The Galleons: Poems

by Rick Barot

For almost twenty years, Rick Barot has been writing some of the most stunningly crafted lyric poems in America, paying careful, Rilkean attention to the layered world that surrounds us. In The Galleons, he widens his scope, contextualizing the immigrant journey of his Filipino-American family in the larger history and aftermath of colonialism.

These poems are engaged in the work of recovery, making visible what is often intentionally erased: the movement of domestic workers on a weekday morning in Brooklyn; a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, fondly sharing photos of his dog; the departure and destination points of dozens of galleons between 1564 and 1815, these ships evoking both the vast movements of history and the individual journeys of those borne along by their tides. "Her story is a part of something larger, it is a part / of history," Barot writes of his grandmother. "No, her story is an illumination // of history, a matchstick lit in the black seam of time."

With nods toward Barot's poetic predecessors--from Frank O'Hara to John Donne--The Galleons represents an exciting extension and expansion of this virtuosic poet's work, marrying "reckless" ambition and crafted "composure," in which we repeatedly find the speaker standing and breathing before the world, "incredible and true."

Genres: Poetry, Asian American, Queer, LGBT

88 pages, Paperback

First published February 11, 2020

About the author

From rickbarot.com:

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and attended Wesleyan University and The Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.

He has published three books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002), which received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize; Want (2008), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize; and Chord (2015), which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and received the 2016 UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer in Poetry. In 2020, Barot received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.

His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New Yorker, and The Threepenny Review. His work has been included in many anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, Asian-American Poetry: The Next Generation, Language for a New Century, and The Best American Poetry 2012, 2016, and 2020.

Barot lives in Tacoma, Washington and teaches at Pacific Lutheran University. He is also the director of The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at PLU. His fourth book of poems, The Galleons, was published by Milkweed Editions in 2020. The Galleons was listed on the top ten poetry books for 2020 by the New York Public Library, was a finalist for the Pacific Northwest Book Awards, and was on the longlist for the National Book Award. Also in 2020, his chapbook During the Pandemic was published by Albion Books. In Fall 2024, Milkweed Editions will publish his fifth book of poems, Moving the Bones.

Reviews

[Ken]

Sometimes, for reasons unknown to science, I read blurbs. On the back of Rick Barot's collection, The Galleons, Monica Youn (persona unknowna to me) says, "Barot has a well-deserved reputation as a poet's poet, and this is his most marvelous work to date."

I'd heard the terms "a man's man" and "a writer's writer," but never "a poet's poet." I rather like it. So I've set a goal of being one when I grow up.

As the title might hint, readers who dive into this collection are going to wade into history, colonialism, imperialism, etc. But, to its credit, there's also a lot of everyday life. In fact, Barot endorses everyday life. Does it need an endorsement? Is it running for something? Does it even have a platform? I'd hazard an answer, but I'm neither wonderful nor the wizard of Oz, so I'll pass.

Still, there's this. The last four lines of the final poem ("Ode With Interruptions"), where Barot writes:


I used to think that to write poems, to make art,
meant trying to transcend the prosaic elements

of the self, to arrive at some essential plane, where
poems were supposed to succeed. I was wrong.


Paradoxically, then, you transcend great mysteries through the quotidian elements in life, the stuff hiding in plain sight around you. And for you, someone who may not read blurbs but apparently reads GR reviews (of poetry books, yet -- mien Gut!), here is a sample poem -- written, like every single poem in the book, in couplets.


The Grasshopper and the Cricket

The poetry of earth is a ninety-year-old woman
in front of a slot machine in a casino in California.

She is wearing a gray dress, her sharp red lipstick
in two lines across her mouth, put there

by her daughter. Like Gertrude Stein's, her hair
is cut close. Nearby is her wheelchair, painted blue

like a boy's bicycle. It is a weekday in March,
the casino is the size of a hangar that could house

a dozen planes, but it is thousands of machines
that fill the eye, an event of light and color.

