Barbara Helfgot Hyett
Nov. 2007

Why did you begin writing?
I grew up by the sea—Atlantic City, N.J.—that sound and stretch were in my ear for 16 years. When I was three, my family died—16 relatives in 6 months. I was teaching English then and decided that if I didn’t write—I’d die. Took my retirement and my 2 small sons to the British Isles visiting writing desks of Bobby Burns and Joyce and Stevenson and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Plath. A pilgrimage to spiritual mentors, and playgrounds. When we returned to the states, I began to speak.

Why Poetry?
My Dad read to me when I was a child—from his Army Issue paperback—I loved the sound of his voice: Enoch Arden “O Captain, My Captain,” all of Robert Frost. He’d been a tap dancer and my mother a concert pianist—weekends, we’d sing.
I began with short stories—a batch. 6 chapters of a novel—signed on for my first writing workshop in Town. Teacher said I ought to study at Harvard. By mistake I was placed in Ruth Whitman’s seminar in poetry. I figured I’d stay for the class change after. I stayed.

First book?
Actually it was published second-Natural Law...cut my eye teeth on poems tearing décor of my hometown, my schools and the public library flattened into casinos. I learned to write by studying history of Atlantic City in archives on the boardwalk and sitting beside my teacher: Ruth Whitman, Ellen Voight, and C.K. Williams, who taught me to craft and the way to the read myself-for 3 years studied too, with Elie Wiesel, my colleague at Boston University. For him I wrote In Evidence- poems on the liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps, derived from my interviewers with veterans, soldiers-who stumbled in the camps.

Then what?
I began to conduct my own workshops after that—private groups of poets in print—and wrote a third book: The Double Reckoning of Christopher Columbus. I studied years of interviewing GI’s, I found his notes, ironically empty. I decided to fill in the spaces he’d left on the page. By 1992, the subject I’d chosen 5 years earlier was the rage. The book took me on my own voyage of discovery across America, speaking about the man and the natures he found here. I had inadvertently become an expert in Columbian history.

What could you write after that?
Seems you think in projects of poems, rather than poems one by one—perhaps I do. I took an interest in the creatures on the US Endangered Wildlife List—soon I was hooked by their names—Appalachian Monkeyface Pearly Mussel, for example, or Echaus Butterfly—my publisher at University of Illinois Press wanted to see mammals: Bear, Whale—and so I gave 5 years to the study of animal behavior one by one. The Tracks We Leave appeared in 1996, each poem an animal illustrated by the painter Bob Treanor.

So now you were a Wildlife Scientist?
Only insofar as a poet involves herself in the socio-political world. Once a critic called me a “Social Documentarian.” Maybe I am. Surely not by intention. Each book referred an essay to explain to the reader the process of my research. I do not know why.

And now you’ve a new book?
Yes. Rift, the first book I’ve made requiring little study, the most personal work I’ve yet done.

How so?
Ten years ago, my husband of 32 years, left the marriage. No warning. No explanation. Another woman. That was that. We met in high school. He had been my always and my all. After a few weeks of shock, I began to make poems. The more I wrote, the closer to my shattered self I came. In the end, the poems led me home. I am lucky to have established the poetry so I could turn to it to see what I had to say.
With the publication of these poems, I return to my place in the writing world. These poems have pulled me through. My process and my person are changed. Which is all one can hope for, I suppose—to grow.

Have you new plans?
Several. Yes. I am 30 poems into a memoir of my childhood. Atlantic City and Other Myths, from my conception to the death of my father when I was 13. And I’ve outlined a series—What to Tell the Children, concerning what I’ve learned by teaching nearly 40 years. And I’m 2 stories into a collection of short non-fiction, funny perhaps, about each of the 69 men I’ve dated in these recently-single years.

69 men?
Yes. Men I met in life or on the internet. 4 of whom became significant in my life. I think I may discover in the telling something about the last quarter of life, and the human need for connection, comfort, and love.

What inspires you?
Firstly, my students who bare their work to one another and to my cold, indifferent, critical eye. Their struggle and a collective poetic one. I am fortunate to earn my living among poems and poets, working hard, 84 or 5 have sprung from my courses at Poemworks. I work in a non-competitive, generous community of like-minded, socially concerned souls.
Secondly, the woe of the world. I must try to say something important, (paraphrasing Ernest Becker) to throw something into the external mix before I’m gone.

Why do you write?
To learn who I am, to tap into the deeper, most thoughtful world—to exercise my belief in beauty and its sometime appearances; to prove that I truly exist.