On Poets Sharing a Bed: Caleb Barber and Rachel Mehl

Rhymes With Shellfish

Caleb Barber

After Eli Wallach’s character Tuco kills a man who thought he had the upper hand in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, he says “If you’re gonna shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.”  I believe the same advice applies to writing. So although I live with a fellow poet, we don’t sit around cross-legged on the floor trading lines counting each other’s syllables.  Maybe when we were dating, but not now.  For me, writing will always be primarily a solitary endeavor.  If I’m going to write, I write.

I have never been disciplined enough to have “writing time.”  I wrote the majority of my first book of poetry, Beasts and Violins, on a clipboard while delivering machined parts around Northwest Washington State.  The poems would come from bumper stickers, road construction, or a line I misheard on an album I was listening to.  The muse was everywhere.  Now the same profession finds me tied more to a computer and a workbench, so I lack the luxury of observation.  My hands and head are occupied.  The game has changed.

At home now I write in red notebooks. I bought a stack of them at an import store in Seattle because their inscription advertised “Most advanced quality gives best writing features,” and I took them for their word.  The red is a flag.  If I’m writing in a red notebook, I’m probably working on a poem, and Rachel leaves me to it.  Likewise, if I observe Rachel with one of her several journals she leaves strewn about the house (I’ve never once opened one), I assume she’s doing something necessary, so I take the dog to the park or herd the chickens around the yard.  I like to hold them up to the windows like nosy neighbors.

It never made any sense to me hearing cohabitating writers glow about how they are one another’s “first readers.”  I would find it very limiting to know my partner is going to be over my shoulder telling me what’s good and what’s not about a piece I’ve just written.  Her silence would be a judgment; her approval would be like a mother congratulating her son on his macaroni art.  I don’t find that sort of relationship realistic to the creation of poetry.  Around here, we treat it like serious business.

A little while back I wrote a poem that ended with the lines “I’ve got/ a busy social schedule, staring out/ funny windows, canceling all my plans,/ and falling in love twice a week.”  At the time, I remember being concerned Rachel would see that and think it meant something dubious, but I don’t feel the things I write in my poems are very reliable as far as Caleb Barber: The Man goes (if I may slip into third-person personas for a moment).  Caleb Barber: The Poet just writes what sounds good.  He doesn’t spend a lot of time deducing how accurate it is, because that would be hobbling the mind.

I like Rachel to hear my poems at readings and see them handsome in literary journals.  I want her to know I worked hard on them and a few of them are for her but most of them I’m saving for myself.  As far as reasons to write go, that may sound a bit cold, but I think it’s accurate.  I mean, the thing came from my brain, my guts, my heart.  Who could handle more than a little of something like that without losing the mystery altogether?

The Last Confessional

Rachel Mehl

For Valentines Day I made Caleb a Richard Hugo pocket shrine, which was a lot more fun than making one for say, Elvis or John Wayne Gacy.  I have been to AWP twice because Caleb published a book, and I started sending to journals because he was getting poems picked up and I got jealous.

Caleb has a book.  I have a manuscript that has been going out to contests for three years now.  When he got Beasts and Violins picked up, it was hard for me, but living with a published poet has shown me the reality of having a book.  It is really not that much unlike like being a poet without a book.  You are still a poet.

One reason I don’t want to be Caleb’s first reader is because when we were dating he wrote roughly five times as many poems as I did.  Also, I often use poems to exorcize my personal demons and the process of publishing is a way to put them in the world.  I read them to my best friend Maya and then I don’t talk to her for a week.

Caleb puts up with my shoes on the floor, the balls of my hair in the shower.  He does not need to see all my poems.  I don’t want to be that close to anyone.  I don’t want to start writing poems to impress Caleb and then start ripping him off any more than I want to write a poem about him hurting my feelings and then show it to him because he hurt my feelings.  Unlike The Little Mermaid, I will not give up my voice for the man of my dreams.

When we were at the airport on the way back from AWP Caleb was reading the newest Los Angeles Review, which has his book review and my poem.  I got so nervous about the possibility of him reading my poem that I started trying to distract him by pointing out Robert Hill Long’s essay about Bruce Holland Rogers.

Robert was surprised to learn upon meeting Bruce, many years ago, among the many things the two had in common one was frequently wearing collarless shirts.  Bruce was faculty in Caleb’s grad program.  Robert was faculty in mine.  I have seen them both in these shirts.  Thinking about that still makes me smile.

Rachel Mehl’s poems appear in Issues 6 and 9 of The Los Angeles Review, and Caleb Barber’s work appears in Issue 5. Caleb’s debut poetry collection, Beasts and Violins, was published by Red Hen Press in 2010. But it here.