David Kirby
David Kirby's collection The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2007. Kirby is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement of London called “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” Kirby’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. His latest poetry collection is Get Up, Please.
"King of Good Fellows"
Emerson says a reader can nestle into Plato’s brain
but not Shakespeare’s, yet what is Shakespeare
doing if not throwing everything against the wall and seeing
what sticks? He just piles one image on top of the other
like a father showering presents on his children,
the gifts arriving so quickly that all experiences are devoured,
all categories broken down, all distinctions annihilated,
and we see the world as it really is, a mishmash, a glorious shiny
mess where I am king and you are queen, though neither of us
wears a crown. Otherwise, why bother? Why write at all
if you’re not giving away the store, tossing out your shiniest
presents, bestowing your best boons, favors, benefactions?
As good Sir Thomas Browne says, what songs the Sirens sang
are not beyond all conjecture. Why, we might even come up
with better songs than the ones they actually sang. To limit
oneself is to tempt the fate of Sancho Panza’s kinsmen, the one
tasting a hogshead of wine and saying he found
in it a taste of leather, and the other doing the same, only finding
instead a hint of iron, and so both were ridiculed and made
to feel a failure, though when the hogshead was drained,
what was found at the bottom? That’s right: a rusty key
with a leather thong. Don’t limit yourself, poets! Do you
think Shakespeare said “I better limit myself” just
before he writes Act 2, Scene 1 of Midsummer Night’s Dream,
where Oberon tells Puck how he sat on a cliff and saw
a mermaid riding on a dolphin’s back and singing such
a song as made the very world bend a knee to its beauty
and then saw as well Cupid flying between the earth
and the moon and firing an arrow at a Vestal
virgin and missing her, though the arrow lands on a white flower
and turns it “purple with love’s wound,” and this is
the very flower that Puck will now fetch to bewitch fairy
and high-born Athenian alike and spark such japes, jibes,
shenanigans, tomfoolery, and star-crossed love as have
ne’er been seen this side of the Peloponnesian Peninsula,
and there you have it: Shakespeare could have had Oberon
say, “Fetch me that flower,” as indeed he eventually does,
but he also gives us a mermaid, a dolphin, a song so sweet
as to calm the sea and shake the very stars, not to mention
Cupid, a virgin, a flower made magic by the god’s arrow,
and all told by a sorcerer to his apprentice
because Shakespeare is so generous, so kind to us, his audience,
so possessed of a mind that makes no distinction
between anything and anything else, be that thing
literary, philosophical, musical, military, historical,
gastronomic, genealogical, geographic, or jurisprudential,
and by offering us such rings, toys, conceits,
knacks, trifles, nosegays, KitKat bars, and other messengers of strong
prevailment as these does he invite you and me
to play a game, really, an elaborate game that’s totally
realistic and, at the same time, make-believe, like a dream,
one that the eye of man has not heard, the ear of man
has not seen, that man’s hand is not able to taste,
his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what it is, in other words,
a dream no one has dreamed yet, but you’re in it, and you’re
the star, and though you tore across the stage in the very torrent,
tempest, and whirlwind of your passion, you spoke your speech
so trippingly that it acquired and begat a temperance that gave it
smoothness, and you weren’t too tame, no, you let your own
discretion be your tutor and suited the action to the word,
the word to the action. And the other players: aren’t
they good? Plus they’re just fun to be with even when
you’re not on stage. But you are now, and our play
is done, and you’re all laughing and bowing as applause
crashes down on your heads—let lightning spit fire,
let rain spray! And you smile and nod
as you look this way and that, and when you turn
to the player on your left, it’s Shakespeare himself,
and he has a role, too, a minor one, as usual, and you say,
“Shakespeare!” and he says, “Your honor,” and you say,
“Thank you for writing this,” and maybe it’s the applause
or your own giddiness or the girl who plays Hermia that
you’ve been wanting to ask out on a date, and not
the let’s-all-go-to-a-movie-and-hang-out kind of date
but a real date with just two people, and she’s looking
at you now as though she has never seen one so fair,
but anyway, and this is the best part, you can’t
help believing Shakespeare when he says, “I didn’t write it, you did.”
