~ Delta Poetry Review ~
No Place Like Home:
An Interview with David Kirby by Susan Swartwout
DPR:
Though we had already assigned a reviewer for our featured poets’
book review section, you generously offered to review
The Winter Dance Party: Poems 1983–2023
yourself, and I find that intriguing. What points might you make
about your collection that a book reviewer might miss or envision
differently? I’m particularly interested in any shadowy
shy-of-Craven-or-Cronenberg-lurid, spy-worthy comments you have
about the book or any of the many historical events mentioned
therein. Go ahead; we can handle the truth.
DK:
Well, I think I’d
begin with “First Homer, then Milton, and now Kirby.” That’d let
readers know I have a sense of humor (more on that later) as well as
at least a passing acquaintance with the mighty dead, as Keats
called those who have gone beyond yet are more powerful than any of
us who are alive will ever be.
Then I’d like to
call my potential reader’s attention to the fact that there might be
more variety here than he or she would encounter in other
collections, including ones I’ve written myself. These poems are
long and short, fat and skinny, reverential and derisive. There are
also two essays, one at the beginning where I thought I said
everything I know about poetry and another at the end when I
realized I hadn’t done that at all and said everything I couldn’t
think of earlier. There’s even a poem with no words in it (“The Diet
of Worms”)—can’t get much more varied than that.
Which leads me to
humor. I’m often described as a funny poet; I gave a reading in
Cleveland last week, and the poster for the event described me as
“hysterically funny,” so of course I gave the most lugubrious and
lachrymose reading possible, though come to think of it,
“lugubrious” and “lachrymose” are pretty funny words. As Mel Brooks
says, if you don’t think the word “Buick” is funny, I don’t want to
know you.
Anyway, I did
read some funny poems in Cleveland. But I told the audience that 78%
of poetry is written within a certain emotional range with sober
reflection at one end and projectile weeping at the other. Then
there’s the rest of us, the 22% who write in that range, sure, but
also use other tools, including humor, though “wit” is probably a
better word, since humor makes you think of the Three Stooges and
wit implies subtlety and a certain intelligence. But since most
poets aren’t funny, if you are, then people will say, oh, he’s one
of those funny poets. Hey, I can make you just as miserable as the
next guy.
DPR:
Let’s get right
into the weeds with some of the poetry in your new book. I love your
poem “The Fates” in Winter Dance Party, and I’ve been obsessed (I do
not use that word lightly) with the idea that there are three fates
living and collaborating in different scenes of one’s life. If your
ongoing Three Fates were colors, which and why?
DK:
I’d say the
Fates range from black to white and all the shades of gray between
and that they flow from one to the other constantly but so slowly as
to be imperceptible, which is why we don’t notice them even when
we’re sitting right next to them in the bus station. I had a lot of
fun writing this one. It was born of long walks, like almost all of
my poems; if walking was good enough for poets from Dante to Frank
O’Hara, it’s damned sure good enough for me.
Walks bequeath
two things to me, stories and images, and as a student said to me
recently, those two things strengthen whatever arguments you have,
and they make you more relatable. The argument here isn’t that three
gnarly old ladies aren’t going to knock on your door this afternoon
and upend your life. It’s more that there’s a whole bunch of stuff
out there that shapes every little moment in our lives, from
deciding what kind of bagel to have for breakfast to when to have
kids or whether to have them at all.
I hope you like
the end of this poem, by the way. It’s the kind of end I call a
rescue: the poem is spiraling down, spiraling down, and then whup!
You saved it—whew!
DPR:
“The Stanza”
is the most gorgeous and perfect organic explanation of what it is
to write a poem. It should be a classroom classic. What are three or
four (or more; I know better than to say “max” to you; it would be
stifling) important tips about writing that would embellish
discussion of this poem in a workshop—or even in one’s head.
DK:
As you can probably tell from the variety of
poems in The Winter Dance Party,
I’m absolutely besotted by format in both practice and teaching,
although since “format” is not a very appealing term, I like to say
“delivery system” in the classroom: you’ve made the present, so how
are you going to wrap and send it? Young poets think words are
everything, but that’s like putting butter and flour and eggs out on
the counter and saying you’ve made a cake.
Every poem has its own best format, so you
should try a few out and see which one works best. Charles Wright
takes this idea to an even more radical extreme: in
Halflife: Improvisations and Interviews,
1977–87, Wright pretty much says that
everything has already been said and what matters is how we shape
the poem so we get it across to the reader in a new and exciting
way.
As far as tips
go, let me do what I always do when somebody asks me for a tip:
panic, then quote my betters. Here goes.
First, Proust
said that “the real voyage of discovery is not in seeking new
landscapes but in having new eyes.” The right format’s like glasses:
it’ll sharpen your vision.
Then Adam
Zagajewski said a poem is a dream in the presence of reason. The
words make up the dream, the format supplies the reason that shapes
that poem, edits it, makes it into its best self.
