Kirby, This Is Where I Get Off

Two of the deepest tropes here are romance and, at times, audacious sexual candor—think of a heart-racing first date at a 5 star restaurant the back door of which opens into a steamy alley, loaded with Allen Ginsberg’s “saintly motorcyclists” and Kirby’s “bevy of bears,” and this is the astonishing new poetry collection, There Is Where I Get Off—double meaning intended and perfectly executed throughout. Other thrilling collisions occur throughout the book: fear and loneliness are assailed by cat-creamy satisfaction and hot thrills; the language itself is raw and cooked; love is prevailed upon like justice, to be not strained but mad about, aroused by the body when it is both bold and shy, as is best explicated in “A Cute Little Ditty on Romance”:

Romance is never tiring of watching the way his cock moves.

Romance is when you cease to apologize for farting and begin to welcome it while rimming

Kirby’s work recalls many legendary figures in art and pop, from Frank O’Hara and David Trinidad to Will Munro to Joe Orton to of course, the deeply musical Rock Hudson.

But they are an original. And This Is Where I Get Off is a Whitmanesque cry of passion and pain that treats both the quotidian and the extraordinary with excitement as if also developing a poetics, and philosophy. That life is a series of exquisitely beautiful moments, sewn together by our dear selves.

And if we cannot sew and end up blowing it? (Lynn Crosbie, “Forward”)

By the time Kirby crossed my attention, they were already omnipresent, and indeed, legendary, whether appearing at events or running readings, publications and other enthusiasms through Toronto’s poetry-only bookshop, knife│fork│book. Kirby’s latest title, after a handful of smaller poetry publications over the years, is the full-length debut poetry title This Is Where I Get Off (Toronto ON: Permanent Sleep Press, 2019), a collection of first-person lyrics bristling with energy, from grief to passion to wild exuberance and graphic enthusiasm. Kirby cribs, cradles and wrestles with their own history, writing passionately of living and loving, doing so openly and defiantly, even against climates that worked equally hard to deny their existence. There is such an openness to this collection, one that works to celebrate as much as acknowledge, working to record the stories of too many individuals lost over too many years. “My mother said that’s all they knew of homosexuals,” Kirby writes, early on in the poem “The Only Reason,” “that they were child / molesters and they killed themselves [...]” And yet, for all the dark corners Kirby writes on, around and through, this is a glowing, glorious, exuberant collection of hope.

They’re closing down the temples.

Disinfected cans, lit, doors

off stalls. Porn theatres boarded

up. Closed. Steel plates cover glory

holes. Sex clubs patrolled, video

surveillance. Arrests. Suicides. Cock-

suckers told they’re addicts.

“You must’ve been one helluva

cocksucker before AIDS.”

[FUCK YOU, STILL AM] this

suit’n tie worries I might drool

stain his fucking trousers lunch

hour. He’s the one wants to jack me

ready to throat his load the minute

he steps back from the urinal.

Hard. Thick. Fuck.

“You really want it.”

lips barely reach head he

backs buckles shoots sprays

quick finger over nozzle repeats

spurts mouth open wide for

“Fuck, that was wild man, oh, shit

did I get it in your eye, Sorry…”

at basin, cold water rinse, look

up. Red. Walk some TP over

to where he shot. Didn’t

bother cleaning up. Swipe a glob

between thumb and forefinger,

place them in my mouth.

There’s always going to be cocksuckers.

Morgan Parker, There are more beautiful things than Beyoncé

Another Another Autumn

in New York

When I drink anything

out of a martini glass

I feel untouched by

professional and sexual

rejection. I am a dreamer

with empty hands and

I like the chill.

I will not be attending the party

tonight, because I am

microwaving multiple Lean Cuisines

and watching Wife Swap,

which is designed to get back

at fathers, as westernized media

is often wont to do.

I don’t know

when I got so punk rock

but when I catch

myself in the mirror I

feel stronger. So when

at five in the afternoon

something on my TV says

time is not on your side

I don’t give any

shits at all. Instead I smoke

a joint like I’m

a teenager and eat a whole

box of cupcakes.

Stepping on leaves I get

first-night thrill.

