Meet Robert Barsky | Poet and Professor

We had the good fortune of connecting with Robert Barsky and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Robert, we’d love to hear about how you approach risk and risk-taking.
In some ways “risk”, variously defined, has been at the very heart of all my endeavors: the risk of working outside the proverbial box, the risk of making surprising connections between different disciplines or realms, the risk of following questions to their logical conclusions rather than sticking to the way things have been done in the past. In my most recent endeavor, The Beltline Chronicles, I connected my passion for Great Books and epic quests to Ryan Gravel’s (and others’) dream of building transit and affordable housing on fallow rail lines that circle Atlanta. Epic quests, such as Homer’s ‘Odyssey’, or Cervantes ‘Don Quixote’, or Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’, or Toni Morrison’s ‘Paradise’, are peopled with characters who take risks and sometimes suffer, sometimes celebrate, the consequences. Embarking upon our own quests along Atlanta’s Beltline, we all risk meeting new friends, finding new connections, building new communities: pleasurable risks indeed! As a writer, I didn’t want to risk losing the stories that were catalyzed by Atlanta’s magical 22 mile ‘Emerald Necklace’. So I created a fictional poet, George, named after George Gordon Lord Byron, who reads canonical quests each day, and then sets out to discover his own adventures on the Beltline. Great characters who have risked life and limb become catalysts to George’s own expedition, thereby elevating his strolls to new heights, which he then renders immortal in verse and rhyme.
One of the texts that George loves is Cervantes’ ‘Don Quixote’, that epic story about a man who imagines himself to be an errant chivalric knight in search of great battles to be fought on behalf of the great love of his life, a model of female virtue he calls “the Dolcinea dell Doboso”. Our Don Quixote quite literally risks his life for someone he has conjured up, a handmaiden for his dreams of eternal glory to whom he dedicates his amazing feats and timeless tales. One day, his sidekick Sancho Panza decides to break the bad news to Don Quixote: He is not an errant knight, and his Dolcinea is in fact Aldonza Lorenzo, a peasant girl from his village whom he’s never met. In response, Don Quixote says: “I persuade myself that all I say is as I say, neither more nor less, and I picture her in my imagination as I would have her to be, as well in beauty as in condition; Helen approaches her not nor does Lucretia come up to her, nor any other of the famous women of times past, Greek, Barbarian, or Latin; and let each say what he will, for if in this I am taken to task by the ignorant, I shall not be censured by the critical”. Inspired by his readings of Medieval chivalric stories, Cervantes fictional character Don Quixote has taken that great risk of letting his imagination loose in a world devoid of heroism and chivalry; and so he wanders, he creates adventures in his mind, and he documents his travails in that famous book of his. We can do the same thing, as we seek out and document our own adventures, create our own characters, and find pleasure and meaning in our own quests. Those are some of the joys of public spaces, where dreams and dreamers meet for a stroll, share a drink, exchange a story or two and, — who knows?– perhaps end their day with a new friend, and a new story to tell.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I arrived at the work I do by virtue of two accidents: one skiing, the other typing. Let me explain. As a young person my true objective was to pursue some kind of professional career as a skier: instructor, perhaps, patroller, more likely, or even, in wilder dreams, a somewhat successful competitor. My virtue was my love of the sport, and my secret sauce was my recklessness. No hill too steep, no day too cold, no ice too foreboding. Every day on the slopes was a great gift, even the very cold and icy day that brought me and my friends to the steepest and most dangerous and yes, closed hill that bore a sign saying: “Closed. This means you”.
Obviously not me, I thought, and down I went.
I quickly lost control and hit a tree with my face, the bottom of my face, luckily, and in fact my teeth, — luckier still. Lucky, but still charged with paying the dentist who replaced my bottom teeth with a durable facsimile. I was a graduate student at the time, struggling to keep the lights on in my apartment, but luckily that that dentist bill led me to another accident. I was a good typist (a skill that people now seem to possess very early on!), and a friend told me about a job for someone able to transform words recorded on a cassette into words printed on a page. The documents I was to work on turned out to be Convention Refugee Hearings, recordings of refugees’ quests for asylum in a safe haven on account of persecution in their country of origin. With what I learned from those heart-wrenching stories, I wrote a PhD dissertation and my first book, on the challenges that face refugees who seek protection from persecution, in accordance with treaties to which most states in the world are party. That work, coupled with my literary interests, have led me to a career as a researcher, writer and professor. The Beltline Chronicles is my tenth book in a corpus focused on Humanities, and the Law.
The challenges along the way have been as gigantic as that treacherous teeth-jarring hill, but the rewards have been as rich and enjoyable as surviving that fall, and then finding myself lucky enough to continue skiing all that day, with rather a silly (toothless) grin that celebrated my having not missed out on a single hour of pleasure.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
As the author of The Beltline Chronicles, with extraordinary artworks by Atlanta’s own Susan Ker-Seymer, the answer is clear: I’d spend the week meandering on all 22 miles of our extraordinary Atlanta Beltline. When Marsha and I came to Atlanta we found its heart, and our own, at the Botanical Gardens, Piedmont Park, and the entrance to the Eastside Beltline on the corner of 10th and Monroe. We couldn’t believe it. A 22 mile pathway, a park, a garden, a Champs Elysées in the very heart, and all the way around, Atlanta. Adorning this vibrant pathway were carefully curated native plants and trees along with restaurants and shops and cafés and bars and multitudes of people doing what Charles Baudelaire made famous in his prose poems about Paris: wandering, aimlessly, without direction and without a goal in mind. He called this the activity of the “flâneur”, a term and activity I love. I was impressed by Ryan Gravel’s vision that has led us to the Atlanta Beltline, and fascinated by his reference to Guy Dubord and the “Situationnistes”. I reference Baudelaire and Dubord in my poem, and in Canto 4 my poet George talks about the quest for “paradise”:

….To find his “enchanted garden,” his own version
Of Paradise, he decided to voyage through
What’s called the situationniste internationale
Approach (loved by Ryan Gravel): “A moment of
Life, concretely and deliberately constructed
By the collective organization of

Unitary environment,” which would help seed a “free
Play of events.” To do this right, George would read
About Debord’s dérive, a fancy way to be
Aware of new sensations, inspired
By novel terrains. Debord sought psycho-
Geo-graphical effects(!), a kind of trek
That does not imply a quest, or journey,
Or a stroll. The idea is to partake

In travels entirely without motive,
Or pursuit….

I have since spent hundreds of hours biking and walking and running and strolling and yes, playing the flâneur upon this extraordinary pathway. And I’ve invited many friends to follow a host of itineraries that follow our own rails to trails Beltline. Inspired by these voyages, they have created new stories, forged new friendships, and found their own revelations. I look forward to many more visits from friends, old and new, and new itineraries on the Beltline and the myriad of pathways and revelations to which it connects. Susan Ker-Seymer and I are now thrilled that our own revelations are chronicled in a book that will yield — through sales and fundraisers — significant donations to organizations that help persons experiencing homelessness.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I honor Marsha, Magical Marsha, whose beauty and wisdom are the stars that illuminate and guide my quests through life, and fill me with untold excitement and joy. And of course, our boys, who give meaning to our quests, and remind us that it’s all about the journey, ….

Website: https://contours.pubpub.org/beltline-chronicles

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/barskyrf

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdiLtfSnrhc

Image Credits
Photos by Robert Barsky, Marsha Barsky