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Barbara Henning's most recent books are a collection of poems, My Autobiography (United Artists), and a novel, You, Me and the Insects (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005). Black Lace (a novel) and a collection of poems, Detective Sentences were both published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2001. Thirty Miles to Rosebud, a collection of stories and poems is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil. Five new stories are forthcoming at Jacket Magazine. Her other books of poetry include In Between (Spectacular Diseases 2001), Me & My Dog (Poetry New York, 1999); Love Makes Thinking Dark (United Artists, 1995); The Passion of Signs ( Leave Books, 1994); Smoking in the Twilight Bar (United Artists, l988). Artist books and collaborations include How to Read and Write in the Dark (with Miranda Maher 1996); Words and Pictures (with Sally Young, 1996); Aerial View, Found in the Park, Up North, Teacher Training, Black Grapes, My Autobiography, Seventh Street, Thirty Miles to Rosebud, The Animal I Am, Aham Asmi, An Arc Falling into the Bougainvillea, Cities & Memory and Tha Kita Thaka (2000). Tha Kita Thaka was reprinted and displayed gallaries at eight colleges in theMichigan Global Awareness Consortium(2002-3). Poems and stories have been published in many magazines, including Talisman, Cyberpoems, Eaogh, Reconfigurations, Hanging Loose, Zen Monster, Lungfull, House Organ, Shiny, The World, How2, First Intensity, Lingo, Poetry International, Lacanian Ink, Poetry New York, Key Satch(el), The Paris Review, Not Enough Night, Chain, Hambone, Dispatch Detroit, Abandon Automobile: A Detroit Anthology (Wayne State University Press) and The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology. Essays and reviews have been published in écorché (England), Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, The World, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Taproot,Chain, College English and Modern Fiction Studies. Fiction has been published in Fiction International, Mark(s), The Widener Review ("Dust" was nominated for a Pushcart award), and The Brooklyn Rail, Downtown Brooklyn and Matrika Yoga . During the early nineties, Barbara was the editor of Long News in the Short Century, a journal of art and writing. She grew up in Detroit, and moved to New York City in the early 80's, teaching creative writing and literature at Long Island University in Brooklyn, where she now Professor Emeritus. Currently, she lives in Tucson, Arizona, teaching for Naropa University, Long Island University and Writers.com.

Most books available from:

Spuyten Duyvil
Small Press Distribution
Amazon.com

Selections from Reviews and Blurbs:

Review of "My Autobiography"   United Artists 2007. Reviewed in Rain Taxi, Print Version, vol 12, No 2., Summer 2007. Mark Terrill

The idea for Barbara Henning's book My Autobiography stems from a collaboration with the artist Miranda Maher, who clipped off the corners of 999 books from Henning's personal library for an installment entitled "999."  Henning then constructed a series of seventy-two untitled sonnet-like poems consisting of seven couplets each—selecting a word, phrase, or passage from each of the 999 books, using alliteration as a rough common denominator, and more or less following the alphabetical order of her library.  Changes were minimal; some rearrangement was done but the poems basically wrote themselves, the lines synching up with each other in ways unforeseeable by the author, adn sourcing everythign from Agee, Artaud, and Apollinaire to Zukofsky, and all the way into the kitchen to Henning's cookbooks.

The result is a neo-Oulipian synaptic joyride through a series of evocative, hilarious, and surprising contrasts, parallels, and combinations. At the end of the book is a comprehensive index listing all of the various sources for each individual line.  One can either read the poems just as they are, letting the lines play off the mind and ear without knowing who wrote what, or one can work their way through wile comparing each line with the index, only to be all the more amazed at how seamless and fluid the transitions actually are, who's doing it with whom, and what magic has been created in the process.