Confuse the meanings

of castle and slum, exotic

and erotic. I bless

the dark, tuck

myself into a canyon

of steel. I breathe

dried honeysuckle

and hope. I live somewhere

imaginary.

I’ve been enjoying the vulnerability and swagger of Brooklyn, New York poet Morgan Parker’s There are more beautiful things than Beyoncé (Tin House Books, 2017), a pop-culture mélange of daring, playful and fiercely smart lyrics. There are elements of Parker’s There are more beautiful things than Beyoncé that are reminiscent of some of the earlier work of Toronto poet Lynn Crosbie (best evidenced through her selected poems, Queen Rat [see my review of such here]), for their shared mix of contemporary pop culture, vulnerability, bravado and first-person flâneuse. As Parker writes to open “Poem on Beyoncé’s Birthday”: “Drinking cough syrup from a glass shaped / Like your body I wish was mine but as dark / As something in my mind telling me / I’m not woman enough for these days […]”

I find poems engaging contemporary pop culture, whether this collection or even Sarah Blake’s Kanye West-inspired Mr. West (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2015) [see my review of such here] far more compelling than poetry collections centred around historical cultural figures (The Beatles, for example). Where some of those other collections engage with a kind of nostalgia, Parker, through writing Beyoncé, Drake and Michelle Obama (among others), instead engage with more contemporary matters, such as how it is to be black and female in America, circling out into larger issues of the price of fame, negotiating love, sex, friendships and other engagements, composing a larger canvas of studies on how to simply live and be in the world. The openness and vulnerabilities displayed in Parker’s poems are quite striking, even as she plays with familiar tropes in fresh ways, such as her poem “13 Ways of Looking at a Black Girl,” riffing off Wallace Stevens’ oft-altered “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (from his 1923 debut collection, Harmonium), that includes: “I am hungry  for myself […]” There is even a riff on Canadian writer Lawrence Hill’s 2007 novel (and subsequent miniseries), The Book of Negroes, in her own poem of the same name, that includes: “This book is uncorrected proof. You read it / on your eyelids. You sleep under it. // You give it away. You tear out whole chapters. / You say you read it but you didn’t.” The third poem in her triptych reads:

You see the commercial on BET

while you’re painting your nails.

The women are only crying.

The slave cabins are dull. You’re trying

to text this dude: Negro, please,

why sleep when the world so bad.

For him you would be pumice shined to pearl.

He makes you wanna write your name.

Everybody has an opinion.

You shiver and it is permission.

You are beautiful because you’re funny.

You are alive because you’re a question.

This is a poetry collection that holds a great deal of wisdom and lively energy (and one that is clearly improved through live performance), and was an absolute delight to read. One can only imagine (and hope) that Beyoncé herself was equally charmed.

Blog Hop: what the stories make of us,

The lovely and talented Montreal writer Tess Fragoulis (who we really don’t hear enough from) tagged me in this “Blog Hop” meme [her answers to the same questions are posted here]. I agreed to participate before I realized that I had already done such, under a different title, earlier in the year. Given that I answered such on my current poetry work-in-progress (our wee babe adds much, but slows all projects down, as you might imagine), I thought it might be worth going through the process again (especially since I’d already said yes) for the sake of my current fiction work-in-progress.

[Photo of myself on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, October 4, 2014, taken by Stephen Brockwell]

What are you working on?

For the past couple of years, I’ve been accumulating a collection of short stories tentatively titled “On Beauty.” I’m not entirely convinced by the title, but have set such considerations aside for a while, allowing myself to focus on the stories themselves.

The collection is made up of roughly eighteen short stories, each constructed to be roughly three manuscript pages in length (I suspect the manuscript is nowhere near long enough yet). What appeals to me is in a compact exploration of character and situation, attempting to say an enormous amount in a very small space in the most compact language possible. What appeals are those small or large moments of a character’s life or consideration that have enormous repercussions later on, even if that character might not be aware of the whats and the whys of those triggers. We are such complex creations, and so little of what we do, what decisions we make and why are really understood, even in the midst of our actions. My fiction appears to focus quite heavily on that, for reasons I, myself, have yet to determine.

