David Kirby: his poetry, Kirbyisms, & video

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by David Kirby
   

The Search for Baby Combover
   

            In Paris one night the doorbell rings,
            and there’s this little guy, shaking like a leaf
            and going “uh-uh-uh-UNH-ah!” and his eyes get big
            and he raises his hands like a gospel singer
            and goes “UNH-ah-uh-uh-uh-UNH-uh-ah!”

            and for just a fraction of a second I think
            he’s doing the first part of Wilson Pickett’s
            “Land of a Thousand Dances” and he wants me
            to join him in some kind of weird welcome
            to the neighborhood, so I raise my hands a little

            and begin to sort of hum along, though
            not very loudly in case I’m wrong about this,
            and I’m smiling the way old people smile
            when they can’t hear you but want you to know
            that everything’s okay as far as they’re concerned

            or a poet smiles in a roomful of scientists,
            as if to say, “Hey! I’m just a poet!
            But your data’s great, really! Even if
            I don’t understand it!” And by the time
            I start to half-wonder if this gentleman wants me

            to take the you-got-to-know-how-to-pony part
            or means to launch into it himself, he gives
            a little hop and slaps his hands down to his sides
            and says, “PLEASE! YOU MUST NOT MOVE
            THE FURNITURE AFTER ELEVEN O’CLOCK OF THE NIGHT!”

            so I lower my own hands and say, “Whaaaa…?”
            And he says, “ALWAYS YOU ARE MOVING IT WHEN
            THE BABY TRY TO SLEEP! YOU MUST NOT DO IT!”
            And now that he’s feeling a little bolder,
            he steps in closer, where the light’s better,

            and I see he’s got something on his head,
            like strands of oily seaweed, something
            you’d expect to find on a rock after one of
            those big tanker spills in the Channel,
            so I lean a little bit and realize it’s what

            stylists call a “combover,” not a bad idea
            on the tall fellows but definitely a grooming no-no
            for your vertically-challenged caballeros,
            of which Monsieur here is certainly one,
            especially if they are yelling at you.

            But I’d read an article about AA that said
            when your loved ones stage an intervention
            and go off on you for getting drunk
            and busting up the furniture and running out
            into traffic and threatening to kill the President,

            it’s better to just let them wind down
            and then say, “You’re probably right,”
            because if you’re combative, they will be, too,
            and then your problems will just start over again,
            so I wait till Mr. Combover–it’s not nice, I know,

            but it’s the first name that comes to mind–stops shaking,
            and I say, “You’re probably right,” and he raises
            a finger and opens his mouth as if to say something
            but then snaps his jaw shut and whirls around
            and marches downstairs, skidding a little

            and windmilling his arms and almost falling
            but catching himself, though not without
            that indignant backward glance we all give
            the stupid step that some stupid idiot would have
            attended to long ago if he hadn’t been so stupid.

            The next day, I ask Nadine the gardienne
            qu’est-ce que c’est the deal avec the monsieur
            qui lives under moi, and Nadine says his femme
            is toujours busting his chops, but il est afraid
            of her, so il takes out his rage on the rest of nous.

            There’s something else, though: a few days later,
            Barbara and I see Mr. and Mrs. Combover
            crossing the Pont Marie, and she is a virtual giantess
            compared to him! Now I remember once hearing Barbara
            give boyfriend advice to this niece of mine,

            and Barbara said (1) he’s got to have a job,
            (2) he’s got to tell you you’re beautiful all the time,
            and (3) he’s got to be taller than you are,
            so when I see Mrs. Combover looming over her hubby,
            I think, Well, that explains the busted chops.

            Not only that, Mrs. Combover looks cheap.
            She looks rich, sure–Nadine had told me Monsieur
            is some sorte de diplomat avec the Chilean delegation–
            but also like one of those professional ladies
            offering her services up around the Rue St. Denis.

            But who are they, really? “Combover” is one
            of those names from a fifties black-and-white movie;
            he’s the kind of guy neighborhood kids call “Mr. C.”
            and who has a boss who says things like, “Now see here,
            Combover, this sort of thing just won’t do!”

            He’s like one of Dagwood’s unnamed colleagues–
            he’s not even Dagwood, who at least excites
            Mr. Dithers enough to be fired a couple
            of times a week, not to mention severely beaten.
            Only Dagwood is really in charge. Everything goes his way!