Finally, in his
treatise on Noh acting, Zeami Motokiyo says, “When you feel ten in
your heart, show seven in your movements.” I think that means
discipline your words, tighten them. Restraint is a good thing; a
corset can present an all-too-human body to best advantage. Also,
it’s more moving to see an actor fight tears than to stand there
blubbering like a baby.
DPR:
The Nabokov’s
cufflink story at the end of “Imperfect” pits a practically-zen (or
Matrix spoon) finale against the more socially popular but
predictable stereotypical hero’s arc. Yes, this is a compare and
contrast scenario. What’s so great (or not so great) about these
story endings for the brain cells of readers or film buffs?
DK:
Well, it all has to
do with disrupting the reader’s expectations, doesn’t it? Not in a
baffling way, of course, but a new way: man loses cufflink, man
catches fish years later, opens the fish, and there inside is . . .
nothing. If the cufflink were inside the fish, the story would be
like a joke, and not a very good one, either. But the lack of a
cufflink sends the mind in about seven or maybe twenty new
directions, and that way the reader gets to stay longer in the game
the poet has asked them to play.
You want to lead
the reader to something new but not too new. Music critic Ben
Ratliff says that “the future belongs to those who can work slight
variations on fixed roles.” Or wait, let me use a watery metaphor in
keeping with the fish story. Do you know what a sea anchor is? It’s
a big canvas bucket that you can trail behind your boat, not to stop
it but to slow it down and make the voyage last longer. That’s what
disrupting the reader’s expectations can do.
DPR:
In “Racing
Through Pittsburgh with Annie Dillard” you describe as pivotal those
unexpected moments of near-death or near-dismemberment that at once
thrill and appall us with their mesmerizing unpredictability and
inability to be controlled. Do you have a favorite unexpected moment
in your life that you survived?
DK:
Too many, all
involving motor vehicles. I tell one such story in “I Had a Girl.”
What happened was that I was sixteen, a sophomore in high school,
and some seniors asked me to go on a road trip from Baton Rouge to
Austin. Boom—instant big shot! Can you imagine how I felt? I was
sleeping in the back seat of our car somewhere between Baton Rouge
and Austin when the guy on the passenger’s side in front shook my
shoulder and handed me half a pecan pie. That may be as close to
heaven as I’ll ever get.
And then I found
myself in hell. Around 3:00 a.m., on a lonely two-lane highway
somewhere in East Texas, we saw what looked like a spaceship that
had crash-landed in the road ahead. We pulled up, got out, and found
four boys our age in a car that had been totaled. The dome light was
on, the interior of the car stank of and looked as though it had
been painted with whiskey and blood. The boys were still alive, but
barely. They were screaming. They had compound fractures, so we
couldn’t touch them. We watched them die. Farther away in the
darkness was the truck they’d hit. Its driver was dead, too. I felt
for a pulse, but his skin was already cool. He looked as though he
was taking a nap.
That happened
sixty years ago, and I think about it every day. Not that I need a
reminder, but life’s hard. For everybody. I was a lot more carefree
before that night, and I’m still pretty darned carefree right now,
but I do believe each of us has only one purpose, and that’s to make
life better for everyone else, with no exceptions. You do what you
can. Me, I write poems.
DPR:
Italy has
long been lauded by and beloved of writers—the Shelleys, Byron,
Keats, a couple of Brownings, Joyce, Lawrence. I know that you and
your wife, the absolutely amazing poet Barbara Hamby, love Italy.
Besides the obvious incredible countryside, the food, the wine, the
people, the art, and the history, what else about Italy calls to
your poetic spirit?
DK:
Well, speaking of my betters, they all went
to Italy and loved it. Byron admired the passion and directness of
the Italians, especially compared to what he saw as English
self-restraint. Same with E. M. Forster, who felt that Italy
liberated him from the gloom and self-righteousness of England (take
a look at A Room With a View,
and you’ll see what he means).
I first spent a long
stretch in Italy when I was still in my twenties and figuring myself
out, and Henry James, whose work I had written my doctoral
dissertation on, also saw Italy as a canvas for exploring identity
and aesthetic awakening, especially in works like
Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady.
And while I’m
sure there are nice people everywhere, I just find the Italians are
easy to get along with and talk to. My own command of the language
is permanently stuck in second gear, but the citizens of Florence,
where we’ve spent most of my time, have always been generous with
one who has as shaky a grip on the subjunctive as I have.
In a sidewinding
kind of way, that struggle has been good for my English, which is
what my poems are made of. As the absolutely amazing Barbara says,
nothing makes you love English more than when you’re trying to get
your clothes back from the dry cleaner’s in a language you can’t
really speak. The more I yammer and haw in Italian, the more deeply
I love that marvelous, many-voiced tongue called English.
That doesn’t mean
I want to live there. From time to time, someone says, “You spend a
lot of time in Italy—why don’t you just move there?” Are you
kidding? I can’t imagine life without the smell of barbecue from a
smoky roadside cooker, the sound of Chuck Berry spooling out the
window of a passing car. Dorothy Gale was right, folks. This here is
my country, and there’s no place like it.
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