What prompted the poem, what shaped it—gives it that loopy circularity—kaleidoscopic, dizzying?
RS: It was prompted by what I witnessed of social gatherings my parents attended. It was prompted, further, by the suburban academic gatherings I attended in Iowa City and Bread Loaf, Vermont, in the late 1950s. Earlier I had seen my Russian-born podiatrist father and his podiatrist friends slapping each other on the back when they met, drank and hung out together. Because I saw Dad as self-consciously there and, at the same time, not there, I wondered if he and his friends—like Samuel Johnson who kicked a curb to ‘prove’ its existence to the English philosopher Berkeley—slapped one another on the back to ensure the presence—at the party—of the other. Anyway, I was struck by a certain disconnect between the fun and games the people seemed to want—and the occasion seemed to promise—and the self-conscious, desperate aloneness, the private sorrow, the alcohol-fueled desperation. “Barbecue” is pretty tightly constructed. Much of what I wrote at that time was in syllabics—syllable count, in
