Coleman Barks, UGA professor and poet who popularized Rumi, dies at 88

With his older brother and younger sister, Coleman Bryan Barks grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where his father, Herbert Bernard Barks, was the headmaster of the Baylor School, situated on 100 acres. Barks said in an interview that his family was “ecstatic” and that “anybody at any time could burst into song for any reason.” His mother, Elizabeth Bryan Barks, “would just dance around the house, singing.”

His sister, novelist Elizabeth “Betsy” Barks Cox, says because her brothers and she were raised in a school, they were always talking to English and Latin teachers “who wanted to know what we were reading. We were around books a lot.” Brother Herb Barks, a former minister, is also a writer.

A big influence on the Barks children, says Betsy Cox, was the campus where they grew up, surrounded by Elder, Signal and Lookout mountains with the Tennessee River flowing by.

“It was a magical place, and it opened us to the soul,” she says. “It opened Coleman. He knew about the sacred but never had anything to do with church. Just that sacred place Rumi talks about.”

Coleman Barks attended UNC-Chapel Hill on a Morehead Scholarship — the first awarded to an out-of-state student — and graduated with an English degree. He earned a master’s at Berkeley before returning to Chapel Hill for his doctorate. In 1967, he joined the English department faculty at the University of Georgia, teaching literature and creative writing for more than 30 years.

In a few years, Barks had become a tenured UGA literature professor and a poet who had published three well-received books of poetry. Retired UGA English professor Hugh Ruppersburg selected some of Barks’ poetry for “Georgia Voices,” a University of Georgia Press collection of Georgia’s finest writers. He describes Barks’ poetry “as relaxed and casual, but meditative, usually focused on nature or his family. There was a playfulness and curiosity in Coleman that came across in his personality and his poetry.”

In 1976, Barks encountered the 13th century Sufi mystic and poet Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, who would change his life and alter his career. He was introduced to Rumi’s work — an academic translation by A.J. Arberry of the original Persian — by his friend, poet Robert Bly, who told him the poems needed to be “released from their cages.” Barks and Bly together reinterpreted the English translations into free verse, and published “Night & Sleep” in 1981.

Rumi resonated with Barks, so much so that he began reading translation after translation and then became a student of Sri Lankan Sufi mystic Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. Further reinterpretation of Rumi’s poems meant the publication of dozens of books. People who had never before bought a book of poetry found meaning in the spiritual verses of Rumi.

Barks read at poetry festivals across the world to rapt audiences, sometimes accompanied by musical groups like the Paul Winter Consort, and he signed books by the hundreds to Rumi devotees. He made recordings of his readings. Bill Moyers interviewed him for a PBS series on “The Language of Life.” In 2004, he received the Juliet Hollister Award for his work supporting interfaith understanding. The state department sent him to Afghanistan in 2005 to read Rumi; the next year, he traveled to Iran to receive an honorary degree from the University of Tehran.

Athens native Bryan Barks remembers as a young girl accompanying her grandfather Coleman on some of his speaking engagements, traveling across the country and into Canada. She says she loved watching him perform on stage, “and he clearly loved that his work was meaningful to people. He appreciated that people wanted to hear his poetry.”

The two had a close relationship. Beginning in elementary school, she says, her grandfather would pick her up after school for “club,” during which they might visit a local coffee shop for lemonade and coffee, give each other writing prompts and share what they had written. They liked to ride around in his green topless convertible in the rain. They played “dumb chess,” trying to see who could get into checkmate first.

“Rumi was a constant, but I loved his own poetry so much,” she says. “His own poetry means the most to me because I can feel him distinctly in his own work. It speaks to his spirit. He was playful.”

In addition to his brother, sister and granddaughter, Coleman Barks is survived his former wife, Kittsu Greenwood; their two sons, Ben and Cole; five additional grandchildren; and his longtime companion, Lisa Starr. A celebration of life is planned for a later date.