Storyteller of the Week

 Barbara Crooker

 

 Barbara Crooker and her husband Richard McMaster Crooker

Barbara Crooker's poems have appeared in magazines such as The Sun, The Hollins Critic, The Christian Science Monitor, Smartish Pace, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Nimrod, The Denver Quarterly, The Tampa Review, Poetry International, The Christian Century, America and anthologies such as The Bedford Introduction to Literature, Good Poems for Hard Times (Viking Penguin), Boomer Girls (University of Iowa Press), and Commonwealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (Penn State University Press). She is the recipient of the Pen and Brush Poetry Prize, the Ekphrastic Poetry Award from Rosebud, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Pennsylvania Center for the Book Poetry in Public Places Poster Competition, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, the "April Is the Cruelest Month" Award from Poets & Writers, the 2000 New Millenium Writing's Y2K competition, the Karamu Poetry Award, and others, including three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, twenty residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; two residencies at the Moulin a Nef, Auvillar, France; and two residencies at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, Ireland. 

A sixty-one time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and seven time nominee for Best of the Net, she was a 1997 Grammy Awards Finalist for her part in the audio version of the popular anthology, Grow Old Along With Me--The Best is Yet to Be (Papier Mache Press). Her books are Radiance, which won the 2005 Word Press First Book competition and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance, which came out from Word Press in 2008 and won the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence; More (C&R Press, 2010); Gold (Cascade Books, a division of Wipf and Stock, in their Poeima Poetry Series, 2013); Small Rain (Virtual Artists Collective, 2014); Selected Poems, (FutureCycle Press, 2015); Les Fauves (C&R Press, 2017); The Book of Kells (Cascade Books, 2018, winner of the Best Poetry Book 2018 from Poetry by the Sea); and Some Glad Morning (Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), which was long listed for the Julie Suk Award.

Her poetry has been read on the BBC, the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company), by Garrison Keillor on The Writer's Almanac, by US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith on The Slowdown podcast, and in Ted Kooser's column, American Life in Poetry. She has been an invited reader in the Poetry at Noon series at the Library of Congress; the Halle aux Grains, Auvillar, France; the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival; Poetry @ Roundtop; the SoCal Poetry Festival; the Festival of Faith and Writing; The Scissortail Poetry Festival; Glory Days: A Bruce Springsteen Symposium; Poetry by the Sea; and many other venues. Recently, she received an award for outstanding ekphrastic achievement, a body of ekphrastic work in and outside of the journal The Ekphrastic Review. One of her poems won The Pandemic Poetry Contest, sponsored by Garrison Keillor.

She has been writing poetry since the late 1970s. Her husband, Richard McMasters Crooker died on April 30, 2021 after almost 46 years of marriage. She has three children and lives in Pennsylvania.

Comments by Editor Sharon Waller Knutson

I have been a fan of Barbara Crooker ever since I read “Patty’s Charcoal Drive-in” and “Nearing Menopause, I Run into Elvis at Shoprite” and knew she was a woman from my generation, someone who had been through what I’d been through.

But she was a famous poet, mistress of her craft, and I was her star struck fan so I never dreamed we’d be friends. When I discovered her poetry and her email address on Verse-Virtual and got up the nerve to send her a fan email in 2020, I expected I’d get a standard reply from her secretary.

Instead, I got a warm email and soon we were reminiscing late at night about carhopping at burger joints to put ourselves through college in the good old days when summer jobs paid our way. We graduated to bonding over autistic kids, she as a mother and I as a grandmother.

In 2021 we comforted each other over her loss of her husband and mine of our son. Barbara confided in me that she didn’t know if she’d ever write again after losing the love of her life. I assured her she would and now she is writing poetry for a new manuscript on being a widow.

I am proud to publish poems which are among my favorites over the years and two recent poems from her new manuscript, Absence.

Patty’s Charcoal Drive-In

First job. In tight black shorts
and a white bowling shirt, red lipstick
and bouncing pony tail, I present
each overflowing tray as if it were a banquet.
I’m sixteen and college-bound,
this job’s temporary as the summer sun,
but right now, it’s the boundaries of my life.
After the first few nights of mixed orders
and missing cars, the work goes easily.
I take out the silver trays and hook them to the windows,
inhale the mingled smells of seared meat patties,
salty ketchup, rich sweet malteds.
The lure of grease drifts through the thick night air.
And it’s always summer at Patty’s Charcoal Drive-in—
carloads of blonde-and-tan girls
pull up next to red convertibles,
boys in black tee shirts and slick hair.
Everyone knows what they want.
And I wait on them, hoping for tips,
loose pieces of silver
flung carelessly as the stars.
Doo-wop music streams from the jukebox
and each night repeats itself,
faithful as a steady date.
Towards 10 P.M., traffic dwindles.
We police the lot, pick up wrappers.
The dark pours down, sticky as Coke,
but the light from the kitchen
gleams like a beacon.
A breeze comes up, chasing papers
in the far corners of the darkened lot,
as if suddenly a cold wind had started to blow
straight at me from the future—
I read that in a Doris Lessing book—
but right now, purse fat with tips
the moon sitting like a cheeseburger on a flat black grill,
this is enough.
Your order please.