            Despite cronic incompetence, ol’ Dag keeps
            the job that allows him his fabulous home life:
            long naps, towering sandwiches, affectionate
            and well-behaved teenaged children, a loyal dog,
            and, best of all, the love of Blondie.

            Blondie! The name says it all: glamorous but fun.
            Big Trashy Mrs. Combover is not glamorous,
            although she thinks she is, and no fun at all.
            She is the anti-Blondie. Her job seems to be
            to stay home and smoke, since we’re always smelling

            the cigarette fumes that seep up though the floor
            into our apartment day and night. And he says
            we’re keeping Baby Combover awake when we move
            the furniture, which we’ve never done, but then
            we’ve never seen Baby Combover, either. Or heard him.

            Baby Combover: the world’s first silent baby.
            Barbara has this theory that, after a life
            of prostitution, Mrs. Combover has not only repented but
            undergone a false pregnancy and imaginary birth.
            Therefore, the reason why Baby Combover is silent

            is that he is not a real baby who fusses and eats and
            wets and poops but is instead a pillowcase with knots
            for ears and a smiley-face drawn with a Magic Marker and
            a hole for its mouth so Mrs. Combover can teach it
            to smoke when it’s older, like eight, say.

            Now I know what they fight about: “You never spend
            any time with the babyl” hisses Mrs. Combover.
            “I will–when he’s older and can talk!” says Mr. Combover.
            “Here I am stuck with this baby all day long!
            And those horrible people upstairs!”

            And he says, “Oh, be silent, you… prostitute!”
            And she says, “Quiet, you horrible man–
            not in front of the child!” Maybe it’s time
            for a call to the police. Or the newspapers.
            I can see the headlines: OU EST LE PETIT ENFANT COMBOVER?

            I feel sorry for him. With parents like this,
            it would be better if someone were to kidnap him.
            Or I could take him back to America with me,
            I who have a wife who loves me and two grown sons.
            Why not? We’ve got all this extra room now.

            We’ll feed him a lot and tickle him;
            there’s nothing funnier than a fat, happy baby.
            And when the boys come home to visit,
            they’ll take him out with them in their sports cars:
            “It’s my little brother!” they’ll say. “He’s French!”

            The neighborhood kids, once a band of sullen mendicants,
            will beg us to let him play with them,
            even though he doesn’t speak their language.
            Look! There they go toward the baseball field,
            with Baby Combover under their arm!

            I love you, Baby Combover! You are Joseph Campbell’s
            classic mythical hero, i.e., “an agent of change
            who relinquishes self-interest and breaks down
            the established social order.” But you’re so pale!
            You’ve stayed out too long and caught cold.

            Barbara and the boys gather around his bed;
            they hug each other, and we try not to cry.
            Baby Combover is smiling–he always smiled, that kid.
            His little mouth begins to move, and we lean in
            and think we hear him say, “Be bwave fo’ me.”

            Back in Paris, Mr. Combover grows a full head of hair.
            Mrs. Combover reaches up to touch it.
            He puts down his attaché case and caresses her cheek.
            “How beautiful you are!” he says. It’s so quiet now.
            Then they hear it: in the next room, a child is crying.

            brought to you with the poet’s gracious consent
   

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David Kirby, who grew up in Baton Rouge, is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. The latest news on his work is that, for the third time a poem by him, “Seventeen Ways from Tuesday”, has made the pages of Best American Poetry. He is also currently judging for the InterBoard Poetry Community.

For more profile on him, see this page of The Chelsea Forum:

            David Kirby;

where Andy Brumer is quoted in a New York Times item, saying:

The stream-of-consciousness and jazz-based rhythms of Kerouac and Ginsberg meet the surreal, philosophical musings of Wallace Stevens, with an occasional dose of cathartic confessionalism à la Robert Lowell.

A current profile, with a webography that includes links to his poetry, is at About Poetry:

            David Kirby;

where we find:

He has two books forthcoming in 2007, The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems (also by LSU Press) and an essay collection entitled Ultra-Talk: Johnny Cash, The Mafia, Shakespeare, Drum Music, St. Teresa Of Avila, And 17 Other Colossal Topics Of Conversation (University of Georgia Press).

