Barbara Barg

Who is Barbara Barg?

Barbara Barg is 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, Z'EV, Janene Higgins, Monique Buzzarté and other experimental artists and musicians. Her poetry is attuned to notions of poetic ethnologies, and what she calls "voluntary evolution" and "whatever other notion I get in my head". Barg currently lives in Chicago, is on faculty at The Chicago School of Poetics, and is writing screenplays for Jump Room Films.