Nearing Menopause, I Run into Elvis at Shoprite

near the peanut butter. He calls me ma'am, like the sweet
southern mother's boy he was. This is the young Elvis,
slim-hipped, dressed in leather, black hair swirled
like a duck's backside. I'm in the middle of my life,
the start of the body's cruel betrayals, the skin beginning
to break in lines and creases, the thickening midline.
I feel my temperature rising, as a hot flash washes over,
the thermostat broken down. The first time I heard Elvis
on the radio, I was poised between girlhood and what comes next.
My parents were appalled, in the Eisenhower fifties, by rock
and roll and all it stood for, let me only buy one record,
"Love Me Tender," and I did.
     I have on a tight orlon sweater, circle skirt,
     eight layers of rolled-up net petticoats, all bound
     together by a woven straw cinch belt. Now I've come
     full circle, hate the music my daughter loves, Nine
     Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins, Crash Test Dummies.
     Elvis looks embarrassed for me. His soft full lips
     are like moon pies, his eyelids half-mast, pulled
down bedroom shades. He mumbles, "Treat me nice."
Now, poised between menopause and what comes next, the last
dance, I find myself in tears by the toilet paper rolls,
hearing "Unchained Melody" on the sound system. "That's all
right now, Mama," Elvis says, "Anyway you do is fine." The bass
line thumps and grinds, the honky tonk piano moves like an ivory
river, full of swampy delta blues. And Elvis's voice wails above
it all, the purr and growl, the snarl and twang, above the chains
of flesh and time.

Why I Love Being Married to a Chemist
 
Because he can still cause a reaction in me
when he talks about SN2 displacements,
amines and esters looking for receptor sites
at the base of their ketones. Because he lugs
home serious tomes like The Journal of the American
Chemical Society or The Proceedings of the Society
of the Plastics Industry, the opposite of the slim volumes
of poetry with colorful covers that fill my bookshelves.
Because once, years ago, on a Saturday before our
raucous son rang in the dawn, he was just
standing there in the bathroom, out of the shower.
I said Honey, what’s wrong? and he said Oh,
I was just thinking about a molecule.

Because he taught me about sublimation, how
a solid, like ice, can change straight to a gas
without becoming liquid first. Because even
after all this time together, he can still
make me melt.


THE RECENT WIDOW CONSIDERS THE ALPHABET

Accept.  She has begun to accept what happened.  Because there’s no way she can ever change it.  Can we step in the same river twice? asked Heraclitus.  Despite the hard facts, she wishes she could get a rewind, go back to last January, the first rehab.  Even though the stroke had already done its damage.  Feeble.  Gone:  his balance, his eyesight, the use of his right hand and leg.  He didn’t give up. Instead, he tried to use the walker.  Just keep swimming, he told himself, like Dory. Listen to the therapists for cues.  Memorize the number of steps to the bathroom. Never quit, even though it’s hopeless. Outside, winter receded. Palliative care followed by hospice.  Quietly, his breath grew feathery.  Right in front of her, it ceased. Solo. That’s how she’s navigating now.  Understanding that he won’t come back. Value every day you had together, she tells herself, though they’re starting to fade. Wish on every falling star though it does no good.  Expand your heart. You have to keep putting one foot in front of the other.  Zero in on love.

THE O IN WIDOW

is empty, a room with no windows.
The lifeless moon in a bleak sky.
The hollow in your throat I used to kiss.
A deep well, without a wish.
Without.
Where there used to be a couple,
the deep division of negative numbers.
The unused chair at the kitchen table.
The vast Sahara of one side of the bed.
The air in my hand as I reach out for yours.
The shape of my mouth when grief
sneaks up and takes me unaware.
The heartless dawn with you still gone.

Patty’s Charcoal Drive-in is from Barbara Crooker: Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2015,) “Nearing Menopause, I Run into Elvis at Shoprite,” is from Radiance (Word Press, 2005, “Why I Love Being Married to a Chemist” is from Les Fauves (C&R Press, 2017) and THE RECENT WIDOW CONSIDERS THE ALPHABET was first published in SALT and THE O IN WIDOW in ONE ART.