Coleman Barks: "auroral aliveness, powers, hilarity"

Ruppersburg talks about Coleman Barks. Barks is the creator of poems that people have been reading for more than forty years, poems eccentric and unpredictable in the best ways. They concern small and large life moments, dreams, observations, friends, children, humorous stories, random words and phrases. He excels with poems that memorialize departed friends-few poets have memorialized so many people. His poems are meditations, in that word's deepest meaning. Taken as a whole, they make up a sort of autobiographical prayer journal in which he measures the progress of his life, things he has seen and done, people he has known; he offers both self-recriminations and self-assessments, especially in the poems he has written beginning with his collection Gourd Seed in 1993.