A good example is poem 35, in which we find the collusion and collision of such disparate authors as William Shakespeare, Karl Shapiro, David Shapiro, Hal Sirowitz, Ron Silliman, W.D. Snodgrass, David Snow, Gary Syder, Juliana Spahr, Jack Spicer, and Gertrude Stein. Strange literary bedfellows indeed, creating a very unusual progeny, best expressed in the last three couplets:

I know what it means, my language
left banares on the kashi express

even bananas with seeds
gain fluency even as they

create wars and pointless loves
little sales ladies little sales ladies little saddles

While the use of such generative constraints is nothing new, My Autobiography is not just a derivative spin-off from William Burrough's cut-up oeuvre or Ted Berrigan's The Sonnets, nor is it just another cento exercise in the vein of John Ashberry's "The Dong with the Luminose Nose." It was Oulipo member Harry Mathews who said that "writing the truth means not representation but invention"; in My Autobiography, by way of a deft combination of constraints and supple editing, Barbara Henning has conjured up a sort of truth by proxy by merely letting the language speak for itself in an inventive way. 

Barbara Henning. My Autobiography. United Artists 2007. Review by Bill Kushner in The Poetry Project Newsletter, December 2007/January 2008.

As she explains in her forward, Barbara Henning's My Autobiography began as a collaboration with the artist Miranda Maher. "Miranda clipped off the corner of 999 of my books, for an installation, entitled 999. Then I constructed the poem by taking a word, a phrase or a passage or two from these books. " So from out of her 999 books, ranging from Henning's vast collection of poetry to writings on art, yoga, philosophy, psychiatry, and then into her kitchen for her cookbooks, Henning has produced 72 excellent and adventurous sonnets. These sonnets are truly Objectivist creatures (Henning dedicates her book to Louis Zukofsky). What's more interesting about these poems to me? Woven, as they are, with the raw material of language I think they are often funny, and they give a picture of our times and poetics in a weird way.  Take her sonnet "28" (the only titles to these poems are numbers) with 14 lines credited to such poets as Charles Olson, Maureen Owen, Ovid, Gary Pacernick, Grace Plaey, Patchen, Perec, Pessoa, Pettet, Wang Ping and Jayne Anne Phillips (Henning obviously working form those of her books arranged alphabetically)

28

born December 27, 1910
to be alive is to be a great noise

no man could swim in air, no man could breathe
but—this much you can do—give in as if

you're a beatup Mercedes
maybe it's my age, prime of life, you know

no, no I am not mentioned
with the print of a million moving feet

fear would deface & topple
finish up as a jackal's lunch

a butterfly through the window
walking back up the street momentarily

mother's voice now full of irritation
I mean I would sort of appear

This poem, with its traditional themes of life, death, and sheer accidental existence, immediately reminded me of Ted Berrigan's sonnet "LIX," which touches movingly on the lives and deaths of Marilyn Monroe, William Carlos Williams, and Joe Brainard. But here Berrigan becomes a very powerful poetical presence in his by now historical and masterful sonnets, Henning herself only appears in person once, in her sonnet "44," in lines taken from, of all exotic places, the East Detroit High School Yearbook, 1966:

Barbara Henning: "east Detroiter" staff 2; pit and balcony drama

Nostalgic, fitting, yet funny, eh? It's our poet at quite a remove. I also like very much these three bumpy transitions she takes form various biographies of Ezra Pound, in her sonnet titled "31":

they both became pupils of Buddha
I don't care a fried_____about nationality
what's normal, makes him ab-normal

A too brief but perhaps apropos history of the man. It's stuff like this that refreshes the language. It's langaue giving back to language the beauty of the unexpected. I like how sonnet "35" begins with Shakespeare and yet ends with a delicious line from Gertrude Stein:

little sales ladies little sales ladies little saddles

or, how another line of Stein's in "36" makes you want to rush back to the source herself:

five and no more five and four four and four

It is the sonnets taken from Henning's books on yoga that have an interesting existence ont heir own. How sonnet "50" ends:

nothing you wish is impossible
in the avenue leading to the water

Or, the very real, very weird beauty of how "51" ends with this couplet:

a pain in my back becomes
corpses of large birds, corpses of small birds

I strongly urge more readers to take My Autobiogrpahy in hand, and find your own favorite passages in this most challenging and adventurous book.

