David Kirby

May 7, 2023

“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by David KirbyPosted by

David Kirby

THE WRECK OF THE EDMUND FITZGERALD

“Everyone’s good in a crisis,” says my brother-in-law’s wife
to my brother-in-law, who seems less than pleased to have
this information, he having just said, “I’m good in a crisis”
in response to her assertion that he’s not really good at anything:
 
picking up after himself, taking turns with the kids,
cleaning the kitchen after a big meal that she has shopped for
and prepared. Bravado, the marvelous, the startling:
these aren’t as impressive as that which is steady, consistent,
 
reliable. Not Faustus but Penelope. Jack Gilbert says as much
in his poem “The Abnormal is Not Courage,” which
describes a 1939 Polish cavalry charge against German tanks,
their sabers flashing as cannon fire cuts them to pieces,
 
although the best thing about this story is that
it never happened: the cavalry came across lightly-armed
German infantry and dispersed them, though
the Poles themselves were routed when German reinforcements
 
arrived and fired on them with machine guns.
The tanks appeared only after the battle was over,
as did journalists who saw the tanks and the dead men
and the horses and drew the wrong conclusion, although
 
in a way the cavalry charge actually worked, since it halted
the German advance long enough for a Polish battalion
of foot soldiers to retreat to safety. But isn’t
the story better the way Gilbert tells it? Who wants to hear
 
about a mistake? If you’re going to tell a story,
make it a good one. Be patient. When 18-year-old
John James Audubon came to America, he found
some Eastern Phoebes nesting in a cave and, having heard
 
that they returned to the same spot to nest every year,
he decided to test that idea, so for days he sat in the cave
with them and read a book until they were used
to him and let him tie string to their legs to identify them,
 
and, sure enough, the next year the same birds were back.
Don’t try too hard, in other words. “Human speech is like
a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears
to dance to,” says Flaubert, “when we long to move the stars
 
to pity.” Really? The stars don’t need us.
The stars are fine. It’s the bears who need dance music.
On your feet, Smokey! Here’s one you’ll like—
I wrote it just for you. Besides, every hundredth time
 
we sit down to write a bear song, we write one
that leaves the stars shaking with sorrow, their tears
raining down in torrents and then evaporating in the atmosphere
before they reach us. Beauty can’t be targeted—that was
 
Ezra Pound’s mistake, says Brodsky, a surprising one
for somebody who lived in Italy so long. Beauty is a by-product.
Beauty is the stepchild of doing one’s job, as when Cyrano
de Bergerac suffered a neck wound in battle and decided
 
to study astronomy while he recovered, eventually writing
a satirical novel about a voyage to the moon, thus influencing
future science fiction writers but also being
discovered three hundred and fifty years later by the Edmond Rostand
 
who made him famous in a play called Cyrano de Bergerac
in which his love for the beautiful Roxane is thwarted
because Rostand gave him a large and unsightly nose,
an assertion as exaggerated as the false Polish cavalry charge
 
and thus, like that invention, a key element in turning
a good story into a great one. Gordon Lightfoot’s
hit song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”
was riddled with so many inaccuracies that the singer-songwriter
 
agonized over his sending the doomed freighter to Cleveland,
for example, when it was really headed for Zug Island
when it sank on Lake Superior in 1975, and the families
of the twenty-nine men who perished in the wreck
 
met to mourn in the Mariners’ Church of Detroit
and not, in Lightfoot’s re-phrasing, the Maritime
Sailors’ Cathedral, but his producer and long-time
friend Lenny Waronker told him not to worry about
 
the facts, to play to his artistic strengths and “just tell
a story.” The Poles weren’t stupid. At the time
of the 1939 cavalry charge, their cavalry
was already being organized into motorized brigades.
 
After all, who won the war? Audubon’s tying
strings onto the legs of the Eastern Phoebes
is the first known incident of banding birds.
Cyrano didn’t have a big nose, but Rostand gave him one.
 
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” charted at #1,
and before long shipping regulations were changed
to include survival suits, positioning systems,
depth finders, increased freeboard, more frequent inspection of vessels.
 
None of this would have happened if Gordon Lightfoot
had made sure all his facts were correct and the song
had turned out to be a dud. Writing isn’t hard.
You just have to be patient. You just have to get everything right.
 

