Kirby, Poetry is Queer

 

Why this line, this angle, and not a curve?
      Somewhere I had read that’s what some researcher found, that the homosexual mind preferred angles over curves.
      Could be true. I’ve always admired a good angle.
      Mind you, this bunch mostly set out to “cure” the mo out of homo. The O-so-fine scholar Martin Duberman covers that terrain in his excellent memoir, Cures.
      My saving grace is that I never, never trusted the question to begin with. “Why do you think you’re homosexual?” “What made you homosexual?” “If you could be straight, would you?”
      I’ve never heard a single non-gay person ask that very same question about their straight selves.
      “Ewww, what do you do in bed?”
      “O darlin’, I don’t do anything in bed but sleep.”
      No, never trusted that question, not one bit. Wise body.
      That’s what I learned to trust, my body. My innate, intimate wisdom.

I’m fascinated by Toronto poet, editor, publisher and bookseller Kirby’s book-length “kaleidoscope of sexual outlaws, gay icons, Sapphic poets, and great lovers—real and imagined—conjured like gateway drugs to a queer world,” Poetry is Queer (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2021). The delightfully moving and energetic memoir Poetry is Queer, following their full-length debut poetry title This Is Where I Get Off (Toronto ON: Permanent Sleep Press, 2019) [see my review of such here], is a lyric essay suite composed in short, accumulating sections, moving from point to point in quick bursts. “I used to court trouble,” they write, early on in the collection, “now only admire it from afar.” There is something of the “I Remember” structure of Joe Brainard sans prefix to these sections; separate but ongoing, as each of these short sections further and build upon what had come prior. The prose moves from exaltation to declaration, joyously exploring a history through language and Queer culture; Kirby writes openly and honestly about the difficulties of growing up, and being not only Queer, but Queer during a particular period, just prior to and through the AIDS crisis, emerging out the other side with a community devastated through loss. Kirby writes with an ease that leans comfortably in; one that emerges from the patience that comes from a highly lived experience, with as much lack of interest in falsehoods, fakery or bullshit. Through a prose of wry and self-aware observation, Kirby offers an “adventures through poetry,” both of their writing and reading, and a tenderness. “Has Cavafy’s ghost entered my body? / If so, it did at a very early age. I’ve often wondered what was meant by “old souls,” but regarding mine, I have no doubt. / That, and/or gay teenage longing is very similar to an elder’s. Everything but want, slightly out of reach.” Kirby writes of poems that shifted their thinking, and poets as well, offering insight into the hows and whys of a memoir as much around coming-of-age through Queer spaces as poetry spaces, and the combinations that emerged. One, it would seem, might not be able to separate from the other. Kirby writes of pleasure and of elders, and of their eventual founding of the now-infamous Toronto-based poetry space (a second location to such, I believe, has just been established): “Knife|Fork|Book (KFB), the all-poetry bookshop I founded late 2016, was born of both fluke and necessity. Though they’re always welcome, Toronto didn’t need another used bookstore—it needed a poetry shop. A place to champion poets and poetry, a place to call home.” There is a joy and an openness and a delight that permeates this collection, but also a simultaneous grief, sense of loss and even exhaustion. This is a joyous and devastating read, simultaneously weighty and light.

            Liars. Cheaters. Criminals. Hatred. Despised. Ostracized. Fired. Laughed at. Beaten. Killed. Of course everyone always knew. Just don’t say anything.
            “Yeah, but things are different now.”
            I cannot hear the name Matthew Sheppard.
            And how many trans?
            Being beaten to death, murdered. Hated.
            It may be less, but no. Still the same.
            I dream Johnny Mathis sings me one love song before we die.
            “I’m Just a Boy in Love” comes close.
            Close.
            If you don’t know my references, look them up. I’m tired of making it easy.