Mastering rocks and words Trail crew worker Christian Barter links day job with private passion to create vivid poetry

The two major hats Christian Barter wears these days – trail crew supervisor in Acadia National Park and published poet – in a not-so-curious way are connected. The special skills the Down East native brings to creating a stairway on a Mount Desert Island mountainside are echoed in the ways in which he fashions a poem. It’s one rock, one word – carefully placed – at a time.

Barter started working in the park after his junior year at Bates College. He had been mowing lawns and “kicking around” Bar Harbor when he put in for a summer job at Acadia. He soon fell in love with the work. Almost concurrently, he began writing poetry seriously. Reading T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as an undergraduate seemed to seal his fate. “I’m probably not the only one to have had this experience,” he notes, “but I remember thinking ‘This is incredible,’ not having much of an idea of what was going on [in the poem], but knowing this was a powerful force to be reckoned with.”

Barter’s big creative inspiration at Bates was composition teacher Bill Matthews. Composing music proved to be excellent training for writing poetry. “Music is an unforgiving medium,” the poet says; “If you get it wrong, it’s glaring.” Working with rock can also be merciless. “You have to put yourself in its world to make it work,” Barter explains, “because rock doesn’t transfer very well into yours.” His Acadia crew mostly does dry stonework, without mortar, using rock found in the woods. “When you get it right, the rewards are tremendous,” he says.

The same goes for poetry: unforgiving but paying dividends if you stick with it. Barter’s first book, “The Singers I Prefer” (CavanKerry Press, 87 pages, softbound, $14), a compilation of 46 poems – about eight years of writing -testifies to a deft craftsman who wastes not and wants not. The lines are taut, the stanzas well hewn.

More significantly, the voice is fresh, spirited and natural in its cadences. Barter likes to interrupt himself in mid-line, rendering shifts of thought and sentiment with engaging precision. The poetry mixes observation and reflection. The subjects also catch one’s attention: “On Hearing that You Feel Bad After Having Sex with Me” reads the title of one poem.

Barter never intended to sit down and write a book about music or that had musical themes, but assembling the poems in this collection he discovered motifs throughout. The singers – and composers – he prefers range from Bob Dylan and Beth Orton to Bach and Copland. His take is often personal, as in these opening lines of part II of “On a Beethoven Cello Sonata”: What I love about Beethoven is what I so often hate about myself: He never finishes anything.

Barter grew up in Maine. His parents were a part of the back-to-the-land movement in the 1960s, raising their own food on a back road in Sullivan. He attended Mountain View Middle School and Sumner High School. The former gets mentioned in the poem “The School Bus,” a charming account of a dream in which everything on the bus goes right for once, from classmates making room for him to sit to kissing Mary Jo Stillwell. Another poem, “Band Camp,” looks back at youthful escapades – vodka in the trumpet case, chasing the “prettiest” girls -with a kind of tempered regret.

“It’s primarily the pleasure and excitement of art that draws us to it,” Barter says. “We have these big hypersensitive pleasure receptors that get us into all kinds of trouble.” The poet cites the German philosopher Schopenhauer who spoke of the “endless yearning” that lies at the core of life. “That’s really simplistic,” Barter admits, “but I believe that’s a fundamental state of being alive that’s worth exploring.”

Barter went on from Bates to earn an MFA in writing at Vermont College. His teachers there, Sydney Lea, Betsy Sholl, Mark Halladay and Jack Myers, all helped advance his work. He especially admired Halladay, “a discursive poet who ‘speaks in the language of real men’ as Wordsworth said” – a description that fits Barter himself, who also eschews the “poetic” in favor of a plainspoken style that nonetheless is full of lyric invention.

Lea, to whom “The Singers I Prefer” is dedicated, has been an important adviser and critic over the years. A Vermonter who spends a part of each year at Grand Lake Stream, Lea cautioned Barter about being too personal. The poet welcomed the nudge. “Unfortunately, comfort and good art do not go together,” Barter states. “Art springs from a state of irritation and discomfort.”

The impetus to shift gears came in the form of a challenge. Half-seriously, Lea suggested his former student try writing a poem about the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Barter had some books about World War I that his grandmother had given him (she had been a book editor for the Des Moines Register). Thumbing through one, he came across a photograph of Trotsky and Joffe in a huge open car on their way to the treaty signing. The resultant poem brings the moment into contemporary focus – as if these two men were driving down the streets of Los Angeles or Bar Harbor. Lea hailed the poem and it led to several others related to the First World War.

That many of the poems in the book have appeared in prestigious periodicals such as the Georgia Review and American Scholar confirms Barter’s accomplishment in verse. Other signs of success: He recently was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Bread Loaf fellowship. Garrison Keillor reading his poem “Can You” on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac on Aug. 4 seemed like icing on the cake.

Barter has taught writing courses and British literature at College of the Atlantic. “However,” he said, “I have chosen a decidedly nonacademic life in which to make my poems, and they are in equal measure the results of a life outdoors working with my hands as they are of my beloved immersions in Keats or language theory.”

Acadia sneaks into a few poems. In “Morning after Your Leaving,” a park ranger tells tourists about peregrine falcons and how “rockslides sometimes just happen,” his spiel tinged with recent loss. “George Dorr’s Abandoned Bicycle Path” conjoins the modern day “synthetic-garbed” mountain biker with women of yore in long dresses on one-speeds, “frowning, as people in old photos do, as though they disapproved of what we did with their lives, the landscape unrecognizable, before the fire, the Loop Road, the puffing laboratory now always in view.

Asked if his fellow crewmembers know that he’s a poet, Barter replies with a laugh, “They do now.” He has managed to keep his writing life “under the rug,” but there’s no escaping his newfound status. “Our society has so separated the art of poetry from manual labor or any other realm of life,” he comments, a situation he calls “ridiculous.” At the same time, in his work at the park he’d prefer that people didn’t know he was a poet, “not because it’s some kind of evil secret,” he explains, “but because I want to be able to concentrate on what I’m doing while I’m there.”

In the meantime, Barter continues to “crank out the poems,” seeking the keepers. “In granite quarrying,” he notes, “they had to throw away 70 percent of the rock.” That’s about the same ratio in his poetry. “I do a lot of quarrying and a lot of throwing away,” Barter says.

In the July 2005 issue of Down East magazine, a feature article titled “Behind the Scenes at Acadia National Park,” quotes Barter on the subject of wear and tear. The task of the trail keepers, he states, is to minimize the impact of visitors and to assure “the lastingness of the trail.” The task of the poet is to assure the lastingness of the language, a mission Barter has made his own.

Carl Little may be reached at little@acadia.net.