Core Memories: Daniel Barnum
We believe the origin of our work as creators is important to consider and hold. In CORE MEMORIES, we ask artists and writers about their own creative beginnings. What led them to operate in their genre of choice? Was it a specific moment, an errant thought, a movement? Was it an insight, a person, a place? Years into their work, does it continue to resonate?
In this edition, we interview Daniel Barnum.
Daniel Barnum’s poems and essays appear in or are forthcoming from The Iowa Review, Guernica, Hunger Mountain, Bat City Review, Muzzle, and elsewhere. Their chapbook, Names for Animals (Seven Kitchens Press), was the 2020 selection for the Robin Becker Prize Series, and won the 2022 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. They live in Philadelphia.
What is your CORE MEMORY?
Growing up, my home life was good until it wasn’t, and then it was unbearable. I wrote as a way out of that, even if I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing. By the time I was a teenager, I was writing a lot of short stories about the end of the world–ostensibly, because I wanted my world, the world I felt stuck in, to end. By senior year, emotional effects from my mom’s extended major depressive episode, my dysfunctional family, and general teenage angst found me skipping my first class each morning. Administrators knew my home situation and were sympathetic when they caught on, and let me take an independent study to make up for my lost English classes. Mr. Degnan, my favorite teacher, helped me design a reading list and met with me every free period and during lunch to read and workshop my poem drafts, creating a space and time in which poetry was the most important thing. That shifted my thinking and let me give shape to hard feelings. Poetry probably saved my life, then, and Mr. Degnan steered me toward it.
How has that moment impacted your current work or current artistic practice?
I still go to poetry to write what I can’t say, or can’t fully think through without it. I still think the greatest gift you can receive in the writing process is a perceptive, engaged reader who gets what you’re trying to do, while remaining critical. That formative experience of workshop coupled with craft discussions in high school led to a lot of similar set-ups over the years, up to and including the course of study in my MFA. Beyond that, I’ve hoped to serve in a similar role as that early teacher did for me. I read, workshop, and edit for groups of young writers, and have taken on independent writing and portfolio clients whose work I believe in. In practice, Mr. Degnan was teaching me something close to what Molly Peacock phrases perfectly near the end of her sonnet, “The Lull:” Look hard, life’s soft. That’s all I’ve been trying to do since I first committed myself to poetry.
Are there any new projects you’re working on?
I’ve got a few different projects I’m at work on right now. I’m writing a series of poems about a relatively minor character from the Matter of England (i.e., all that King Arthur stuff). Sir Palomydes is one of the more-famous Tristan’s competitors for the hand of Isolde. Unstuck from his own time and central narrative (think Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red and its focus on/reinvention of a monster barely mentioned in Greco-Roman stories), Palomydes provides a point from which to think about otherness, ambiguity, and queer relation in ways that feel personally meaningful, while resonant on a wider, sociohistorical scale. The first of those poems appeared in The Tahoma Review in 2020, and another one came out this year in the spring issue of The Iowa Review. More and more, though, I’m working in essay forms now. The most recent of those, “Q + A,” just came out at Guernica.