The sentences she speaks now are like the sentences
of Gertrude Stein, without the ironies of art.

Her mind is like a compressed accordion, the far
points now near, more present than the present.

Waiting, I am at the food court, reading a magazine
article about the languages the world is losing.

The languages spoken only by a few remaining
people. Or by one remaining person. Or lost

totally, except for the grainy recordings in archives,
mysterious as the sounds made by extinct birds.

The reels on her machine spin, their symbols
never matching. She is playing the one-cent slots,

and her money will go far into the afternoon.
And because waiting is thinking, I am thinking

of the eternity Keats writes about in the sonnet
about the grasshopper and the cricket, ceasing never

in the hedges and meadows, in the evening stove:
the grasshopper of summer, the cricket of winter.


See? All around you! (And what's that chirping?)

[Lauren]

My 2nd collection by Barot. Really appreciated CHORD a few years ago so glad to read his new collection and see it's buzz and acclaim.

His 10-part "The Galleons" and many othe poems in the book explores colonialism using the Spanish galleon ship as symbol, coming to his birth country of The Philippines.

Part 9 of The Galleons is a wandering walk around Madrid, noting its wide "empire boulevards" and wondering if his Filipino hero José Rizal walked these same streets as a medical student in Madrid.

"A Girl Carrying a Ladder" - Another poem notes a young Palestinian girl he sees in a magazine who carries a ladder with her to school - scaling barbed wire fences to go to her school each day...
"I see the photograph of the Palestinian girl who carries a ladder with her each morning when she goes to school...carrying the ladder that is two or three times as tall as she is, leaning the ladder against the wall that separates her from school, the girl goes up the ladder as though it were something she did every day, which she does..."

[Jerrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-crafted, thoughtful poems reflecting on history and culture.

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much of Barot's book becomes illuminated in the final two stanzas.

"I used to think that to write poems, to make art,
meant trying to transcend the prosaic elements

of the self, to arrive at some essential plane, where
poems were supposed to succeed. I was wrong."

I wrote so many lines down and marked so many poems down from this book. I think Barot really flexed. He both taught us how to write poems, how to think and consider, and wrote the necessary poems in the process. It's a beautiful work that I think many will come to be rewarded by.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of these poems made me cry, and I know it is because it is the same story I have been studying of those indigenous to the land I love, a story of so-called discovery and theft, conquering and killing. I read recently that 1/3 of all nurses who have died from covid-19 are/were Filipino. So again, our country uses germs to kill but cloaking it in personal freedom and hoax conspiracy theories, and my heart hurts for the world.

But it is not about me, it is about the Spanish galleon trade for hundreds of years that forced Catholicism on indigenous peoples and enslaved them in their own land, and now, a gay Filipino American writes these powerful poems of reckoning in a voice so necessary to hear. I had to look up the galleon trade, not remembering much, but it was a very specific route from Spain-controlled Acapulco to Manila and back, a monopoly on Filipino products. It devastated the culture of the indigenous peoples but it did not eradicate them like in the Americas, and I couldn’t find out why.

So pain of a different sort, and a lament, that is now borne by Filipino nurses most susceptible to covid-19.

EXCERPTS:

THE GALLEONS 1

Her story is a part of something larger, it is a part
of history. No, her story is an illumination

of history, a matchstick lit in the black seam of time.
Or, no, her story is separate

from the whole, as distinct as each person is distinct
from the stream of people that led

to the one and leads past the one. Or, her story
is surrounded by history, the ambient spaciousness

of which she is the momentary foreground.
Maybe history is a net through which

just about everything passes, and the pieces of her
story are particles caught in the interstices.

Or, her story is a contradiction, something ordinary
that has no part in history at all, if history is

about what is included, what is made important.
History is the galleon in the middle

of the Pacific Ocean, in the middle of the sixteenth
century…

UDFJ-39546284

…this morning my sister sent me a photograph of my grandmother’s

hands. Sitting outside in her wheelchair, taking in
the gold sunshine, my grandmother

had her hands folded in her lap, and I looked at them
until I had to stop. This is foreground.