The title originally came from picking up a copy of the Zadie Smith book of the same name; I’d read a piece by her in Brick: A Literary Journal a few years back and been extremely impressed [I even wrote about that here], so when I saw such at a used bookstore in Perth, Ontario (the former BackBeat Books and Music, when Christine McNair and I did a reading there), I had to pick it up. I have to admit, the book didn’t strike me—I suppose it wasn’t whatever it was I thought I expected (I know this is my issue and not hers); I was surprised by the information overload Smith was providing, and I felt that however skilled the work, there was just too much in the way of what I wanted from the story (I’ve since gone through a collection of her essays, and the book was spectacular).

I am interested in the small moments, and in brevity, wishing to include only the information that is essential to the story. I am not interested in providing needless physical description, for example. So much can be suggested through so very little; and so much of it distracts, and has nothing to do with the goings-on of the action (or, inaction) itself.

So far, I’ve had stories from the manuscript appearing in a few venues, including online at Numero Cinq, matchbook lit, Control Lit Mag and The Puritan, in print at Grain magazine, Matrix magazine and Atlas Review, and one forthcoming this month in The New Quarterly.

There was a period I’d hoped to complete the manuscript before the baby arrived, but that didn’t happen; then I’d hoped to complete the manuscript before Christine’s maternity leave ends in November, but I don’t really see that happening either. Now I’ve got my eyes set upon spring. Optimistically.

It might not be moving as quickly as I might like, but I’m still pretty pleased about it, overall. It feels as though I am accomplishing something that is really moving my work forward in a very positive direction.

How does your work differ from others of its genre?

I would think the lyric density alone might be enough to differentiate my work from the work of others in the same genre. I also tend to steer clear of dialogue.

I also tend to focus on particular moments, often leaping over a whole slew of action sequences: the moments of my fiction appear to either work up to a particular action, or away from a particular action, exploring the results of such. There is so much more to explore after the effects of an action, as opposed to the action itself.

I admired very much an episode of Mad Men that, instead of focusing on a particular wedding (which, narratively, wasn’t terribly important), decided to focus on what happened around and after that wedding. So many television programs would have focused on the wrong thing: a wedding episode. There is something about well-written television and film (such as Mad Men, or the film Smoke) that have prompted my fiction for quite some time. How does one tell a story without giving anything away, and yet, leaving enough space to suggest what hasn’t been shown?

Of course, also, the decade-long swath Brian Michael Bendis recently finished carving through The Avengers over at Marvel Comics (he’s currently working his way through an impressive run at All-New X-Men) is a display on how long-form storytelling is constructed: magnificent.

Why do I write what I do?

I think anyone writes the way they do because it is the only way they know how. Throughout my twenties, during my first few attempts at fiction, it took me far too long to abandon ideas of what I thought fiction was supposed to be and look like, instead of attempting to discover exactly the form that worked best for my own writing, and my own processes. Once I finally managed to clear that hurdle, it was far easier to continue and complete manuscripts that I was happy with.

We do what we do because we can’t do it any other way. And yet, experimentation and exploration are (obviously) essential to any writer’s craft and development. But I could never be able to (even if I wished to) compose a straightforward literary work akin to, say, David Adams Richards or Guy Vanderhaeghe. Even as a reader, the form simply doesn’t appeal.

When it comes to fiction, I’m difficult to impress: I often consider literary fiction to be far too long and wordy, and overly and unnecessarily descriptive, and so the amount of books of fiction I deliberately stop reading mid-way through are endless. Fortunately, I have been enormously impressed by recent works of fiction by Tessa Mellas, Marie-Helene Bertino, Lydia Davis, Lorrie Moore, Lynn Crosbie, Ken Sparling, Michael Blouin, Jim Shepard and Douglas Glover (for example). It does happen; I just wish it would happen more often.

A decade back, I was amazed to finally read Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (despite finding many of his non-fiction opinions rather annoying); it was one of the first books over two hundred pages I’d read that I couldn’t see to excise a single word.

I’m currently in the midst of the new Diane Schoemperlen collection, and am duly impressed (as I suspected I would be—I love her work).

How does my writing process work?

Slowly, and accumulatively. I begin with longhand, and once I’ve exhausted such, I enter fragments, sections, sentences and paragraphs into the computer. I then print out the story-in-progress and spend time scribbling on the page, adding and subtracting, and composing additional fragments via longhand in my notebook to then return to the computer and go through the process again. Some of the stories in the manuscript-so-far have gone through this process daily for many months. Some have taken nearly three years to complete, and others I haven’t quite decided on yet. There is still much to do.