—from Poets Respond
May 7, 2023

__________

David Kirby: “When I heard this week that Gordon Lightfoot had died, the first song of his that came to mind was ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.’ It’s one of those songs that’s both awful and fabulous at the same time: it’s the song you put on repeat to drive out those last drunk guests who won’t leave your party, but it’s also one that can move you to sudden, unexpected tears. The story of its composition addresses every artist’s fundamental challenge: do I stick to the facts or do I try to create a work that will last? Me being me, I precede the story of the composition of ‘The Wreck’ with other similar instances, but I get around to it eventually.” (web)

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November 18, 2022

“The Fates” by David KirbyPosted by

David Kirby

THE FATES

A child is born. It’s you! Family and friends stop by
and then the whole neighborhood, it seems, including
three women who sit in the corner and smile and nod
at anyone who says hello, though mainly they keep
to themselves, nibbling the cookies someone else
 
has brought and sipping tea, and then the one nearest
the window takes a ball of yarn out of her purse
and gives it to the one in the middle, who is knitting 
something—booties? a little cap?—as the third 
woman just sits there, a pair of scissors in her lap. 
 
Ten years later and you’re in school now, and even 
the lunchroom ladies are in a good mood as you step 
toward a table with an empty place, and an aide 
says Let me clean that for you and wipes the table 
down and pats you on the shoulder before she heads 
 
to the break room where her two friends wait. 
Your first job? You’re behind the counter 
in a department store, showing a watch to a woman 
who’s buying someone a present, and she pays you
and puts the watch in her purse and waves to a woman 
 
at the perfume counter who hurries over and says Come on, 
we’re late, she’ll be waiting for us at the restaurant.
It’s sunny yet cool the day you marry, and the venue costs 
more than your dad had in mind, but the ceremony 
goes off without a hitch, and the band is cranking 
 
the oldies so everyone will get out on the dance floor, 
and they’re all a little tipsy, and if your aunt’s friends 
are screeching so loudly as they do the Electric Slide 
that you can barely hear the music, it’s a wedding, right? 
Anything goes. In New York a man whose manuscript 
 
has been rejected twenty times is walking down 
Madison Avenue when he is bumped off the sidewalk 
by a gaggle of women who don’t seem to notice him, 
and a car slams on its brakes, and the driver is 
a classmate he hasn’t seen for years who has recently 
 
become an editor with a trade press, and the man 
gets in the car, and by the end of the month he has 
a book deal, and after twenty years and dozens 
of books in print he thinks, If I hadn’t stepped out 
into the street, I’d be in the dry cleaning business now.
 
In Africa a man emerges from the jungle, his bag dripping 
blood: it was a good day, and now his bag bulges with bats,
rats, chimps, even a snake or two. Others have died, 
like the hunters who had cooked and eaten the carcass 
of a gorilla they’d found in the jungle. But who would do that?
 
Bats are healthy: look at them soar from tree to tree!
At the market, the man’s wives spread the bushmeat
on a cloth and begin to bargain. A ferry sinks off the coast 
of South Korea, and among the dead are seven crew members, 
including three women who gave their life jackets 
 
to passengers. Your own children are born. They, too, 
go to school, to work, get married. You have a long life, 
a good one. You weren’t the kid who got picked up 
by a guy who was driving a stolen car and sent to juvie
for being an accessory. You weren’t the one who tried to
 
break up the fight and got knocked down on the sidewalk
and hit your head and never stood up again. You weren’t
those people. Your accidents were good accidents,
and when they weren’t, you learned from them.
A nurse comes in and takes a tube out of your arm
 
as another adjusts your ventilator and a third says
the doctor will be in soon, and the nurses’ names
are Clotho, who spins the web of life, and Lachesis, 
who measures it, and Atropos, who cuts that thread 
when your life is over, and as they make a fuss, 
 
you think how poetry entered you and became like 
a mistress in her own home, one you had not 
summoned but who entered your body of her own accord, 
this force into which everything—work, the sound 
of tires on pavement, home, birds, rocks, love, 
 
the whole world—entered easily and made itself 
comfortable, stanzas rising and falling, one after another, 
in a way that was always surefooted, always a surprise. 
The world rushed in at the speed of a comet, 
everything shouting, “Take me!” and “No, no—take me!” 
 
and all this without your ever having written a single line 
of poetry in your entire life, though along the way 
you learned to think like a poet, to take this over that, 
to begin here and end there and then the other way around 
until at last you could see your life as it really is 
 
and make sense of it, or at least as much sense as one can,
and now you are opening your eyes for the first time, 
and now you are eating, and now you are walking 
from one side of the room to the other, and now you are 
a little girl on her bicycle, flying out into this sunlit world.
 