"Ketchup"
Rome’s Santa Maria del Popolo is built on a site
where once a walnut tree infested by devils in the guise
of crows rose from Nero’s ashes, so Pope Pasquale II
decided to put a church there instead. What if they
were just crows, though? Don’t overthink it,
Your Holiness. Then again, crows are horrible creatures
with harsh caws and disgusting dietary habits. And Nero!
The less said about him, the better. Still, if we tell ourselves
that everything is a guise for something else,
then there’ll be no happiness in the world.
This morning in The New York Times, food columnist
Mark Bittman had a recipe for Stir-Fried Chicken
with Ketchup, and he says, “Now before you turn up
your nose at ketchup, think how good it tastes.”
I don’t have to tell you how good ketchup is.
You’re not a snob. You like everything! As for
the rest of us, we’re still trying to figure out
when a crow’s a crow or a devil. What does it mean
when you’re listening to Buddy Holly singing
“That’ll Be the Day” in your car and you drive by
Krispy Kreme and see the hot-now sign, so you go in
for a cup of coffee and a sinker, and Buddy Holly
is singing “That’ll Be the Day” on the store speakers?
Nothing, probably. Or if anything, that Buddy Holly
was, if not the Mozart of his day, the Vivaldi, say,
full of tricks that the other composers didn’t know
and therefore as entitled to be thought of as the Vivaldi
of rockabilly as Vivaldi might be considered
the Buddy Holly of baroque music, especially
sacred choral works. In every blues song, if your momma
tells you something, it's always "just before she died."
Why not earlier? Answer: it wasn't important.
But she's dying, so now it is. You’ll find out everything
you need to know when you need to know it, not before.
Also in blues songs, the words "Mississippi River"
are always followed by "is deep and wide,"
and if you need something, it’s on the other side.
"Notes in Baskets in the Great Cathedrals of Europe"
The best thing about the great cathedrals of Europe
are those little baskets full of notes people write
to a saint or other famous dead person,
wishing that departed celebrity a happy birthday or beseeching
him or her to make this or that wish come true.
Why, I’ve seen old ladies in Padova push tourists
out of the way to drop off a letter to Saint Anthony
asking him to show their lost dog
the way home or ease their husband’s passage to the hereafter,
and in Paris, I fished a note out of a basket
that asked Saint Genevieve to help with the rent.
Near the tomb of Dante's Beatrice in Florence
there is a basket with hundreds of notes,
mainly from young women asking for help. I picked up one
and guessed it was written in Croatian, and Barbara
said, "Well, you know, they have heartbreak there, too."
A lot of the writing is smeared as though with tears,
but then not all tears are sad, and not all notes
in baskets in churches are sad, either: Botticelli is buried
in the church of the Ognissanti in that same city,
and on the altar rail before his family tomb is note
after note of thanks for “La Primavera” and his other
wonderful works. Why do we cry? The baby cries
when her mommy goes into the kitchen, even though
Daddy’s right there. The two rottweilers looking
through the car’s sun roof dance this way and that
as their owner disappears into the dry cleaners,
certain that she’ll never return, that she’ll stay there,
get a job there, retire there, die. And I—what
am I sad about? Nothing, also everything. What’s
the difference? Emerson says, "Cultivate the habit
of being grateful for every good thing that comes
to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because
all things have contributed to your advancement,
you should include all things in your gratitude”--
easy for him to say, but if we never cried about
anything, life would be even more stupid
and boring that it is already. In Verdi’s Don Carlos,
King Philip is the villain of the piece until he weeps,
and suddenly the audience likes him. “She never
loved me,” he says of his bride, who has given
her heart to his son, not him. Philip oppresses
the hell out of everybody, especially the Dutch,
but each of us has pined for someone who pines
for someone else, not us. They’re always crying
in operas. No crying, no opera. The point is to feel
something or at least not feel nothing and then do
what you can to make others feel the same.
The point is to tear a piece out of your sketchbook
or find a credit card receipt in your pocket or go to
the bar next door and get a napkin and write something
and put it in a basket for Jesus to see or his mother
or me or no one at all, to write “My wife looked
like your Venus forty years ago, and she’s even
more beautiful now” or “Make Roberto love me.”
