David Kirby: “I connect Keats’ early death with that of a student and friend, though as I worked on ‘This Living Hand,’ I began to wonder if I was telling too much and betraying an intimacy. So I asked my wife, the poet Barbara Hamby, who said, ‘You have to write that poem—people are already forgetting Tom, and you will keep him alive.’” (website)
David Kirby: “A lot of my poems are braids I make of found materials; my contribution is to figure out what the different parts have in common and then unite them tonally. In this case, there are three threads. My barber told me the cowboy story. The one about the English schoolboys was told to a class by a student who’d read it somewhere. But I no longer remember where I encountered the story set in the cemetery, the one that begins and ends the poem. Oh, and this braid is drenched in the bittersweet hues of the great Jack Gilbert; I fell hard for him just before I began writing this.” (web)