—from Rattle #77, Fall 2022

__________

David Kirby: “Like everyone, I wrestle with what happens and how and why, and then I remember: older and wiser people addressed these same issues thousands of years ago. The no-nonsense title of this poem makes it clear that I’m looking at life as it is tempered by the Three Fates of Greek mythology, only I wanted them to show up in disguise at various points in a person’s life. I also wanted to conclude on a high note: everyone’s life has the same end, so it’s what happens before that counts. And the best thing that can happen is to learn how to look at life the way poets do. Thing is, you don’t have to be a poet—I know plenty of people who think like a poet who have never written a single poem. It’s what you see and what you make of it that counts.” (web)

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May 20, 2022

“Mass Shootings: A Biography” by David KirbyPosted by

David Kirby

MASS SHOOTINGS: A BIOGRAPHY

For most of history, multiple murders 
were an option for aristocrats: everyone 
else was too tired. Then people
moved to cities, got factory jobs,
had evenings and weekends off,
became more anxious: suddenly
they were living next to people
they didn’t know. In the early 1900s,
nervous disorders spiked as the spread
of information became faster and cheaper
and local stories became national news: 
if people were being killed in Spokane,
why not in your town? The long gun
became the Tommy gun became
the assault rifle, the technology 
speeding faster than our ability 
to fathom it. When Admiral Parry
sailed for the Arctic Circle,
his men carried food in tin cans, 
an invention so new that there were 
as yet no can openers.
 

—from Rattle #75, Spring 2022

__________

David Kirby: “There are daily killings in our country for many reasons, but the dozen or more mass shootings (generally defined as involving four or more victims) over a weekend that inspired this poem stem largely from a growth in firearm availability that is only partially understood by experts, largely opposed by the American public, and seemingly unstoppable.” (web)

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May 30, 2020

“Study Electricity, Etc.” by David KirbyPosted by

David Kirby

STUDY ELECTRICITY, ETC.

Third item on Jay Gatsby’s self-improvement schedule after “Rise from bed” and “Dumbbell exercise and wall scaling.”

You did that already—not electricity,
but the et cetera part. Et cetera means
“and the rest,” and you’ve mastered that.
You work from home, as we do these days,
but you put on a nice top and a dab of makeup
and combed your hair. When the children
need help with their homework, you make
time, and when your husband says he wants
to give them two more math problems
and some vocabulary, you say fine. The four
of you have lunch together, and when he takes
the kids out to play with the dog, you manage
a quick nap. Then tea, then you wrap up
your work and make notes for tomorrow.
Scrambled eggs, toast, and fruit cup
for the children. Let them watch Frozen
for the hundredth time—how could it hurt?
Now you and your husband can have dinner
on the deck: goat cheese, shrimp with
mushrooms, a bottle of Sancerre so cold
you think your teeth might crack. You walk
around the block, making room as others
approach. Bath time. PJs. Their books, yours.
When you were walking, you waved to other
families on their porches. They waved back.

—from Poets Respond
May 30, 2020

__________

David Kirby: “Low-effort thinkers make headlines every day by reacting angrily and even dangerously to the guidelines we have to follow if we’re going to heal our world. To prepare for his future, young Jay Gatsby resolves to ‘study electricity, etc.’ For years I’ve wondered what that ‘etc.’ is, but COVID-19 has given me my answer: it’s the hundred unrecorded daily ways in which we care for ourselves and others with patience and love.” (web)

