Coleman Barks
Poet & Translator of Rumi
“One of the greatest pieces of good luck that has happened recently in American poetry is Coleman Barks' agreement to translate poem after poem of Rumi….Coleman’s exquisite sensitivity to the flavor and turns of ordinary American speech has produced marvelous lines, full of flavor and Sufi humor, as well as the intimacy that is carried inside American speech at its best.” —Robert Bly
Coleman Barks was born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and was educated at the University of North Carolina and the University of California at Berkeley. He taught poetry and creative writing at the University of Georgia for thirty years. He is the author of numerous Rumi translations and has been a student of Sufism since 1977. His work with Rumi was the subject of an hour-long segment in Bill Moyers' Language of Life series on PBS; and he is a featured poet and translator in Bill Moyers' poetry special, "Fooling with Words." A book of his own poetry, Winter Sky: Poems 1968-2008, was published in 2008 by the University of Georgia Press. Coleman Barks is the father of two grown children and the grandfather of four. He lives in Athens, Georgia.
In addition to poetry readings of his own work and of Rumi, Coleman also offers Rumi in performance, with movement by Zuleikha, and live music by world-renowned musicians such as David Darling and Glen Velez.
About WINTER SKY: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, 1968-2008
As the foremost translator of thirteenth-century mystic poet Jalal Al-Din Rumi, Coleman Barks reaches a devoted, inspired, and ever-widening international audience. Yet the foundation for Barks' work as a translator is his own significant body of work as a poet. Winter Sky offers a selection from Barks's seven previously published books combined with a group of new poems. Barks's open-hearted, free verse poetry is infused with a joy of the spirit at play with the forms of the world. His journey through life is deeply embedded in his work. The poems spring directly from experience and engage with subjects such as the elation and struggle of having and raising children, grief over the deaths of loved ones, the transition from parent to grandparent, or the changing nature and intensity of desire. Barks's open letter to President Bush, written days before the invasion of Iraq and widely circulated online, is a poetic plea for peace, offering a startling and moving alternative to war. Whether it is the childhood excitement of being named best athlete at summer camp or the early signs of dementia at the age of seventy, Barks uses the personal to convey the universal. The unique flow of a life is here in poems that are rueful, confused, torn, and grateful, but always informed by Barks's transcendent sense of joy and playfulness.
Without question, we can credit Coleman Barks with making Rumi accessible to American readers through his modernized renditions of the best-known poems of the great Islamic mystic. This is the capstone of Barks’ life’s work, a vast collection centering on Shams Tabrizi, a wandering mystic who transformed Rumi’s life. Rumi was already renowned when Shams arrived in Konya, in today’s Turkey, having wandered for years searching for someone with a soul as profound as his own with whom to share “sobbet,” a mystical conversation about God and love. Rumi and Shams inspired each other for several years, until Shams mysteriously disappeared. He lives on in Rumi’s searching poems. Most of the hundreds of poems collected here are short: “Take someone who does not keep score, / who is not looking to be richer, or afraid of losing, / who has not the slightest interest even / in his own personality. He is free.” Even the longer ones have the same intimate tone. Richly sensual yet never flowery, Barks’ language emphasizes Rumi’s embodied spirituality in a book to savor. —Booklist
Coleman Barks website