To visit his web site, click his logo:

   

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Kirbyisms
   

He is also a writer for the New York Times. You can find his articles here:

            NYT Archive: “By David Kirby”

In those articles, we find what may be called Kirbyisms, sayings about poetry and life, said at just the right time, in only the way David Kirby can, or would as the good professor in him comes to the fore. Here are some:
   

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In poetry, the first-person pronoun is simply more reader-friendly. It’s like a knock on an office door that’s already open. You didn’t have to knock, but if you had just started talking, it might have been awkward, and your listener might not have responded.

from Dreams, Trees, Grief, August 20, 2006

   
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There is a brash, exuberant poetry being written in America these days, a long-lined, many-paged, pyrotechnic verse that would have its daddy, Walt Whitman, slapping his slouch hat against his leg and chortling with unbridled glee.

from The Biggest Little Poems, December 18, 2005
   

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But of course there is no real competition between the Whitman who boasted “I am large, I contain multitudes” and the Dickinson whose niece Martha reported that her aunt once pretended to lock the door to her bedroom and pocket an imaginary key, saying, “Mattie, here’s freedom.”

from The Biggest Little Poems, December 18, 2005
   

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You’re having a cup of coffee, and bang! It’s your neighbor, putting his car in the garage. Unfortunately, it’s your garage and the door was down. This could be the beginning of a lawsuit–or a poem.

from ‘Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos’ and ‘Into It’: The Double, September 25, 2005
   

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Undergraduate writing programs probably send as many students to law schools as they do to M.F.A. programs. Makes sense: whether you’re writing a brief or a sonnet, you’re gathering material, thinking about the order you’re putting it in, adjusting tone to make the right impact.

from ‘Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos’ and ‘Into It’: The Double, September 25, 2005
   

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“Inside every lawyer is the wreck of a poet,” Clarence Darrow said, but in recent times there have been efforts to encourage the two professions to coexist peacefully.

from ‘Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos’ and ‘Into It’: The Double, September 25, 2005
   

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The lawyers can’t stop the doomsday machine, even if they want to. And the poets can only write about it.

from ‘Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos’ and ‘Into It’: The Double, September 25, 2005
   

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Yes, the world is one big banana peel, and if we don’t know that we’ve got one foot on it, it’s because we’re not looking down: the goat (actually, it’s a heifer) on Keats’s immortal urn is being led to slaughter, wildflowers nourish killer bees, the South’s sylvan meadows were once battlefields soaked in blood.

from ‘Luck Is Luck’: Intimations of Mortality, April 10, 2005
   

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Our parents go through all this before we do; the man who used to take us on his back is bent and gray now, and the woman our friends thought sexy spends her days in a chair. We’re following a curriculum that, if we’re lucky, leads us to accept our lives, and that consists in part of observing our parents as they learn to accept theirs.

from ‘Luck Is Luck’: Intimations of Mortality, April 10, 2005
   

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If poetry is as much a state of mind as it is an assortment of black marks on white pages, then it resides in that intimate space between the world and those who observe it.

from ‘Danger on Peaks’: Ars Longa, Vita Longa, November 21, 2004
   

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Yesterday’s hippies are now gray-haired and prosperous and probably not reading much poetry.

from ‘Danger on Peaks’: Ars Longa, Vita Longa, November 21, 2004
   

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The adage “when in Rome” has always been good advice for foreign travelers. But finding out what, exactly, the Romans do–let alone how to emulate them without making a fool of yourself–is not always easy.

from For Social Slips, Anti-Skid Books, October 3, 2004
   

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If you want to make friends, a smile will always be understood.

from For Social Slips, Anti-Skid Books, October 3, 2004
   

            ~~~~~
   

Poetry can’t fix everything, and maybe it can’t even fix anything. Yet it lets us see and sometimes even understand.

from Moe, Larry and Bertolucci, May 2, 2004
   

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Pound and Monroe were the Lennon and McCartney of their shared enterprise, the one skirting the shoreline of art as the other steered toward the stream’s middle; the impresario and the editor were bound to part, and not happily.

from Poets Behaving Badly, December 1, 2002
   

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All writers think of themselves as superior to the competition, and so it is with a certain amount of malicious glee that one encounters the thunderings of poets who today are more or less nobodies, the John G. Neihardts and John Gould Fletchers who howl with fury at having to appear alongside those they consider their inferiors.

from Poets Behaving Badly, December 1, 2002
   

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Kirby Audio/Video
   

Listen to David Kirby read his poetry, and his love of travel becomes evident. In fact, as I write, this Southern American is on sabbatical leave in France.

