Lawler: Rumi grew up in a highly disciplined household, son of a great thinker and theologian. Is that discipline necessary for any spiritual seeker?

Barks: Rumi does say you should submit to a daily practice of some sort. It’s like the knocker on the door: if you keep knocking, eventually some joy will look out the window and see who’s there.

Lawler: What is the source of Rumi’s poetry?

Barks: Rumi and Shams met in that mysterious place we call the heart. It’s difficult to explain; it has to be lived. Any claim that I might have in this area comes from having met Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, who lived at their level of enlightenment. He once asked me, “Will you meet me on the inside or on the outside?” With my typical English-teacher evasiveness, I said, “Isn’t it always both?” I should have looked in those eyes and said, “Inside.”

Lawler: What is it about Rumi’s poetry that makes it so appealing to Americans today?

Barks: We have been somewhat prepared for Rumi by our own national poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson: our odd couple, with their extensive inner dialogues and ecstatic visions. Also I feel there is a natural expansiveness in the American soul that is willing to receive what Rumi is giving. Fluid yet formal, lyric and narrative, his poetry is like some wild mixture of Miguel de Cervantes, John Milton, James Joyce, John Coltrane, and Robin Williams on lunch break with the crew. Americans have a native hilarity that mixes well with Rumi’s sense of humor.

Lawler: How did you become a poet?

Barks: I’ve never thought of myself as anything but a writer. When I was twelve years old, I kept a little notebook of words that I loved: azalea, halcyon, jejune. I just liked the taste of them. I was getting my tools ready. Then I began writing short stories in high school and won some contests there, and I kept on writing in college, and I’ve just always kept on with it.

Lawler: Your father was headmaster of a prep school in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Did your home life feed that exploration of writing?

Barks: We ate every meal, three meals a day, with four hundred people in a big dining hall. I ate with my father and mother and brother and sister and five other people at the table. Among the tables around us were several magnificent English and Latin teachers who were storytellers and writers. There was also a group at the school called the “Round Table” that met every two or three months and discussed a book. It was a very literary place.

Lawler: Did religion enter the picture in your childhood?

Barks: We were Presbyterian, but I was sort of a river mystic. There was a curve of the Tennessee River near the school, right across from Williams Island. It was a very beautiful spot. People have been living in that place for fifteen thousand years. That’s where I learned about beauty, just watching that river. There are three mountains there — Elder, Signal, and Lookout — and you could yell at Elder Mountain and hear your name come back. And it was perfectly all right at any time just to wander off from the family and sit by the river. My sister had her own spot out on the bluff where she went. We would see her out there, and we realized that you shouldn’t go and talk to her when she was out there. She was doing what I did — just looking at the river.

Lawler: So your family allowed for creative expression and reflection?

Barks: I grew up in an ecstatic family. Anybody at any time could burst into song for any reason. My mother would just dance around the house, singing. I recall those two minutes at the end of the day when a golden light would fall across the floor, especially in April. I would lie down in it and hug myself. One time when I was doing that, I told my mother, “Mama, I’ve got that full feeling again.” She said, “I know you do, honey.” Rumi says just being sentient and in a body is cause for rapture, and I think his reminding us of that is one reason why he’s so popular.

Lawler: Rumi calls grief and joy “the double music” of life. What has this looked like in your life?

Barks: Both of my parents died in 1971, within six weeks of each other, of unrelated causes. I went into a period of grieving in which I felt as if I had blinders on. It also opened me out into a new freedom with bursts of creativity. My dreams became lucent and spectacular. Grief and joy very much did feel like two wings on the bird of my consciousness during that time.

Lawler: I was struck in your first book, The Juice (Harper & Row), by your fascination with the body. One poem is called “Big Toe”; another is “Tongue.”

Barks: Rumi says there’s a great wisdom in the body. You’ve got to listen to it and do what it tells you to do, as a student walks behind the teacher, because this one knows the way more clearly than you. This also comes down to us through Whitman.

Lawler: If that’s so, then why are you so quick to dismiss the idea that Shams and Rumi were lovers?

Barks: I seem to have been forced to make that pronouncement. Some members of the gay community like to claim that Rumi and Shams were lovers in the physical sense. I don’t believe they were. Rumi’s poetry teaches us about a friendship, a love in a place that is beyond sex.

Lawler: But why couldn’t Rumi and Shams experience love on all levels, including the physical? As you make love, Rumi says, so will God make love to you.

Barks: Rumi’s so honest, I feel he would have mentioned it. I think we would have descriptions of sexual acts. When I claim that his friendship with Shams was beyond touch and time, beyond teacher and disciple, beyond lover and beloved, beyond longing, I’m not being afraid of the erotic. They met in the heart.

Lawler: So many of the Rumi poems you’ve chosen to translate are the sensual ones. Why?

Barks: When I first began translating or rephrasing, I was in my thirties and forties, and I was drowned in sexual energy. Now, at seventy, my libido is less strong, and the poems are becoming less sensual. Maybe that’s not the right word, because they’re still delighting in the senses, but they feel less driven by sexuality.

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