Sufi Poetry of Coleman Barks: It is a Raining February Night

It Is A Raining February Night - Coleman Barks

Story by Ramsey Nix in Morgan County Citizen Online, Thu, 02/11/2010

Listening to Coleman Barks read his poetry recently at Georgia State University was the right antidote to hearing news broadcasters read excerpts of Salinger's work since his death on January 27. My skin crawled when I heard ABC’s Dianne Sawyer as Holden or even NPR’s Steve Inskeep narrating a Salinger passage. I think these two experiences, in juxtaposition, have taught me the importance of hearing a writer read his own work.

Barks is a world-renown poet who lives right around the corner, in Athens, where he taught in the English department at The University of Georgia for 30 years. While he has published hundreds of original poems, Barks is best known for his free verse interpretations of Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic, who inspired Turkey’s popular Whirling Dervishes. Barks has sold over one million copies of his books of Rumi poetry, including “The Essential Rumi,” “The Soul of Rumi,” and “Rumi: The Book of Love.”

Through his writings, Rumi taught that love is the soul of genius. Salinger fell in love with his characters, the Glass family, in particular. That was the secret of his genius. I remember falling head over heels in love with Franny and Zooey when I first met them. The writer made me do that. Yet the newscasters have been pretty tough on 'ole Salinger. They criticize him for being a contemplative, for eschewing society for his writing– for not tossing the hungry media a bone. Rumi said, "Fall in love in such a way that it frees you from any connecting." Rumor has it that Salinger dabbled in Eastern mysticism. Perhaps he heeded Rumi’s call.

Barks is another writer who flies below the media radar. In a rare interview he granted The Sun in October 2007, he explained how one interview could ruin a whole day of writing. After hearing his recitation, I can only imagine how much time Barks spends in meditation before he puts his pen to the page.

In that same interview, Barks talked about his education in Sufism, that mystical branch of Islam that Rumi practiced. Barks had a living teacher named Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. To illustrate his teacher's enlightenment, Barks said, "When somebody asked Bawa what reality was like, he said it's like you're driving a car, and you're inside driving, but you're also the landscape you're driving through." This insight must have informed his poem, "Extravagance":

It is a huge extravagance
hiring a car to get home
the final 67 miles,
having missed the last shuttle from the Atlanta airport to Athens by five minutes. So I enjoy it, napping or nearly napping on the middle van seat.

It is a raining February night.
A cheerful Ethiopian man is driving, steady and very fast, passing the trucks with their vast sleeping compartments
behind their cabs, spaceships.

It feels like I have not watched traffic sideways since I was a child.
At 70, going 80, 85.

The drips on the sidewindows do their slow slide toward the rear.
How can that be? What is the physics of such slowness?

We are going fast, but the drips are finding a leisurely way,
stopping awhile, shivering, continuing on, as though making watery decisions,
this magnificently dawdling troop of Taoist masters, who arrive at the rubber edging of my window
from up in the nowhere of this night's coldfront.

• • •

I graph with fingers
their progress on the convex pane.

Whatever presences we are blessed by, we must bless others with, to keep the blessings moving along,
the nearly formless ones
who drop vertically in,
and just for a sideways drawn-out moment are with us, and we see them held supinely in the custody of an amicable Ethiopian man.

We feel them sliding through and out the bottom of being as they become songs and sentences,
the notions and beauty of the liquid fire of presence, in people we meet, in the nightair we breathe cupfuls of.

Barks poems are enlightened, and he carries them around like matches. They sparkle and burn when he reads them. That must be what he means by "being an ecstatic." But I think he proves that one must be a contemplative in order to muster the ecstatic. Just as quickly as he finishes reading a poem, he fades back into a state of quiet amusement. I was struck by the way he amuses himself.
People all over the world, especially the Middle East, have read Barks’ translations of Rumi. In fact, I first picked up one of his books while living abroad. I was tickled to death to learn where the author lives. But Barks doesn’t dwell long on time and place: his poetry is a bridge capable of connecting us to other people, other cultures, and even to the Divine. That’s powerful stuff.