Through the sounds of his poetry, he gives us the world to travel, with its accents and lingo, but also the vocalizations from–for a different example–young hip hop artists. In this sense, his is an audio world for poetry.

Below are two poetry readings by him available on the web that will use your RealPlayer. The first is close to a half hour in length, and is from from the Library of Congress’s web pages of the 2005 National Book Festival.

The fourth of the four poems he read there, “The Search for Baby Combover” featured above, from his book The Ha-Ha, is a favorite among the young men of high schools, to read for, and win, Poetry Out Loud competitions across America. Click on his picture to view this webcast:
   

Duration 28:25

   

And click the picture of his Big-Leg Music book, to get a RealAudio presentation from his web site, with graphics, of David reading his poem “Your Momma Says Omnia Vincit Amor“, wherein music overlays the world of language, this world travelled through poetry.
   

Duration 2:15

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David Kirby Books
   

Books by him are available here:

BestPrices.Com: David Kirby Books

   

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Mark Doty Physically: "Heaven for Paul"

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a Margaretta Mitchell photograph

   

by Mark Doty
   

        Heaven for Paul
   

The flight attendant said:
We have a mechanical problem with the plane,
and we have contacted the FAA for advice,

and then: We will be making an emergency landing in Detroit,

and then: We will be landing at an air force base in Dayton,
because there is a long runway there, and because
there will be a lot of help on the ground.

Her voice broke slightly on the word help,
and she switched off the microphone, hung it back on its hook,
turned to face those of us seated near her,
and began to weep.

Could the message have been more clear?
Around us people began to cry themselves,
or to pray quietly, or to speak to those with whom
they were travelling, saying the things that people
would choose to say to one another before
an impending accident of uncertain proportions.

It was impossible to hear, really, the details
of their conversations–it would have been wrong to try–
but one understood the import of the tones of voice
everywhere around us, and we turned to each other,

as if there should have been some profound things to be imparted,
but what was to be said seemed so obvious and clear:
that we’d had a fine few years, that we were terrified
for the fate of our own bodies and each other’s,
and didn’t want to suffer, and could not imagine

the half-hour ahead of us. We were crying a little
and holding each other’s hands, on the armrest;
I was vaguely aware of a woman behind us, on the aisle,
who was startled at the sight of two men holding hands,

and I wondered how it could matter to her, now,
on the verge of this life–and then I wondered how it could matter to me,
that she was startled, when I flared on that same margin.

The flight attendant instructed us in how to brace
for a crash landing–to remove our glasses and shoes
and put our heads down, as we did long ago, in school,
in the old days of civil defence. We sat together, quietly.
And this is what amazed me: Paul,

who of the two of us is the more nervous,
the less steadily grounded in his own body,
became completely calm. Later he told me

how he visualised his own spirit
stepping from the flames, and visited,
in his picturing, each person he loved,
and made his contact and peace with each one,

and then imagined himself turning toward
what came next, an unseeable ahead.
                                                                                      For me,
it wasn’t like that at all. I had no internal composure,

and any ideas I’d ever entertained about dying
seemed merely that, speculations flown now
while my mind spiraled in a hopeless sorrowful motion,

sure I’d merely be that undulant fuel haze
in the air over the runway, hot chemical exhaust,
atomised, no idea what had happened to me,

what to do next, and how much of the next life
would I spend (as I have how much of this one?)
hanging around an airport. I thought of my dog,

and who’d care for him. No heaven for me,
only the unimaginable shape of not-myself–
and in the chaos of that expectation,

without compassion, unwilling,
I couldn’t think beyond my own dissolution.
What was the world without me to see it?

And while Paul grew increasingly radiant,

the flight attendant told us it was time to crouch
into the positions we had rehearsed,
the plane began to descend, wobbling,

and the tires screeched against the runway,
burning down all but a few feet of five miles of asphalt
before it rolled its way to a halt.

We looked around us, we let go
the long held breath, the sighs and exhalations,
Paul exhausted from the effort of transcendence,

myself too pleased to be breathing to be vexed
with my own failure, and we were still sitting and beginning to laugh
when the doors of the plane burst open,

and large uniformed firemen came rushing down the aisles,
shouting: Everybody off the plane, now, bring nothing with you,
leave the plane immediately

–because, as we’d learn in the basement
of the hangar where they’d brought us,
a line of tornadoes was scouring western Ohio,
approaching the runway we’d fled.