For further interviews, I tag thee: Cameron Anstee; Aaron Tucker; Ryan Eckes;

Matthea Harvey, If The Tabloids Are True What Are You?

THE STRAIGHTFORWARD MERMAID

The Straightforward Mermaid starts every sentence with “Look…” This comes from being raised in a sea full of hooks. She wants to get points 1, 2 and 3 across, doesn’t want to disappear like a river into the ocean. When she is feeling despairing, she goes to eddies at the mouth of the river and tries to comb the water apart with her fingers. The Straightforward Mermaid has already said to five sailors, “Look, I don’t think this is going to work,” before sinking like a sullen stone. She’s supposed to teach Rock Impersonation to the younger mermaids, but every beach field trip devolves into them trying to find shells to match their tail scales. They really love braiding, “Look,” says the Straightforward Mermaid, “Your high ponytails make you look like fountains, not rocks.” Sometimes she feels like a third gender, preferring primary colors to pastels, the radio to singing. At least she’s all mermaid: never gets tired of swimming, hates the thought of socks.

Brooklyn poet Matthea Harvey’s remarkable new poetry collection is If The Tabloids Are True What Are You? (Graywolf Press, 2014), a work thick with full-colour photographs and artworks throughout by the author. One of the smarter and more playful of American poets I’ve seen playing within the structure of lyric narrative, Harvey’s previous books of poetry include Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (Alice James Books, 2000), Sad Little Breathing Machine (Graywolf, 2004), Modern Life (Graywolf, 2007) and Of Lamb (with illustrations by Amy Jean Porter; McSweeney’s, 2011). The poems in If The Tabloids Are True What Are You? are witty and whimsical, displaying a pop culture sensibility and wink to the camera, each composed in that nebulous boundary between lyric prose poem and postcard story. There is something of the pop culture sensibility in Harvey’s poetry similar to works by Montreal poet David McGimpsey, Toronto writer Lynn Crosbie, or even American writer and filmmaker Miranda July, pushing an earnest and knowing irony through tales of the hilarious, fantastic and impossible (and sometimes, perversely and desperately sad), especially in poems with titles such as “CHEAP CLONING PROCESS LETS YOU / HAVE YOUR OWN LITTLE ELVIS,” or “PROM KING AND QUEEN SEEK / U.N. RECOGNITION OF THEIR OWN COUNTRY… / PROMVANIA!”

USING A HULA HOOP CAN GET YOU

ABDUCTED BY ALIENS

We’ve never taken anyone

buttoned up and trotting from point A

to point B—subway to office, office to

lunch, fretting over the credit crunch.

Not the ones carefully maneuvering their

whatchamacallits alongside broken white lines,

not the Leash-holders who take their Furries

to the park three point five times per day.

If you’re an integer in that kind of

equation, you belong with your Far-bits

on the ground. We’re seven Star-years

past calculus, so it’s the dreamy ones

who want to go somewhere they don’t know

how to get to that interest us, the ones

who will stare all day at a blank piece of paper

or square of canvas, then peer searchingly into

their herbal tea. It’s true that hula hoops

resemble the rings around Firsthome, and that

when you spin, we chime softly, remembering

Oursummer, Ourspring and our twelve Otherseasons.

But that’s not the only reason. (Do we like rhyme?

Yes we do. Also your snow, your moss, your tofu—

our sticky hands make it hard for us to put

things down.) Don’t fret, dreaming spinning ones

with water falling from your faces.

It’s us you’re waiting for and we’re coming.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Harvey’s If The Tabloids Are True What Are You? is the way she has intricately blended and incorporated her poems into her wide array of artworks—including photographs, collage, erasures, needlepoint and tiny installations—into the collection. The artwork is an integral part of the work (making up more than half the book), and blend intricately with the poems, as opposed to being merely decorative or added-on (which so often happens, unfortunately, when artists/designers attempt to blend writing and art). There is almost a coffee-table book sensibility to what Graywolf has done with this book, if coffee-table books could be stunningly brilliant, smart, subversive and strikingly original (which, predominantly, they are not).