Get to Know the Poets: Hadara Bar-Nadav, November 3

Hadara Bar-Nadav is the author of two books of poetry, A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight (Margie/Intuit House, 2007), winner of the Margie Book Prize, and the forthcoming The Frame Called Ruin (New Issues, 2012). She is co-author, with Michelle Boisseau, of Writing Poems, 8th edition (Pearson/Longman, 2011). She teaches at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

We asked Hadara a few questions in anticipation of her reading with Rebecca Hazelton on November 3rd--here's what she told us:

Do you have a favorite book that people who know you or your work might not expect you to like?  I’ve been reading and re-reading Emily Dickinson’s Collected Poems, as well as her letters.  Her language is so wonderfully strange and evocative and fresh.  Reading her poetry makes little lights go on in my head.  I always find something new.

Is there a poet whom you wish more people would read?  Yes, Helene Johnson, a fantastic poet from the Harlem Renaissance. Like many accomplished women poets of the period, she was unable to publish a collection of poetry in her lifetime.  However, Verner D. Mitchell edited This Waiting for Love (U Mass, 2000), a collection of her posthumously published poems—and it’s brilliant.

If you were holed up during an Iowa blizzard and you could choose only one person with whom to ride out the storm, who would it be and why?

My husband and my poodle (does that count as 2 people?).  They are great at keeping me centered, happy, and calm.  Plus, my poodle is very warm and great to cuddle with when it’s cold.  

What drives you and/or your poetry?

I suppose what drives me has changed over time and might even change depending on the poem.  Right now, I’m working on a manuscript of elegiac poems that riff off of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.  So that project is driving me now, as well as exploring the elegy, discovering its language and form, and considering mortality, which I suppose we all must do eventually.  I’m also simply inspired by Dickinson’s fantastic and weird language, her electric, elastic syntax, and her absolute bravery in the face of loss and death.

If you weren’t a poet, what would you be?

If I weren’t a poet, I’d be a painter.  Equally realistic and lucrative, I know. I was a painter for many years, but have found that I don’t really have the time I’d like to, to invest in it.  I channel my love of art into poetry.  Both my first book, A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight, and my forthcoming book, The Frame Called Ruin, are largely inspired by visual art.