At this point it seemed plain: if God intervenes
in history, it’s either to torment us
or to make us laugh, or both, which is how

we faced the imminence of our deaths the second time.
I didn’t think once about my soul, as we waited in line,
filing into the hangar, down into the shelter

–where, after a long while, the National Guard would bring us
boxes and boxes of pizza, and much later, transport us, in buses,
to complimentary hotel rooms in Cincinnati.
   

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“Heaven for Paul” comes to you here, following a conversation with Mark Doty at this year’s Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. It is from his 2005 book School of the Arts, published by and available through HarperCollins Publishers.

Here is a link to his web site: Mark Doty
   

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I will keep exegesis to a minimum below. Instead, I want the poet to present the poem through his own speaking, through a spoken reading of “Heaven for Paul” that took place in 2004, before the book came out. First, though, we’ll look at an excerpt from an interview with Mark Doty found through the Audio page on his web site.

The idea in this presentation, then, is to first present “Heaven for Paul” as a poem to be read and valued off the page as above, however you had come to it; then to garner some ideas from listening to the poet, which I will take a brief tangent from; and then to listen to him read. Thus, we will have tarried with the poem and poet for a little extra time.

Here is the link to the the web page, where you can click onto a RealAudio broadcast of the interview:

Mark Doty on WBUR’s The Connection, in an interview with Dick Gordon, discussing SOURCE, Walt Whitman, and the complexities of writing about contemporary American life, recorded in March, 2003

At 6 minutes and 32 seconds into the interview, this conversation takes place:

Dick Gordon: Mark, when you compose your poetry, do you do it out loud?

Mark Doty: I begin scribbling in notebooks–makings of random notes on the computer screen–and very quickly I find myself mouthing those words, wanting to feel the language in the muscles of my jaw and in my tongue. And pretty soon, I am muttering to myself at my desk, and frequently taken for a person who’s a little too far gone into his inner life in public spaces.

DG: But, they’re written to be read out loud.

MD: They’re written to be heard. And even when we read a poem alone, I hope that what’s happening is that there’s a subtle kind of sounding going on, that we’re physically participating in those words, in the sonic texture of the verse. Poetry lives to be physical, to be in our bodies.

In an edited version of an address to the National Library of Australia’s literature conference, “Love and Desire”, published last week in The Age as The write of way with a reader, Dave Malouf writes the following:

When we speak of being unable to put a book down, it isn’t that we can’t wait to find out what happens next. It’s that we don’t want to give up the close and quite tender intimacy that has been established; we do not want to break the spell.

When Doty says “that we’re physically participating in those words, in the sonic texture of the verse” and that poetry “lives to be physical, to be in our bodies,” he is saying to me that there is to be a physical intimacy between the poet and the listener (or reader as it were) of the poem. In listening to the sound of Doty’s voice, even in conversation with Dick Gordon, what stands out is how he articulates his words beyond the syllable level into each letter, each “t”, each “n” that precedes a “d”, the whistling “‘s”–in physical enunciation.

This physicality shows thematically in Doty’s poetry as well. In “Heaven for Paul”, via the communication of crying, for instance–the stewardess wept, and the poem goes on, “people began to cry themselves.” There is the scene with “two men holding hands,” (each holding each, therefore), but also what ensued, that this “startled” a woman, how the speaker wondered “how it could matter to her” and then, on her reaction, “how it could matter to me” (each mattering to each, therefore)–a repeated and operant word of physicality being matter.

Doty becomes playful with taking us in and out of what we might think at first wouldn’t be, but then must be physical: disappearance from this world:

sure I’d merely be that undulant fuel haze
in the air over the runway, hot chemical exhaust,
atomised, no idea what had happened to me,

And doesn’t he bring Paul’s heaven and trancendence physically to Paul, and to us readers in such a way that we physically understand?

Here, from the Poem Present series is the Mark Doty poetry reading, in which “Heaven for Paul” begins just over 24 minutes in:

Podcast #38. Poetry reading by Mark Doty: A poetry reading by Mark Doty as part of the Poem Present series at The University of Chicago. © 2004 The University of Chicago (mp3)

It is a preview reading from his latest book School of the Arts.
   

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School of the Arts, at HarperCollins

   

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