Poetry, Business Career 'Co-exist' for John Barr, and his Life Is Richer for It
Will Read at Sunday's Festival
By Sean Ely

John Barr on the front porch of his West Bluff cottage, with views of the Round Island Lighthouse and Grand Hotel, looks over his epic poem, "Grace," which was published in 1999.

What do the occupations investment banker and poet have in common?

"Some people find it odd or interesting that someone can be both a businessman and a poet," said West Bluff cottager John Barr, who is both. "However, I've often wondered why it's odd. If you think of a doctor or surgeon who plays the violin, there are a lot of doctors who are gifted musicians, and nobody thinks that is odd. I think that the businessman poet combination catches the popular imagination because they seem so different, but in fact, for me, the one fits the other. I got a lot of raw material for my poems out of my business career, while dealing with people all the time and traveling. I think that poetry sort of gave me a way to think about things that weren't strictly business. I found that the two have coexisted very well, and my life is richer for it."

Mr. Barr will read excerpts from some of his published poetry, as well as new poems Sunday, July 8, at the Poetry Festival at Little Stone Church. The readings begin at 8 p.m.

He is one of the three poets featured in July at the church.

"The atmosphere and the whole Island become a setting for the poem," he said. "Another reason I love to read here is because people are so friendly, so it's an audience that is literate and receptive, and they come to have a good time, just as I do. The tone of the readings is also very nice."

Little Stone Church pastor, the Reverend Vincent Carroll, who will also be reading poetry later in the summer, is the festival organizer.

"John Barr," he said, "has been a particular supporter of Mackinac Island and he has brought his gift of poetry and other American poets to read at Mission Church and Little Stone Church. His experience in the business world brings great credibility, combined with his skills as a poet. It should be enormously attractive to people who want to hear poetry. His expertise is just phenomenal."

Mr. Barr has summered on the Island since 1990 with his wife, Penny. They have three grown children, Nate, Chris, and Jenny.

The Barrs commute from Chicago, where he is president of the Poetry Foundation, and from a home in New York, their ties to his Wall Street career.

He discovered poetry in college, where he majored in English and fell in love with the poems of William Butler Yates and took all the poetry-related courses he could.

"When I graduated," he said, "I had grounding in classical and modern poetry, and I've just continued to write ever since."

Even during the 18 years he spent at Morgan Stanley, where he was a partner heading a public utility group, and later, when he and several partners formed their own small company.

"We provided financial advice and service to public utilities, like gas and electric, around the country and we sort of caught a wave. There was a bunch of consolidation, companies merging with other companies in the utilities sector in the 1990s, and we were very instrumental in all of that," he said. "And then we sold that business to a large bank in 1998. I love the corporate finance, all 30-plus years of it."

After Ruth Lilly, an heir to the Lilly Pharmaceutical Company, made a large gift to the Poetry Foundation and the organization sought a person to manage it, John Barr applied for the job and was accepted.

"If it's possible to love two careers at once, that is what I did," he said. "I absolutely loved my work as an investment banker, in corporate finance. I just love that business. I've done a lot of work with boards of directors and management of companies around the country, and the world. That was great."

The Poetry Foundation publishes Poetry Magazine, which, at nearly a century old, is the oldest literary magazine in the country. It has been the first to publish popular poets like T. S. Elliot.

Under his leadership, the foundation created a new Web site (www.poetryfoundation.org) containing an anthology of more than 5,000 poems, which can be downloaded free. The foundation has also created the Children's Poet Lauriat, to pay attention to poetry written for young people up through the eighth grade, and in a joint venture with the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, it has organized a national competition to recite poetry called Poetry Out Loud. It is voluntary, but more than 100,000 high school students competed last May in 50 state competitions. After memorizing poems, they are judged on accuracy, delivery, and body language. Yet another program encouraged the publication of poetry in newspapers.

"For me it's a wonderful opportunity," Mr. Barr said of his new post at the Poetry Foundation. "It brings together a career I had in business and a career I had in writing poetry. In 2006, 10 million Americans either read a poem or heard a poem because of our program, that they would have not otherwise seen it. If you add up the magazine, the Web site, the media programs, and the Poetry Out Loud, it's quite a big impact."

Mr. Barr has written formal poetry, free verse, and lyric poetry and has published six collections, which have overlapped, with some being collections of other collections. Two of these publications were trade edition books. The first one, A Hundred Fathom Curve, published in 1997, has a lot of formal poetry in it, summarizing a lot of the lyric poetry that he had written for 30 years.

The second trade edition book, Grace, published in 1999, was a 150-page book-length poem which he calls a "mock epic." He will read excerpts from it at the Poetry Festival. It is meant to be humorous, written in a voice of another character, covering themes that he found important during the time he wrote it.

His poetry evolves over time.

"I write on and off frequently, so I don't have a set period of time I write everyday," he said. "I tend to carry around 3-by- 5- [inch] cards. When a line comes to me, I stop and I write it down. After this gets full, I take all the 3-by-5 cards and copy the lines into a journal. Those lines become raw material for the writing that I do. I will drive a poem out of those lines. Not everybody writes that way, but it works for me, so I've written that way for quite awhile."

Many of the ideas for his poems come from personal experiences. When something monumental, or even minuscule, happens in his life, it has the opportunity to become a written work.

His first book was of his Vietnam War experience, called The War Zone. He served in the Navy on destroyers and small ships, traveling to Vietnam three times in the 1960s. He said that he always wanted to write a poem about what it was like to be on a modern war ship, because, with a career interest in writing, he looks for areas that haven't been done before.