For context, today I learned that the farthest galaxy
we know of, located by scientists in 2011,

is 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away.
It goes by the name of UDFj-39546284,

for reasons that I haven’t yet looked up.
In the photograph you can see online, the galaxy looks

like the dusty stuff in the corner of a windowpane,
something you could look at sometimes,

something that is nothing, and has nothing
to do with what you know about distance and time.

STILL LIFE WITH HELICOPTERS

Almost two thousand years before da Vinci
imagined a machine whose screwlike overhead

motor could lift the machine into vertical flight,
children in China played with bamboo toys

whose propellers, thin and light as dragonfly
wings, were set on a sharpened stick and spun

into the wonder of an object spiraling in the air.
The toys were brought back to Europe by early

travelers, where they gave dreams to certain
men, whose names are now an ornate inventory on the Wikipedia page…

….One popular use
Of the ASTAR is to provide aerial observation

And support to ground units, which must be
what the Oakland Police Department helicopter

is doing now, while the protesters swarm onto
the 580 Freeway and shut it down, protesting

the grand jury’s decision in Ferguson, Missouri,
not to indict the police officer who killed Michael

Brown. The police and news helicopters are
what I hear as I sit at the desk, the desk and its

world of things: the green paperweight and the little glass utopia inside it,
the Post-it note listing the plains of the moon, and the copy of Brown Girl Dreaming.

THE BLINK REFLEX

I have this notion that if you live long enough, there are three or four great stories that you will have in your life.
A story of a journey or a transformation. A story of love, which will likely mean the loss of love, a story of loss.
And a story of spiritual illumination, which, for many, will probably be the moment of death itself, the story untellable, its beginning and middle and end collapsing with its teller into a disappearing conclusion.

VIRGINIA WOOLF’S WALKING STICK
Unless you are too sensitive or being affected, you don’t cry over a thing in a museum, knowing what’s there is already dead. But there I was, in grief, because when I bent to the glass case I saw the walking stick she left behind on the riverbank before she walked in and sank and died.

THE GALLEONS 8

The galleons want to go to the opera
because they want to hear emotions as big as their emotions.

When the spurned lover sings
his booming aria, they think of the oceans

that cover the world almost completely.
---
…And then the galleons want
to shop in the mall in the suburbs. Everything they see there is like the secrets
they once carried in their holds.
---
…And then the galleons
want to visit the boy who loves making model boats

in the basement that his parents have given up
his hobby. Wearing a magnifying

visor, at a table with glues and tweezers and exact
bits of wood, the boy puts together longships

and carracks in exquisite minute scale.
The galleons approve of the galleon he has been making for months…

And then the galleons, on certain
other days, want to go back to the forests

they came from, to reel the blood-soaked narrative
back to the stands of pines and oaks

that will become their keels and decking,
hulls and masts. Back to the mountains being mountains,

their iron in the ground like gray thoughts.
Back to the birds being birds.

THE GALLEONS 9

In Madrid I orient myself I walk on the wide boulevards
And know an empire is its boulevards I stand below the angel

skeptical of the beauty of angels at the royal gardens I count
The 138 kinds of dahlias at the crystal palace I imagine

The exhibition of plants indigenous to my islands I walk
up the streets of poets read the bronze lines on the ground
----
I visit the memorial for the murdered in the great white
square at dawn I walk inscribe myself like letters on a page

at the naval museum I look into the face of Magellan show the
painting my face I sing the neighborhoods of Huertas

and Cueca maybe only in Madrid is the light a gold
weight always at the supermarket I hear two Filipinos

speaking and I run away and break I find myself in
the cathedral in the movie theater where I watch a movie

without understanding the words spoken around a corner
I stop because a kind of meadow has been grown on the side

Of a building like a tallness of heart a dream carried
Into waking my life breathing before it incredible and true.

