On the last evening in January 2013, I had the good fortune to stop by Coleman Barks’s home in Athens to interview him about his long poem “The VOICE inside WATER,” which appeared in the Winter 2012 issue of The Georgia Review and subsequently in his recently released collection, Hummingbird Sleep: Poems, 2009–2011 (University of Georgia Press). We sat by the fire in the spacious front room where Barks works (the fire wasn’t just for ambience; the house really was drafty), and Barks mused on the workings of the poem. Written in part as a meditation on the stroke he suffered in March 2011, it pulls together some of Barks’s eclectic enthusiasms, including rare endangered animals, esoteric color words, and the sublimely demented eighteenth-century poem Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart.