, or my publisher, The Word Works. Thank you.