******

You, Me, and the Insects is a heartening, bittersweet story of a spiritual struggle and transformation, told in parallel universes of mother, writer, wife in secular USA and dedicated struggling western yogini in luminously detailed India. The writing is marvelously rich, layered, the narrative is compelling. The phenomenal world is the source of terrific insight, delight and surprise. This is not a pretentious New Age memoir but an ageless picaresque and imaginative voyage. A major accomplishment for this extremely salient, charged writer. (Anne Waldman on You, Me and the Insects)

This is a miracle of a book. Barbara Henning has taken seemingly unpromising materials–the demanding study of yoga in southern India; the daily incidents of life there; the recollection of starting a family with a husband now dead–and transformed them into a narrative that is gripping, entertaining, and intensely moving. It is a triumph of imagination restoring irresistible vivacity to the perishable treasures of memory. (Harry Mathews on You, Me and the Insects)

Barbara Henning’s astonishing new semi-autobiographical novel, You, Me and the Insects, is set in Detroit’s Cass Corridor, New York and finally in Mysore, India, some 20-odd years later.  While in India, Henning’s narrator, Gina grows spiritually, developing a profound relationship with her guru while discussing yogic traditions manifested in India and the United States, as well as the history of Hindu mythology and sacred Vedic texts. But one of the few clear philosophical directives he gives her—“It is your duty to be joyful”—illuminates the foundation of their work together, and informs Henning’s project as a whole: Discipline is an undeniable component in a spiritual quest, but creative force is equally vital. Enlightenment is not for the passive.  In You, Me, and the Insects, Henning has written a testament to living and devotion—LYNN CRAWFORD (Review, Metro Times, Detroit, July 6-12, 2005)

Enjoyed your book cover to cover. There's a palpability about the good writers and the musicians and even the filmmaker Michael Moore who I totally admire. It's a kind of blue-collar matter-of-factness you have, like you are taking us along with you to work in the morning. You have that completely, no esoteric sauces, no enlightenment poof on the Indian experience. It's so easy to clutter India with spiritual mumbo. Even Allen does that. He never lets you know his heart is really in New Jersey. It's a quality I like about Philip Levine when I like him, and a Detroit poet who died young, Ted Holmes. I see the same quality in Paul Chambers and Donald Byrd and other Detroit jazz musicians. Bill Bamberger, though he's from Flint, shares it in the way he approaches publishing his books. Congrats on a sweet book. (Steve Katz, January 24, 2006)

*****

I feel like a particularly blessed inhabitant of our earth after receiving and above all reading Barbara Henning's wonderful Found in the Park. It's a little jewel of a book: so haunting to look at, so very moving to read. (Harry Mathews)

*****

The crystalline precision of Barbara Henning's writing contains a startling suggestiveness; the surface of her language always implies an intensity of feeling and intellect that recognizes the ability of understatement to be more gripping that pyrotechnical virtuosity . . . . suggesting, through a few careful words, the most complicated dynamics of a very human struggle to find life worthwhile. (Mark Wallace)

*****

[In Detective Sentences] Henning maneuvers conventional, "protestant" plain speech as an unlikely foil to her frequent "yogic twists" mediating "ease and disease." Henning does not attempt structural subtlety in these formal experiments--alternating for the most part between prose patches and verse couplets. The prose is straightforward, pellucid, and all the more noteworthy in that it unselfconsciously fuses dream imagery with journalistic scrutiny. Her couplets shear experience down to judicious reportage in chilling dualities, points, counterpoints: "I sleep better with my head at the foot of the bed / The guy in the next bed is handcuffed to the rail." "I put oil in his ears.../...you want me // to pick up the check and then nothing / not even a kiss." "The Trade Center towering over St. Paul's /Two paper cups with coffee on a bench." The value of Henning's experiments, as these examples indicate, is the intensity that appears to be lived out through the brevity if what is expressed. (Jack Kimball, Faux Press, 1/3/2004) http://pantaloons.blogspot.com/2004_03_01_pantaloons_archive.html

