Transcript: Poems on Air, Episode 20 - David Kirby

[Music intro]

LYNNE THOMPSON: Hello! My name is Lynne Thompson, Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles and I’m so happy to welcome listeners to this installment of Poems on Air, a podcast supported by the Los Angeles Public Library. Every week, I’ll present the work of poets I admire, poets who you should know, and poets who have made a substantial and inimitable contribution to the art and craft of poetry.

LYNNE THOMPSON: Continuing the podcast’s focus on poems available via the internet, I’m delighted to highlight the website Verse Daily which not only publishes a new poem daily—selected from both full length collections of poetry and literary journals—but also publishes a weekly web feature that links directly to journals from which the poems are selected thus giving the reader what I’m calling “double exposure”.

On April 28th of this year, Verse Daily spotlighted the work of David Kirby, a Guggenheim Fellow and the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State Univer-sity. I had the pleasure of meeting him at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival just before we were all shut down by the pandemic and I am so glad I did. David is a kind and generous soul and a prodigious poet. His most recent collection is Talking about Movies with Jesus.

LYNNE THOMPSON: Today’s poem is "Van Gogh" by David Kirby

Van Gogh

I say “How was your summer”? and you say,
“We had our ups and downs,” and I say,
“Well, I hope it was more ups than downs,”
and you pause for a moment, and then you say,
“Liam died,” and before I can bite my tongue off,
you tell me about the bike, the stop sign,
the distracted driver, the call to you,
the call from you to your wife, your parents, hers,
the service, the stunned look on the faces
of Liam’s friends, the look the grownups
gave you, the sense you got that they, too,
were devastated yet felt lucky and guilty
about their luck. I let you talk,
though as I did, I imagined you getting the call
and looking around and realizing
you were seeing for the last time the world
as you had known it. And then
you called the others. Van Gogh said
he saw things as if in a dream, as themselves
yet at the same time stranger than reality.
On the last day of his life, he shouldered
his bag of brushes and paints
and canvases and made his way
to the wheatfield where the crows cooed
and cawed and rattled and clicked,
unable to believe their luck.

LYNNE THOMPSON: The Los Angeles Poet Laureate was created as a joint program between the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs and the Los Angeles Public Library and this podcast will be available on the Library’s website. In the future, episodes will be available on iTunes, Google, and Spotify. Thanks for listening!

[Music outro]

  • Back to Poems on Air: Episode 20

    • DISCLAIMER: This is NOT a certified or verbatim transcript, but rather represents only the context of the class or meeting, subject to the inherent limitations of real-time captioning. The primary focus of real-time captioning is general communication access and as such this document is not suitable, acceptable, nor is it intended for use in any type of legal proceeding. Transcript provided by the author.

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