The Invention of the Kirby Poem.

The Death of Fred Snodgrass

 
   San Francisco, 
   April 6, 1974. 
   It says here 
   in the Chronicle: 
   "Fred Snodgrass, 
   who muffed 
   an easy fly ball 
   that helped 
   to cost 
   The New York Giants 
   the 1912 
   World Series, 
   died yesterday 
   at age 86." 
   Fuck you, 
   Fred Snodgrass. 
   Some things 
   we never forget. 

THIS LITTLE GEM IS FROM David Kirby's 1983 collection Sarah Bernhardt's Leg. Though 50 percent found poem, "The Death of Fred Snodgrass" is the distinctive "Kirby poem" in miniature: casual, seemingly occasional beginning; specific character(s) other than the author; specific dates and places (then and now); a free-verse line that pulls us along as we gather information; agile syntax, impeccable timing, and complex tone. The poem is characteristic, too, in its mixed dictions. A colloquial, conversational voice ("It says here," "Some things/ we never forget") reads a well-made newspaper sentence full of baseball language and responds with apt slang--in this case, an obscenity. Is the speaker reading aloud? The last four lines certainly sound like it, but the first two mimic the dateline of a short news item: "San Francisco,/ April 6, 1974." So it's a kind of report. But a report on what?

"The Death of Fred Snodgrass" implies a speaker with a well-developed sense of irony. It has about it a delicious whiff of malice, but the malice is not, as it first seems, aimed at Old Man Snodgrass. Nor is the target the anonymous rewrite guy at the Chronicle who (perhaps unconsciously) betrayed a malicious streak of his own, though that possibility transforms Snodgrass from culprit into victim. "Fuck you,/ Fred Snodgrass," and we laugh, but in sympathy. "Some things/ we never forget": we're all implicated, we've all "muffed an easy" something, and we ought to--but don't--forget. So the poem is a report on Homo sapiens, and it's the product of notable intelligence, even wisdom, though it masquerades as a Bronx cheer.

My Twentieth Century, published by Orchises Press in 1999, is Kirby's twentieth book. Besides his five collections of poetry, he has published works of literary criticism, an "interdisciplinary glossary of contemporary American thought," a study of boyishness in American culture, a poetry-writing text, and two children's books.

I've been enjoying Kirby's poems since 1984, when I bought a copy of Sarah Bernhardt's Leg. The title was hard to resist, though I already knew the story: "Dr. Denuce took it off in 1915,/ and P. T. Barnum offered Sarah Bernhardt/ ten thousand dollars for her severed leg." The poems in this collection are various and are arranged in various ways on the page, but Kirby, unlike many first- or second-book poets, shows no inclination to work out on the jungle gym: a sonnet or two, experiments with syllabics and accentuals, a villanelle and/or a sestina. His impulse has always been to entertain, and even poems of dark or painful content are spoken in an amiable, discursive free verse. The characteristic Kirby poem begins with a barber who says "Aw, crap," or perhaps a line from a song ("You Can't Always Get What You Want"), a book or movie title (Krafft-Ebing's Aberrations of Sexual Experience; Let's Get Lost), a moment of whimsy ("! Think I'm Going to Call My Wife Paraguay"), or a bit of history or biography the poet happened upon in his omnivorous reading. Then, through a series of unpredictable associations and modulations of tone, it delivers us to a place we couldn't have imagined but instantly recognize.

In selecting Saving the Young Men o[ Vienna for the 1987 Brittingham Prize in Poetry, Mona Van Duyn called Kirby a "generous poet," and continued: