What I'm reading, and why.

At present, it's David Kirby's collection The Temple Gate Called Beautiful. I have told myself for years I've wanted to write a Kirby-esque poem, and I've managed to sort of write one. Kirby has this long-lined, discursive style which a lot of people probably find too chatty or, worse, unpoetic, but which I find a compelling high-wire act. Charles Wright's latter-day poems walk this same wire, too. I just know that my work tends sometimes toward the multi-syllabic and declarative, so I'm always interested in those poets who seem to manage it and/or give in to it.

Is Kirby's stuff just lineated prose? Mmmm, there's more of that in this collection than in his previous collections. The problem isn't so much with the lineation as with the occasional dullness. But when he manages to pull off this sort of lowbrow, chatty persona with the more refined, learned, artiste persona, as in "Elvis, Be My Psychopomp," it's delicious. This book occasionally tips too far toward the purely philosophical, though, and I'm not always a fan of him telling in his poems how much he's read. But that's kinda his subject, marrying the high and the low, kind of a Southern-genteel Baudelaire.