Barbara Barg


Barbara Barg was a poet, writer, and musician.
Barg was born in Memphis, Tennessee and raised in Forrest City, Arkansas. After studying with poet Ted Berrigan at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, she moved to New York City and became involved in a number of individual and collaborative projects on the downtown poetry/music scene in the late 1970s-1990s. She performed frequently at venues like The Kitchen, Bowery Ballroom, St Mark's Poetry Project, Bowery Poetry Club, Nuyorican Poets Café, Fez, CBGB, Luna Lounge, Sidewalk Cafe's The Fort, Mercury Lounge, Galapogos, The Sculpture Center, The Open Center, as well as One World Poetry Festival and The International Festival of the Poets. With writer Maggie Dubris she co-founded the all-women cult band "Homer Erotic", which came to life during a lull in poetry readings in the early 90s. The group was composed of seven women interested in music and poetry as performative art forms. She has also performed with Pauline Oliveros, Elliott Sharp, Z'EV, Janene Higgins, Monique Buzzarté and other experimental artists and musicians. Her poetry is attuned to notions of poetic ethnologies, and what she called "voluntary evolution" and "whatever other notion I get in my head". Barg most recently lived in Chicago, and was on faculty at The Chicago School of Poetics, and was writing screenplays for Jump Room Films.

Death

On May 22, 2018, Ellen Floren's official Facebook page revealed in a post that Barg had died. She was 71.

Books

Barg's works have appeared in the following anthologies.
Barg has contributed to three of Elliott Sharp's multi-artist compilation CDs State of the Union and "Beneath the Valley of the Yahoos", Phone Noir, and Late 20th Century Sexual Practices — as well as to One World Poetry, a multi-artist compilation recorded at Amsterdam's One World Poetry Festival, and Sugar Alcohol & Meat, produced by John Giorno Poetry Systems. Barg features in two multi-artist compilation tapes: Noise Fest with the band Avant Squares and Tellus #5 with Barbara Ess.