Rick Barot & Brian Teare Remind Each Other to Look Again

This is Awakeners, a Lit Hub Radio podcast about mentorship in the literary arts. Robert Frost allegedly said he was not a teacher but an “awakener.” On every episode of this podcast, host Lena Crown speaks with writers, artists, critics, and scholars across generations who have awakened something for one another. We chat about how their relationship has evolved, examine the connections and divergences in their writing and thinking, and dig into the archives for traces of their mutual influence.

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On this episode of Awakeners, Lena chats with poets Rick Barot and Brian Teare, who met at Stanford University as young writers and have collaborated for over twenty years.

Teare’s micropress, Albion Books, published Barot’s chapbook of prose poems, During the Pandemic, in 2020. A few years later, Teare commissioned a poem from Barot for a folio responding to a retrospective of the artist Jasper Johns’s work. The same retrospective inspired Teare’s 2023 collection Poem Bitten By a Man (Nightboat Books), and the poems Barot wrote now appear in Barot’s 2024 collection Moving the Bones (Milkweed Editions).

We discuss Brian’s first fingerprint on Rick’s body of work, the triumphs and failures of mentorship they experienced in institutions of higher ed, their approaches to ekphrasis (i.e. creative work that responds to a work of art, or, to quote poet Tania Clark, that “makes the static sing”), and how they helped one another “re-see” another queer artist’s ethics and aesthetics.

From the episode:

Brian Teare: Material culture, print culture, teaching, politics, the actual practice of poetry, the role of visual art in work and in our lives… there are so many overlaps that we never run out of things to talk about.

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Rick Barot‘s most recent book of poems is Moving the Bones, published by Milkweed Editions in 2024. His previous collection, The Galleons, was longlisted for the National Book Award. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The New Republic, The Adroit Journal, and The New Yorker. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Stanford University. He lives in Tacoma, Washington and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University.

A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of seven critically acclaimed books, including Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize. His most recent publications are a pair of book-length ekphrastic projects exploring queer abstraction, chronic illness, and collage: the 2022 Nightboat reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and the fall 2023 publication of Poem Bitten by a Man, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award. An Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia, Brian lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.