Detective Sentences is an exciting and challenging collection. Whether in prose or poetry, Barbara Henning's formal inventiveness has given her apparently autobiographical material a power never found in purely confessional writing. Her vision of an unreasonable world (our very own) is very intelligent, very intense, sometimes funny, always disturbing. (Harry Matthews)

Barbara Henning's Detective sentences are fastened with empathy. Lived sorrow for our failures to connect and a tender knowledge of human potential is the larger sense these discrete and enignmatic sentences illuminate. Like the outline of a body, her phrases impart the residue, memory's investigative unveiling process, here in this house inside a house/ with a spider tatooed over your breastbone (Kimberling Lyons)

Detective Sentences—Henning's surfaces are straight forward, yet her non-sequiturs and leaps are connected by an invisible web that links strands of ordinary, uncommon humanity to the absurd and the cosmic. (Brenda Coultas)

******

Black Lace—This notion of pain as a crutch, a sensory nudge, is dark and well-rendered in the novel. Henning sketches her character so clearly that the notion makes sense, seems utterly reasonable in the context of Eileen's life. The book fails to offer reassurance—life does not get better—and this separates it from other books about women trapped in the institution of marriage. Sadly, perhaps inevitably, Eileen's trap simply changes form. What separates the two traps is the notion of choice, both sexual and professional. . . . The writing style is stark and matter-of-fact, the pacing quick. Henning's unflinching portrayal and her compassion create a memorable protagonist, neither heroine nor victim. Perhaps Eileen herself best describes her life as a woman: I know theworld better from this position, the position of a woman left wanting, the erotic and mystical world of marginality. (Camille-Yvette Welsch ForeWord)

On Black Lace, Lenora Todara, Village Voice

Black Lace. Refreshingly, Henning resists happy endings, and instead focuses on the richer material of Eileen's engagement with her conflicting selves, leaving the outcomes of her trials with identity beyond the last page. . . . complex and heartbreakingly authentic (Rain Taxi).

Barbara Henning's Black Lace is clearly written by a poet, but its prose is straight as an arrow. As third person narrator and I, Henning pins the cut-loose characters of this sparse novel against a gray Detroit dropcloth, connecting them through soul sickness, helplesness, and a scary, uncontrollable eroticism. (Charlotte Carter).

Black Lace is a book of ambivalences, shadowy observations and cul-de-sacs, as dreamlikeand harrowing as the fictions of Tillie Olsen and Maurice Blanchot. Barbara Henning's language is sharp and defiant, as if cut with a stylus. Her Eileen looms out at us, trapped in her sullen self-awareness, wanting everything while reminding us of everything we can't have. Set in Detroit during the post-Vietnam years, Black Lace has a power of a Depression-era Walker Evan's photo (Lewis Warsh).

******

Donna Cartelli. Me and My Dog. Poetry Project Newsletter. February/March 2001. . . . everyday details and language of death become a means to both witness and revel in how we live. The result is breathtaking work, simple and profound.

******

How to Read and Write in the Dark. This limited edition livre d'artiste(s) presents Barbara Henning's sharp, analytic and ruminative prose pieces -- "a composition of tiny speech genres" -- interleaved with artist Miranda Maher's drawings (presented in color photocopy) of gridworks & lines seemingly representing maps tracing the communicatie paths of sleep, sex and dream -- "a disruption of scientistic knowledge by the sensual and physical. Small Press Distribution Catalog, Spring/Summer 1997. Also available from Printed Matter.

*****

Dan Featherston. Specters and Spectacles [Love Makes Thinking Dark]. Sulfur, Fall 1996. . . .a linguistic funhouse of prose and verse poems where body, language, memory, family/pronoun romance and specklings of body/text speculations merge and undercut, informing and undermining each urgent declarative. . . "Fabric Reins" is an exhilarating example of loosing language via form's constraint. A range of images and phrases recycle throughout the pece shifting through oulipo-like twists and grammatical transpositions that dynamize an ostensibly simple sequence of events.

