Dialogue:
Robert Carr and Eleanor Ball
Robert Carr on Eleanor Ball’s “Only Then” and “Every month for forty years”
Dear Eleanor –
When I read your poems in this issue of ballast, “Every month for forty years” and “Only Then,” I experience the weird sensation I call poetry magic. For me, poetry magic happens when another poet’s images speak directly to your own; when, through something unexpected like the ballast dialogues, the work of poetry collides across, often very different, lives.
In your poem “Every month for forty years” I was startled by the sentence – In the hollow of my body, a bird / is dying and rising. When this happens to men, / we call it a miracle. As I experience and write about aging and changes in the male body, this idea intrigues me. It rings true. The speaker in your poem is fearless, female, examining the blood from her womb, anticipating her miraculous body in all its complexity. In my writing that explores the male body I find myself asking – What is the miracle of this? What are the true gifts of occupying a human vessel? What is the essence of being in relationship to others?
Then I turn to your poem “Only Then” where you test the waters of connection. You might have reached for my hand; / I might have reached for yours. Though I sense that the speaker is addressing a real or imagined lover, I also feel I’m being addressed directly and asked who I’ve trusted to touch. Where have I made myself vulnerable?
Eleanor, it seems we are both very grounded in an exploration of what it means to exist in a body. Yours – queer, female, in the first quarter of a hundred-year life. Mine – queer, male, and forty-two years older, writing through the shadow of the early decades of the HIV pandemic. That the editors at ballast paired our work is not accidental. As you say so beautifully – I am unmooring myself. Holding my body / up to the light. Thank you for that gift. I am grateful – from the richness of our varied experience.
Eleanor Ball on Robert Carr’s “Commands for My Surviving Husband” and “Retinal Detachment”
What a pleasure to have discovered Robert Carr’s poetry through this issue of ballast and an honor to have spent the last few weeks writing about it. These poignant poems explore queer love, loss, and corporeality—the inevitable limitations of the body, as well as the body as a site for imagining and enacting the endless possibilities of love.
“Commands for My Surviving Husband” aches with loss from the title to the last line. In this poem, Carr explores cycles of grief, the breakdown of the body, and how our queer bodies blend with the bodies of the earth. “Boil down my jaw, rachet / teeth to nub, carry my bones / to the swimming hole, nail me / to a white birch,” he writes, then “Place discordant music / in the throats of migratory birds” and “Make me—a torrent of stars.” The speaker and his husband move through a landscape of various deconstructed bodies until they reach the final lines: “I’ll listen, / your rattle, and we’ll come together again.” Throughout the poem, they reach for each other across the gulf carved by sickness and grief; and in the end, they reunite.
Carr continues his exploration of the body in “Retinal Detachment,” focusing here on queer aging. The speaker and his husband must navigate a landscape altered by shadows, floaters, light flashes, and other symptoms of retinal detachment: “Flash beams leave us // to flounder in each other’s / shortened day.” While they grieve the slow loss of their old bodies, they search for signs pointing the way into life with their new bodies—an experience I connected deeply to as someone living with unpredictable chronic pain. Sometimes the body in which you wake up is not the body in which you fell asleep. Sometimes the world becomes so blinding, so spinning, and yet so dark, it feels like you’ve slipped into another dimension. And yet, as Carr emphasizes, there is always the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel: “We’ll consult the raven / floaters on our porch— // those sparks of bird caw, / pixelated flares of hope.” Queer resilience and joy form the core of Carr’s poetry, poetry that is simultaneously timeless and timelier than ever.
For each issue, ballast asks pairs of poets to read each other’s work and respond in some way. We hope these dialogues will sound the resonances contained within the issue as well as serve to foster a sense of interconnection and community among our authors.
If you’ve been published in a previous issue of ballast and would like to participate in a dialogue, please reach out to our editors at ballastjournal@gmail.com.