Hadara Bar-Nadav
The House is a Difficult Text
A Coffin of Clouds
Hadara Bar-Nadav
Hadara Bar-Nadav is an NEA fellow and author of several award-winning collections of poetry, among them The New Nudity, Lullaby (with Exit Sign), The Frame Called Ruin, and others. In addition, she is co-author of the best-selling textbook Writing Poems, 8th ed. Individual poems appear in the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, The Believer, The New Republic, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. She is a Professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Hadara Bar-Nadav
Two Poems
The House Is a Difficult Text
—for Jenny Clyde
Line breaks
trace the windows.
Blankness follows.
More moments
of blank.
Show them
what burned:
every thing.
The house, her red hair,
the roots.
This is the difficult
next—
who fell asleep
on the flower-printed couch,
whose cigarette wore
a bright coral ring?
Her lips, her slow
breath, her dream.
Newspapers mounded
around her,
a paper maze
three-feet high,
and her body
at the hot center,
her body as kindling,
tinderboxed.
She died inside
a dying house
returning itself
to dust.
The difficult part
is two deaths:
a palpable
emptiness,
a field.
A Coffin of Clouds
The dead make a kite
the size of god—
omni-present,
omni-eyed.
Four kinds of god: feather,
blanket, cotton, sheet.
The clouds offer
their sums, their minuses.
Our vast wreckage—
ghost opal,
blighted egg,
a blood sea.
Entire eyefulls
of endings.
Weren’t we at last
provisional,
delusional, more hull
than whole.
My lack of compass,
composure.
I throw out
a shallow noun,
anemic invectives.
Fuck you, sky,
you liar,
where a god has gone
to die.
Figment, idea,
nothing here—
the great blankery
of us
torched by the sun’s fire.
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Questions for the author:
What are 2 - 3 books (regardless of genre) that you've read over the last year or less that really blew your hair back?
As for books, Belcourt's book totally blew me away: Belcourt, Billy-Ray. This Wound Is a World. Calgary, Canada. Frontenac House, 2017.
Also, new books by danez smith's Don’t Call Us Dead and Franny Choi's Soft Science were also exciting, pushing poetry and language forward.
Who is someone you admire who does work that you feel really benefits your “local” community, and what kind of work is it that they do?
As for people in the local community, I'd say every teacher I know inspires me. My colleagues work with thousands of students each year, reflecting on poetry and language in general, examining it, reinventing it, discovering and problematizing its many layers and nuances. We need to think and carefully consider how we use language and how others use language. This is where miracles are happening, even small ones.
What is the single geekiest/nerdiest thing about you that doesn’t involve literature?
And finally, the nerdiest thing about me: I'm obsessed with standard poodles. I grew up with 2 to 3 standards at a time in my house at all times. I now have a beautiful white crazy dancing poodle named Disco.