- Jane, Queen's Foole (full-length play) is based on the little known of the only documented female Fool/jester in the English court. My Jane Foole is a disabled, compulsively rhyming beggar who encounters Princess Mary Tudor, King Henry the VIII's rejected daughter. Using her strange wit and prophetic vision, Jane becomes Mary's Foole and confidante and rises in the royal court. But when Mary becomes Britain's Queen and Jane tells her things she does not want to hear, the women's relationship falls apart.

Selected Works

Drama

Marilyn finds herself lost in a vast, surreal desert. She falls in love with a hand Miner (Death) and must choose to live eternally in the bright lights of the male gaze or to reject Death and age as an ordinary female.

Cage

A thirteen-year-old girl named George brings home as a pet a large black snake she caugth near the Hudson River and provokes her emotionally distant, recently divorced mother Bobby.

Jane, Queen's Foole

Based on the little known of the only documented female Fool/jester in the English court, Jane Foole, a disabled beggar girl, becomes Princess, then Queen Mary Tudor's Foole and confidante.

Clearing

CLEARING is about war, war between countries, ideologies, past and present, war within families, within the self. Pressured by our culture to be "warriors," the male characters in this play oppress themselves and each other and thoughtlessly appropriate cultural symbols that are not theirs to take.

Years of Sky

Years of Sky tells of the doomed but enduring love between David, black, and Stace, white, whose relationship is bound to both Kennedy assassinations and thirty years of American politics.

Poetry

Living with You

Living with You traces in lyrical, abstract verse, reminiscent of George Oppen and other poets in that tradition, the first years of the poet's married life.

Barbara Blatner's work possesses great power and great stillness. It is quiet but passionate, and the sense I have is that the processes she describes go on forever: "so we come back to / the old / the new // like the cats / in circle of[…]" She is very much a necessary poet in these loud and selfish times.

—Mac Wellman

New York Quarterly Books, 2012

The Pope in Space

A poetry chapbook

Poetry, memoir

The Still Position

A verse memoir of my mother's death

Verse play

No Star Shines Sharper

A verse play for Epiphany

Quick Links

Authors Guild

Advocates for published authors since 1912

Authors Guild Directory

A compendium of member websites

Jane, Queen's Foole (full-length play)

is based on the little known of the only documented female Fool/jester in the English court. My Jane Foole is a disabled, compulsively rhyming beggar who encounters Princess Mary Tudor, King Henry the VIII's rejected daughter. Using her strange wit and prophetic vision, Jane becomes Mary's Foole and confidante and rises in the royal court. But when Mary becomes Britain's Queen and Jane tells her things she does not want to hear, the women's relationship falls apart.