BROKEN MIRROR AGAINST TREE TRUNK

Beauty strides into view all the time, clear and particular
or vague and soft, an affiliation or a polarity.

I have felt squalls in the blood and in the mind, even though I am mostly like a mirror, its silver blood.

A POEM AS LONG AS CALIFORNIA

This is my pastoral: the used car lot
where someone read “Song of Myself” over the loudspeaker

all that afternoon, to customers who walked among the cars
mostly absent to what they heard…
---
This is also my pastoral: once a week,
in the apartment above, the prayer group that would chant

for a sustained hour. I never saw them,
I didn’t know the words they sang, but I could feel

my breath running heavy or light
as the hour’s abstract narrative unfolded, rising and falling,
---
And this is also my pastoral: in 1502, when Albrecht Dürer painted
the young hare, he painted into its eye

the window of his studio. The hare is the color
of a winter meadow, brown and gold, each strand of fur

like a slip of grass holding an exact amount
of the season’s voltage. And the window within the eye,

which you don’t see until you see, is white as a winter sky,
though you know it is joy that is held there.

THE GALLEONS 10

I come from the lowlands.
My mother’s city was built on the river

where the mountains fanned out to the sea,
and the city thrived there.

I come from farmers.
I come from childhood’s transistor radio,

from the kalachuchi tree
and its white flowers. I come from prayer.
---
I had a fate, it took me
Across the ocean. It has taken half a life

To turn back and see.
I come from horizon. I come from water.

[Peycho Kanev · Rating 3 out of 5]

A POEM AS LONG AS CALIFORNIA

This is my pastoral: the used car lot
where someone read “Song of Myself” over the loudspeaker

all that afternoon, to customers who walked among the cars
mostly absent to what they heard,

except for the one or two who looked up
into the air, as though they recognized the reckless phrases

hovering there among the colored streamers,
their faces suddenly loose with a dreamy attention.

This is also my pastoral: once a week,
in the apartment above, the prayer group that would chant

for a sustained hour. I never saw them,
I didn’t know the words they sang, but I could feel

my breath running heavy or light
as the hour’s abstract narrative unfolded, rising and falling,

sometimes changing in abrupt turns
of speed, as though a new voice had taken the lead.

And this, too, is my pastoral: reading in my car
in the supermarket parking lot, reading the Spicer poem

where he wants to write a poem as long
as California. It was cold in the car, then it was too dark.

Why had I been so forlorn, when there was so much
just beyond, leaning into life? Even the cart

pushed against a concrete island, the forgotten melon
in its basket like a lost green sun.

And this is my pastoral: reading again and again
the paragraph in the novel by DeLillo where the family eats

the take-out fried chicken in their car,
not talking, trading the parts of the meal among themselves

in a primal choreography, a softly single consciousness,
while outside, everything stumbled apart,

the grim world pastoralizing their heavy coats,
the car’s windows, their breath and hands, the grease.

If, by pastoral, we mean a kind of peace,
this is my pastoral: walking up Grand Avenue, down Sixth

Avenue, up Charing Cross Road, down Canal,
then up Valencia, all the way back to Agua Dulce Street,

the street of my childhood, terrifying with roaring trucks
and stray dogs, but whose cold sweetness

flowed night and day from the artesian well at the corner,
where the poor got their water. And this is

also my pastoral: in 1502, when Albrecht Dürer painted
the young hare, he painted into its eye

the window of his studio. The hare is the color
of a winter meadow, brown and gold, each strand of fur

like a slip of grass holding an exact amount
of the season’s voltage. And the window within the eye,

which you don’t see until you see, is white as a winter sky,
though you know it is joy that is held there.

[Rebecca]

did not vibe with this sadly

[Maddy Barnard · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book melded contemporary politics with historical and ongoing colonialism in a beautiful way.

[Annie Yotova · Rating 5 out of 5]

For almost 250 years, between 1564 and 1815, the Manila Galleons crossed the Pacific - bringing luxury goods, slaves and silver between Manila and the New World. Each of those ships had its own name - they were always named after the port they started from (even when the same ship made the trip multiple times) and the route was an important alternative to the much longer crossing via the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. Because of its route, it is often omitted - it does not connect the Old Spain ports to the new ones after all - but in those years New Spain is part of Spain.

Barot takes this history and builds a collection around it. The backbone of the collection are the 10 poems called "The Galleons 1-10" which are telling part of that story, including one of the middle ones being nothing more than a complete list of all the Galleons' names and years. It is like a chant, just a list that seems to go forever. And around it are the pictures that keep repeating in your head - the slaves on the ships, the slaves that made it to the other side and the ones that did not, the captains and the objects. But it is not about that part of history - the Galleons brought people which have future histories and they are part of the collection as well - those histories merged with the history of the world and became our histories.

Barot is Filipino-American and a lot of those poems are about his family and his own experiences - using what he knows to add a context to a little known part of history. You will not learn much about the Galleons from the collection but it will send you reading about them. And even the poems that are not about that route on the surface end up connected - because they are the center of the experiences of a lot of people from this diaspora.

Highly recommended.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rick Barot has quite a presence in the Pacific Northwest poetry scene, and I was glad to finally get a chance to read one of his collections of verse. This particular collection centers around a handful of specific themes, including the creation of poetry itself, so eloquently expressed right at the very end of the book in "Ode with Interruptions":

I used to think that to write poems, to make art,
meant trying to transcend the prosaic elements

of the self, to arrive at some essential plane, where
poems were supposed to succeed. I was wrong.

Those lines perfectly capture Barot's unpretentious approach to his craft, where the technical elements of verse are rightly pushed to the background in favor of clarity and directness.

The Galleons is a great collection overall, with a handful of poems really standing out for me:

The Flea
Virginia Woolf's Walking Stick
The Names
The Galleons 8
A Poem as Long as California

[Brent · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection had me leaning forward and marking passages on nearly every page. Barot's ability to translate his close observational skills into profound reflections is a delight. There is also some innovation with form that I found particularly memorable.

[Amie Whittemore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love it! Read my review here:
https://www.usi.edu/sir/amie-whittemo...

[Paul Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I THINK I first read Rick Barot way back in 2006, when a group of his poems led off the Legitimate Dangers anthology. I don't recall those samples making an impression on me at the time, but in the last few years, in one periodical or another, I kept coming across poems of Barot's that I liked, so...why not try one of his collections?

This one is from 2020 (a new one came out in 2024). The collection's title (also the title of ten individual poems within) refers to the Spanish ships that carried the spoil and pillage of empire across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to Spain. Barot was born in the Philippines, one of the places despoiled and pillaged (not only by Spain, but also by the U.S.A. after 1898), and many of the poems look at his and his family's relationship to the history.

I tend not to expect elegance from poetry collections with this kind of thematic content, but that's the word that kept coming to my mind. Monica Youn puts it well in one of the blurbs on the back cover: "Rick Barot brings his understated virtuosity and perceptual sensitivity to bear on issues of postcolonialism, representation, memory, and grief." The themes ("postcolonialism, representation, memory, and grief") are what might land this book on a syllabus, but its elegance ("understated virtuosity and perceptual sensitivity") is what kept pulling me in.

All the poems are in unrhymed couplets, the syntax poised, the imagery clean and telling, as in these lines on spring:

The blooms called forth by a bare measure of warmth,
days that are more chill than warm, though the roots must

know, and the leaves, and the spindly trunks ganged up
by the trash bins behind our houses. The blue pointillism

in morning fog. The blue that is lavender. The blue that is
purple. The smell that is the air's sugar, the sweet

weight when you put your face ear, the way you would
put it near the side of someone's head. Here the ear.

Here the nape.