Emerson says a reader can nestle into Plato’s brain
but not Shakespeare’s, yet what is Shakespeare
doing if not throwing everything against the wall and seeing
what sticks? He just piles one image on top of the other
like a father showering presents on his children,
the gifts arriving so quickly that all experiences are devoured,
all categories broken down, all distinctions annihilated,
and we see the world as it really is, a mishmash, a glorious shiny
mess where I am king and you are queen, though neither of us
wears a crown. Otherwise, why bother? Why write at all
if you’re not giving away the store, tossing out your shiniest
presents, bestowing your best boons, favors, benefactions?
As good Sir Thomas Browne says, what songs the Sirens sang
are not beyond all conjecture. Why, we might even come up
with better songs than the ones they actually sang. To limit
oneself is to tempt the fate of Sancho Panza’s kinsmen, the one
tasting a hogshead of wine and saying he found
in it a taste of leather, and the other doing the same, only finding
instead a hint of iron, and so both were ridiculed and made
to feel a failure, though when the hogshead was drained,
what was found at the bottom? That’s right: a rusty key
with a leather thong. Don’t limit yourself, poets! Do you
think Shakespeare said “I better limit myself” just
before he writes Act 2, Scene 1 of Midsummer Night’s Dream,
where Oberon tells Puck how he sat on a cliff and saw
a mermaid riding on a dolphin’s back and singing such
a song as made the very world bend a knee to its beauty
and then saw as well Cupid flying between the earth
and the moon and firing an arrow at a Vestal
virgin and missing her, though the arrow lands on a white flower
and turns it “purple with love’s wound,” and this is
the very flower that Puck will now fetch to bewitch fairy
and high-born Athenian alike and spark such japes, jibes,
shenanigans, tomfoolery, and star-crossed love as have
ne’er been seen this side of the Peloponnesian Peninsula,
and there you have it: Shakespeare could have had Oberon
say, “Fetch me that flower,” as indeed he eventually does,
but he also gives us a mermaid, a dolphin, a song so sweet
as to calm the sea and shake the very stars, not to mention
Cupid, a virgin, a flower made magic by the god’s arrow,
and all told by a sorcerer to his apprentice
because Shakespeare is so generous, so kind to us, his audience,
so possessed of a mind that makes no distinction
between anything and anything else, be that thing
literary, philosophical, musical, military, historical,
gastronomic, genealogical, geographic, or jurisprudential,
and by offering us such rings, toys, conceits,
knacks, trifles, nosegays, KitKat bars, and other messengers of strong
prevailment as these does he invite you and me
to play a game, really, an elaborate game that’s totally
realistic and, at the same time, make-believe, like a dream,
one that the eye of man has not heard, the ear of man
has not seen, that man’s hand is not able to taste,
his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what it is, in other words,
a dream no one has dreamed yet, but you’re in it, and you’re
the star, and though you tore across the stage in the very torrent,
tempest, and whirlwind of your passion, you spoke your speech
so trippingly that it acquired and begat a temperance that gave it
smoothness, and you weren’t too tame, no, you let your own
discretion be your tutor and suited the action to the word,
the word to the action. And the other players: aren’t
they good? Plus they’re just fun to be with even when
you’re not on stage. But you are now, and our play
is done, and you’re all laughing and bowing as applause
crashes down on your heads—let lightning spit fire,
let rain spray! And you smile and nod
as you look this way and that, and when you turn
to the player on your left, it’s Shakespeare himself,
and he has a role, too, a minor one, as usual, and you say,
“Shakespeare!” and he says, “Your honor,” and you say,
“Thank you for writing this,” and maybe it’s the applause
or your own giddiness or the girl who plays Hermia that
you’ve been wanting to ask out on a date, and not
the let’s-all-go-to-a-movie-and-hang-out kind of date
but a real date with just two people, and she’s looking
at you now as though she has never seen one so fair,
but anyway, and this is the best part, you can’t
help believing Shakespeare when he says, “I didn’t write it, you did.”
