Back Draft: Catherine Barnett

Poetry often exists at the intersection of intellect and emotion. But what happens when those two worlds remain strictly separated? Catherine Barnett’s sharply rendered poems present a study of a self divided, an estrangement as wrenching as it is human.

This poem, from her latest book, Human Hours, describes an unforgettable encounter between two Catherines, the speaker and saint. When I met Barnett in her third-floor West Village office, on the campus of New York University, we talked about a range of revision strategies she employs in her work. Our conversation led us to many of the greats—Celan, Plath, Bishop, Eliot—and also, more surprisingly, to the Paradise Resort in the Poconos.

– Ben Purkert for Guernica

Guernica: Do you often start with prose and then convert it into poetry?

Catherine Barnett: Well, this poem began with these notes lifted from the notebook I kept when I visited Siena. I became obsessed with the separation of Catherine’s head from her body. It seemed crazy to me! I was walking around the city alone and I heard a tour guide talk about it, so I went in search of her head.

: I feel like the relationship between mind and. Elsewhere, you write “I’d like to feel a little less, know a little more.”