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October 13, 2019

“Third Time’s a Charm” by David KirbyPosted by

David Kirby

THIRD TIME’S A CHARM

Don’t you wish the president would just shut up?
I mean, why comment on everything all the time.
Let’s hear it for silence. Yes, the helicopter of the world
is always circling overhead, but only rarely and usually
never does it suddenly fix its spotlight on the genius
that is you. What does he expect, a chattering dolphin
to rear up in front of his every tweet/answer to
a journalist/remark to a staffer who’s not supposed
to leak it but does and go chee-chee-chee-chee?
Mozart ends The Magic Flute with the words
“Triumphant strength has rewarded beauty and wisdom
with an eternal crown,” but he was Mozart.
Even ordinary jibber-jabber can go too far, as when
you give someone a present and they say
“You didn’t have to do that” and you think, “I know
I didn’t have to, but I wanted to, though I’m having
second thoughts now,” or someone brings a casserole
to your potluck, and you say, “Oh, how lovely,”
and they say, “Yeah, but it’s way salty, plus I left it
in the oven too long,” and you think, “My, doesn’t
that sound delicious!” Actually it was Mozart’s
librettist Emanuel Schikaneder who wrote the end
of The Magic Flute as well as the rest of it, but still.
Doesn’t the president have speech writers?
The divorce firm of Thyden Gross and Callahan
works out of Friendship Village, Maryland (I’m not
making this up) and recently represented a wealthy
Islamic gentleman who invoked the ancient law
of talaq by saying “I divorce thee” three times
to his wife and bestowing the sum of $2,500
on her while retaining the bulk of their two million
dollar estate for himself. The Maryland Court
of Appeals said no, however, stipulating that
the talaq did not afford the same protections
of due process, prenuptial agreements,
and division of property that Maryland law did,
a ruling in which the court is joined by
those Islamic scholars who say it isn’t right to
invoke the talaq in one sitting and that there
should at least be a period of time between
the “three strikes” as well as other learned
devotees of that venerable faith who say
the talaq is reprehensible and shouldn’t be
used at all. Every time the president goes
yada-yada-yada, I wish Mitch McConnell would say,
“I impeach thee, I impeach thee, I impeach thee”
and he’d disappear like the witch in The Wizard
of Oz, and here I’m just referring to the president’s
banal and mendacious utterances and not
the ugly ones like grabbing somebody by their
you-know-what. In this respect he could at least
take lessons in subtlety from 18th century German
writer Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who said
of the prostitutes he encountered in London
that “they attach themselves to you like limpets”
and “they seize hold of you after a fashion
of which I can give you the best notion by the fact
that I say nothing about it.” Now you’re talking.

—from Poets Respond
October 13, 2019

__________

David Kirby: “I have misgivings about the current move to impeach. That process is usually used to convince the people that the president is a bad person, but we already know that. Too, I bet this president would be delighted; it’ll just give him another chance to feel sorry for himself. No, I’d prefer that he just go away. That’s called magical thinking, as is this poem’s call for Mitch McConnell to do the deed.” (web)

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September 30, 2019

“Little Movies” by David KirbyPosted by

David Kirby

LITTLE MOVIES

I’m telling my friend Charlotte that Barbara and I
are going to New York, where I hope not to spend
a whole lot of money in fancy restaurants, and Charlotte tells me
she was just in New York herself but didn’t
spend much money on food because “I was with
a group of pregnant women.” I can see them now as they

decide between the goat cheese salad and the hummus,
the hearts of palm and the orange-glazed shrimp with
spicy walnut crumble as the waiter says, “Can I interest
you ladies in a mimosa, bloody mary, glass of prosecco?”
and they say, “No, not this time, maybe in a few months.”
Barbara asked her hairdresser if she plans to have

children, and the hairdresser says she’s leaning
the other way because she works on a lot of young
mommies, and “they’re just not selling it.” Then again,
parenthood isn’t about joy. Studies show that parents
report significantly lower levels of happiness,
life satisfaction, marital satisfaction, and mental well-being

compared with non-parents. Why do it, then? Why
have children at all? Probably because children add
narrative to a life that doesn’t have one or add more
narrative to a life that is actually pretty rich in narrative
already or seems as though it may never have
a narrative at all. Did you know that even aliens

love stories? The woman who claims to have
interviewed the alien whose ship crashed in Roswell,
New Mexico, in 1947 said the creature’s favorite books
were Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Don Quixote,
and One Thousand and One Nights, all stories
of great spirit, great power. Great images: Tom Petty

says, “A good song should give you a lot of images.
You should be able to make your own little movie
in your head to a good song,” and the same is true
of stories. A man had a peacock, says playwright
Tom Stoppard, and the man was shaving one morning,
and in the mirror he sees the peacock atop the garden wall

and about to jump to the other side, so the man drops
his razor and races out just as the bird reaches
the motorway and starts to leg it to god knows where,
and he catches it after a hundred yards or so and puts
the peacock under his arm and starts home.
So the story ends happily, but in the meantime, a good