("The Names")

That spring feeling of a "bare measure of warmth," the exactness of "spindly trunks ganged up," the swerve to the Seurat allusion, the "air's sugar" that turns to an evocation of eros. So good. And I literally, no kidding, just opened up the book at random to find that passage. It's that good all the way through.

[Dree · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book features poetry that is more traditional than many NBA longlist picks.

All of the poems in this book are formed of non-rhyming, often open, couplets. The poems all reflect on colonialism (particularly of the Philippines by Spain); immigration; family; nature; and the things the wealthy buy (from art to what Spanish galleons carried back to Spain).

I liked this entire book. There is a lot to think on, and his juxtapositions are excellent. I had to look up a few things--the diamond-encrusted "art" actual human skull, Jack Spicer (who I need to read), the Infanta Margarita and Velazquez--and I am glad I did, because it all connects together.

[William Ward Butler · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Galleons is a book of wonderfully attentive poems, full of feeling, that interrogate the past while remaining centered within the present moment. Rick Barot weaves together history, a global landscape, visual art, and more, with poems that are perceptive to life’s quiet joys and severe injustices. The Galleons offers a comprehensive and contemporary analysis of the world and the people within it—refreshing in its clarity, extensive in its emotional depth. We are fortunate to have Barot among us as a poet, an empath, and a witness.

[Patty Enrado · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three and a half stars! I have left this book of poems on my nightstand because I know I will read it again, getting more out of each poem with each reread. I'll admit that I was distracted while reading Rick Barot's poems. There were some real gems that broke through my distraction and as I progressed to the end of the book I felt as if I had experienced Barot's sense of diaspora and history very deeply. With each Galleons poem, I felt this momentum building, and that was very exciting for me. I knew there was more for me to appreciate, so I'll reach for this book again.

[Gregg Hower · Rating 3 out of 5]

The opening poem was thrilling, but for me promised more than the collection could deliver. Barot clearly has technical chops and an interesting mind. However, he is too cerebral for my tastes, and I found it very easy to put the book down after reading one or two poems. For me, the poems that give flashes of autobiography are the best. So clearly the wrong book for me but possibly a great book for someone else.

[Becky Gaiovnik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you Milkweed Books for sending me a copy of The Galleons- Poems by Rick Barot. Mr. Barots poems were perfect snippets into a lifetime of urban living from an immigrant perspective. As he weaves beautiful imagery around his poignant statements, he dives head on into every emotion without falter. A really stunning collection.

[Megan]

Cascades 501
Ode with Interruptions
Excerpts of The Galleons

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars
Especially in the final few poems of THE GALLEONS: POEMS, Barot's attention to detail and what story that detail tells is exquisite. This collection breathes new life into history and character portraits.

[Rich Farrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my first exposure to Barot, and I see why he’s one to watch. “The Galleons” is a thoughtfully written and chunked poem, but so too are many of the poems in between, especially “Still Life With Helicopters” and “Virginia Woolf’s Walking Stick”.

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection was recommended to me by a young man at Parnassus books in Nashville. I told him I had just finished Richard Blanco, and he said this was a good follow up. I agree. Barot can make the ordinary special. He isn’t Blanco by any stretch, but he holds his own.

[Chris Roberts · Rating 1 out of 5]

Publication is a profound loss
I'd rather have my poetry on the wall
Of a portable toilet
I'll accept my Pulitzer Prize
In a blown out truck stop bathroom
It is good to be king.

Chris Roberts

[Jhoanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

📚📚📚

[Carrie Chappell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Particularly loved "Still Life with Helicopters, "The Galleons 4," "The Names," and "The Galleons 10."

[Samuel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommend. Incredible work.

[Hillary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to buy this book (I read it online, thank you Brooklyn Public Library). Ugh, amazing, amazing, amazing.

[Dylan Kramer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn't like this all that much.

[Kaleigh Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really great read, lots of fantastic things going on with structure! The themes of the poems have been fit together so beautifully!

[vicente elizondo · Rating 5 out of 5]

research is mourning