"I've taken a lot of notes and written a lot of journals in those five years, and then over the next 14 years I wrote and rewrote all of that into a book," he said. "I rewrote it three times, actually, and I was developing as a writer all that time. I don't know of anybody else who has written that much poetry about the naval experience of Vietnam. There has been quite a bit written by men who were in combat on the ground war, so it's a niche, or angle that meant a lot to me."

Another incident he knows that many will relate to is his poem on the tragedy of September 11, 2001. Mr. Barr was at his New York house at 9 a.m. that day, waiting for a ride to the same airport where one of the planes had taken off.

"If I had been an hour earlier or later, I could have been a part of all that," he said. "And because we lived in New York for 30 years, we, like everyone in New York, felt the emotions from that day.

For the next five years, he thought about all of that and wrote a poem that he will read Sunday. It was published recently in a periodical in England.

"I felt a personal connection, and I think all Americans felt that exact same personal connection," he said.

Asmaller incident worldwide but monumental in his eyes sparked a poem when he and his wife were driving down Highway 41 in Wisconsin to see her family. A deer leaped into their path and was struck dead.

"The deer looked totally surprised that it had died instead of us, with a wide-eyed expression on its face," Mr. Barr said. "For me, it was a moment of perception, and that turned into a poem."

Mackinac Island is also a resource for his writing but none of those poems, he said, are good enough yet to be published. It is a work in progress. He loves the Island and the sensory experience of it.

"Like all of us that spend time on the Island," he said, "you notice details, and those details go into my journals, and I work from time to time trying to turn them into poems."

Poetry is a mystical thing. Lines often come up by themselves, Mr. Barr said. He often quotes Robert Frost, saying that he was awfully good on the subject of how a poem gets written and what a poem needs to do. He noted that Frost said the first line of a poem is a gift, and it just comes into one's head, and then the rest of the poem is work.

"I may go back through the thousands of pages of my journals, looking at all of these lines that I've written down, so it takes quite a while," he said. "When I do that, and I have an idea for the subject of a poem in mind, I'll go back and accumulate lines, read journals, or pick out lines that might help me tell that story. I will assemble those on the computer, which I call my line stock, my candidate lines. The process is a little bit like an artist who might create a mosaic out of stone on a church ceiling, so they take different colored stones and they put mortar on them, and they just stick them up there. For me, those lines are my pebbles."

Once he chooses the candidate lines, he starts to boil all of them into a shorter poem.

That three-step process "might take years," he said. "I tend to write over long periods of time on a given thing. I wrote for over 10 years on the book Grace and the first book I ever wrote, The War Zone, took 14 years.

He is in the early stages of a new book, with about six poems, most short and formal. He claims that most of them will not see the finish line, though. He notes that there is efficiency about writing, which took him a long time to realize.

"Sometimes I beat my head against the wall for a long time and realize, 'This poem was not going to succeed.' Robert Frost said, 'If the last line of a poem is known before you write the poem, then it is a trick poem and no poem at all.' He means that the first line comes as a gift, and then a poem rides like a piece of ice on a hot stove, that poem rides on their own melt. It comes to a conclusion that neither the poet nor the reader expected. If there is no surprise for the writer," Mr. Barr said, "then there is no surprise for the reader. If there are no tears for the poet, there are no tears for the reader."

A poem, he said, is actually a new event happening inside the poet. If it succeeds, it will always keep that sense of freshness and surprise, and that's why people go back and read the same poem again and again. It's a little universe that contains a surprise or a discovery in it, he said.

"Typically, for me, and many poets I know, while you are writing it, you don't really know where you are going with it," he said. "You are developing something that you haven't thought about before. It's not just a matter of the mind; it's a fusion of emotion and intellect, so a strong poem has something going on intellectually and emotionally. It doesn't proceed as if you would outline a paper or an essay of expository writing. It proceeds much more intuitively, and because of that, it is not a linear kind of logic that a poem uses."

When not writing poetry, Mr. Barr and his family enjoy the full menu of what Mackinac Island has to offer. They have horse corrals behind their home, with two saddle horses and two carriage horses. Mrs. Barr rides a lot, so she enjoys having the horses at her disposal. Mr. Barr says that he rides when he can to keep his wife company, but admits that he is not a horseman. The family also enjoys bicycling around the Island, especially when sharing the Island with friends and family who have never been here before.

"We love the restaurants, and all of the outdoor activities are just great," he said. "We had some friends here last night that were visiting for the first time, and they said, 'Why do you ever leave?' We had the fun of showing them around the Island and around the house. There is so much history here; it is definitely a deep, rich Island for that."

The next poet after Mr. Barr is James Lenfestey, a writer based in both Minneapolis and Mackinac Island. He founded the Ojai Poetry Festival in Ojai, California, and chairs the Literary Witnesses Poetry Series in Minnesota. He also teaches at Grand Hotel. He will read poetry at 8 p.m. Sunday, July 15.

Then, the following Sunday, July 22, Rev. Carroll, a retired Navy chaplain, will end the Poetry Festival when he recites poetry from his book, Poems from DaNang, with help from organist Rachelle Deresti.

As a fun activity, Mr. Barr said that he has invited these fellow summer Islanders and poets to join him and read one scene from a new verse play that he is working on. Rev. Carroll will play the vice president of the United States. Mr. Lenfestey has agreed to play the role of Africa's newest dictator. He hopes to have another Islander read the part of a CNN correspondent, while he plays the protagonist who is a Caribbean poet. The scene will last 12 to 15 minutes, after the other poems he reads, which will last 15 to 20 minutes.

"This is a new kind of work for John, something he is experimenting with, and I am eager to experience it and participate by helping out and reading with him," Rev. Carroll said.