half-dozen cars have sped by, and their occupants
have seen a man clad only in pajama pants, his face
covered by shaving foam, carrying a peacock.
What did they think? That the man had lost a bet
on a rugby match, perhaps, and now he has to walk
from Whitby to Berwick-upon-Tweed with the foam

on his face and the bird under his arm. Or that he belongs
to a cult religion that worships shaving, partial nudity,
and peacocks, and he’s on his annual pilgrimage.
Or that he has been slipped a powerful drug by his wife’s
lover, who is sending the man out into the world
this way so that he will appear deranged and spend

the rest of his days in a care home while the two lovers
squander the man’s considerable fortune. All lives
end the same way. Between the start and the finish,
it’s the stories that count. May we all say what the poet
Edward Field did when his partner of long standing died,
and Field tells us that “we were together for 58 years.

It was so wonderful I don’t mind being by myself for a while
and reflecting on our life together. I am so grateful.”
Charlotte laughs as she tells me about her pregnant friends,
and I love thinking of all that life around the table, and then
I ask Charlotte if she plans to have children, and she wags
her finger at me as if to say, wouldn’t you like to know.

—from Rattle #64, Summer 2019

__________

David Kirby: “Researchers ask parents if they’re happy, but that’s the wrong question; it’s like asking a cow if it can fly. Evidently there’s something we prize above happiness, and that’s a good story, especially if it stars us.”

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October 9, 2017

“Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las Explains It All to You” by David KirbyPosted by

David Kirby

MARY WEISS OF THE SHANGRI-LAS EXPLAINS IT ALL TO YOU

A student I haven’t seen for months stops by to say hello,
and she’s wearing a sundress, and when she gets up to leave,
I see she has a tattoo on her shoulder, so I say, “Hold on
a sec, let me take a look,” and when I see
it says, “Poetry is not reflection; it is refraction,” I say, “I like that,”

and she says, “You should. You said that in the first class
I took from you.” It’s times like this that I impress myself.
Not for long, though: the more interesting thing to think
about is not my excellence but the process whereby
we turn our experiences into art that moves others, to do, for example,

what Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las did when she sang “Leader
of the Pack,” recalling “I had enough pain in me, at the time,
to pull off anything. And to get into it, and sound—believable.”
We believe you, Mary. Mainly because you’re so
restrained when you sing that song, as though you’re not really bothered

by the fact that the love of your life has just roared away
on his motorcycle only to be turned into a pile of hamburger
somewhere out on Highway 30. Restraint: that’s the thing,
isn’t it? Discipline. Self-command. The more
he wrote songs, the more Burt Bacharach’s music took odd turns,

became clipped and staccato, offbeat. “One-level records
always made me a little bit uncomfortable after a while,”
he says. “They stayed at one intensity. It kind of beats you up,
you know? It’s like a smile. If you have a great
smile, you use it quick, not all the time.” Burt Bacharach sounds

like a smart guy. You have to trust the listener to pick up
on the little thing, to change and color it
until it’s the biggest part of the song, even though it’s the smallest.
And the least true, maybe, in the factual sense.
I don’t remember telling my class about reflection and refraction,

but if I did, I was freeing the students from the absolute need
to reflect their world and telling them that
what they refracted was theirs to make, that you can disconnect
your image from reality. Mary Weiss says,
“The recording studio was the place where you could really release 

what you’re feeling without everybody looking at you.” And the poem
is the place where we poets do the same. Everybody
listened to Mary Weiss—that song was number one
on the pop charts in 1964—and we poets, too, want
to lose ourselves in our early poem drafts so we can write and rewrite

and revise until the poem is so good that everybody loves it,
whether or not they actually end up doing so. When I ask
my former student what other tattoos she has, she says
that’s the only one, and when I say, “Wow,
it means that much to you, huh?” she says no, it really hurt.

—from Rattle #56, Summer 2017

[download audio]

__________

David Kirby: “In the early ’60s, I was obsessed with girl groups: the Ronettes, the Marvelettes, the Shirelles. And guess what? I still am, and with none more than the Shangri-Las, who sang of teen tragedy in a way that made me ‘half in love with easeful death,’ as Keats said. Their songs are little operas in which people meet, fall in love, die, and are born into eternity through the power of art. This isn’t the first poem I’ve written about Mary Weiss and her soulful sisters, and it won’t be the last.” (website)

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