"Ketchup"
Rome’s Santa Maria del Popolo is built on a site
where once a walnut tree infested by devils in the guise
of crows rose from Nero’s ashes, so Pope Pasquale II
decided to put a church there instead. What if they
were just crows, though? Don’t overthink it,
Your Holiness. Then again, crows are horrible creatures
with harsh caws and disgusting dietary habits. And Nero!
The less said about him, the better. Still, if we tell ourselves
that everything is a guise for something else,
then there’ll be no happiness in the world.
This morning in The New York Times, food columnist
Mark Bittman had a recipe for Stir-Fried Chicken
with Ketchup, and he says, “Now before you turn up
your nose at ketchup, think how good it tastes.”
I don’t have to tell you how good ketchup is.
You’re not a snob. You like everything! As for
the rest of us, we’re still trying to figure out
when a crow’s a crow or a devil. What does it mean
when you’re listening to Buddy Holly singing
“That’ll Be the Day” in your car and you drive by
Krispy Kreme and see the hot-now sign, so you go in
for a cup of coffee and a sinker, and Buddy Holly
is singing “That’ll Be the Day” on the store speakers?
Nothing, probably. Or if anything, that Buddy Holly
was, if not the Mozart of his day, the Vivaldi, say,
full of tricks that the other composers didn’t know
and therefore as entitled to be thought of as the Vivaldi
of rockabilly as Vivaldi might be considered
the Buddy Holly of baroque music, especially
sacred choral works. In every blues song, if your momma
tells you something, it's always "just before she died."
Why not earlier? Answer: it wasn't important.
But she's dying, so now it is. You’ll find out everything
you need to know when you need to know it, not before.
Also in blues songs, the words "Mississippi River"
are always followed by "is deep and wide,"
and if you need something, it’s on the other side.
"Notes in Baskets in the Great Cathedrals of Europe"
The best thing about the great cathedrals of Europe
are those little baskets full of notes people write
to a saint or other famous dead person,
wishing that departed celebrity a happy birthday or beseeching
him or her to make this or that wish come true.
Why, I’ve seen old ladies in Padova push tourists
out of the way to drop off a letter to Saint Anthony
asking him to show their lost dog
the way home or ease their husband’s passage to the hereafter,
and in Paris, I fished a note out of a basket
that asked Saint Genevieve to help with the rent.
Near the tomb of Dante's Beatrice in Florence
there is a basket with hundreds of notes,
mainly from young women asking for help. I picked up one
and guessed it was written in Croatian, and Barbara
said, "Well, you know, they have heartbreak there, too."
A lot of the writing is smeared as though with tears,
but then not all tears are sad, and not all notes
in baskets in churches are sad, either: Botticelli is buried
in the church of the Ognissanti in that same city,
and on the altar rail before his family tomb is note
after note of thanks for “La Primavera” and his other
wonderful works. Why do we cry? The baby cries
when her mommy goes into the kitchen, even though
Daddy’s right there. The two rottweilers looking
through the car’s sun roof dance this way and that
as their owner disappears into the dry cleaners,
certain that she’ll never return, that she’ll stay there,
get a job there, retire there, die. And I—what
am I sad about? Nothing, also everything. What’s
the difference? Emerson says, "Cultivate the habit
of being grateful for every good thing that comes
to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because
all things have contributed to your advancement,
you should include all things in your gratitude”--
easy for him to say, but if we never cried about
anything, life would be even more stupid
and boring that it is already. In Verdi’s Don Carlos,
King Philip is the villain of the piece until he weeps,
and suddenly the audience likes him. “She never
loved me,” he says of his bride, who has given
her heart to his son, not him. Philip oppresses
the hell out of everybody, especially the Dutch,
but each of us has pined for someone who pines
for someone else, not us. They’re always crying
in operas. No crying, no opera. The point is to feel
something or at least not feel nothing and then do
what you can to make others feel the same.
The point is to tear a piece out of your sketchbook
or find a credit card receipt in your pocket or go to
the bar next door and get a napkin and write something
and put it in a basket for Jesus to see or his mother
or me or no one at all, to write “My wife looked
like your Venus forty years ago, and she’s even
more beautiful now” or “Make Roberto love me.”