Barbara Henning's deep and quirky knowledge of the human soul--especially woman's soul--brings us to a simultaneous exploration of the outise and the inside, Self and Other: the macrocosm and microcosm of the alchemists. She takes us far, and so skillfully that we are glad to let her do it. (Diana di Prima on Love Makes Thinking Dark.)

If men are from Mars and women from Venus, how have we arrived on this blue and green planet, complete with sexual historis and aching with compliants? Barbara Henning's poetry registers the implosion of emotion, graphs the entropy of relationships. The verse and prose poems in Love Makes Thinking Dark are disjunctive meditations composed of pithy non sequiturs motivated by quirks of logic, love, and language. Conventions, anomalies, and violations of grammar, semantics, and syntax are duly noted along with the deadening routine, curious estrangement, and everyday violence of mothers and fathers, daughters and lovers whose significance to one another erodes in relentlessly paratactic sentences. The grammar of parallel lines and parallel lives puts the "natural" isochrony of American English utterances in service of verses, lines, and sentence fragments tense with the "normal" stresses of lives under pressure. Each page, "a postcard with a prosy style," revelas a deconstructed grammar of passion and loss. (Harryette Mullen).

Not since the Metaphysical Poets have there been love poems like these--assembled from a tantalizing collection of analytic lyricism, philosophical speculation and wickedly witty word play. In politics, as well as poetics, Henning cuts across categories with surprising andpleasurable results. By turns piercingly direct and oblique, these poems glow darkly in the mind. (Elaine Equi)

Robert Hale. Love Makes Thinking Dark. Poetry Project Newsletter. December/January 1995. So effective for its tough confessions and consciousness, Henning's is a late art that has the pride of both presupposing a century of writing in it's objective approach to highly subjective material,and of the idea that confession can be a means of concealment, that confessional "truth" is often the most abstract requisition, a seduction of the senses for the self.

*******

Mark Wallace. The Passion of Signs. Taproot Reviews #7/8, 1996. A beautifully evocative collection of lyrical insights on love, and the social and historical framework in which it struggles to happen. These precise, well-wrought poems understand that formal innovation is never more than a function of insight--these are the sort of poems that could only arise from a life intensely felt and understood. Henning knows a great deal about the negotiations that make love possible, or make it fail, and she knows that the most evocative poetry is often that which lives closest to our own particularities.

******

J.E. Mason."The Alchemist's Bedroom: Poet Turns Lead of Everyday into Gold of Art. Greater Portland's Casco Bay Weekly. April 15, 1993, Vol. VI, No. 15. . . . It is as if the poet has improvised a collage of Polaroids, as if they were taken all together, quickly, and yet do not quite relate to one another . . . We hear the incantatory tone. We have been drawn into the poem; by habit we have sought connection, and now we are being denied it. We are experiencing the idiom of dream.

*****

Thomas Strand. Smoking in the Twilight Bar. Poetic Space: Poetry & Fiction. 1989. Vol 4, No. 6. These are poems with a very hard edge to them. Be warned: this is not a book for those who want poetry to laud some kind of idealized fantasy of what life should be. This is a poet who has been around the block a few times and she is not about to make compromises with what she sees as the truth of human existence. This is a book of unvarnished reality. . . These are our ghosts, the millions of America's metropolitan flotsam, whose sheer numbers alone make their story worth consideration, but who are hardly ever the stuff of poetry.

Smoking in the Twilight Bar is a collection of tales of the nocturnal lives of working women, an intelligent and sensitive portrayal of the urban night. Moving from bars to poolhalls to bedrooms, the stories are of violence and sexuality, understood but not judged. Like glimpses from the street through lighted windows, these brief paragraphs are at first discontinuous; they evolve, gradually, into narrative the way lives come together to make a city." Small Press Distribution Catalog, 1989.