The Winter Dance Party: Poems, 1983-2023
By David Kirby
(LSU, 2024, 280 pp., $34.95)
The problem with David Kirby’s new book, The Winter Dance Party: Poems 1983-2023, is that it’s built upon a fundamental misconception about the nature of his poetry. In his preface, “A Dream in the Presence of Reason,” Mr. Kirby writes:
Because I write the way I do, I’ve never thought for a minute about compiling a collected poems. I like every poem I’ve written, but that’s no reason for me to think you will.
Wrong, David. Wrong, wrong, wrong! I’ve been reading your poems for 20 years, and I do like them all, and I wanted very much for this book to be an absolutely ginormous “collected poems.” Yes, I know you often write long poems, or long-ish poems (Poe said there’s no such thing as a long poem), and, though it may come as a surprise to many laypersons, not every poetry reader is a professional power-lifter in their spare time. But I wanted this book to be the size of an unabridged Roget’s thesaurus, a book so big and heavy that it could be used as a weapon to inflict blunt-force trauma on my ennui permanently. I wanted to see one of those strong-men competitions on ESPN where huge goliaths race each other down a sandy beach while carrying VW Bugs strapped onto their shoulders, but, instead of Volkswagons, they’re carrying copies of David Kirby’s Collected Poems on their shoulders, and they’re struggling, they’re sweating and veins are popping out of their foreheads and their necks and their eyes are red and bulging out all crazy-like because Volkswagons are like feather pillows compared to David Kirby’s Collected Poems, and, sure, they have competitions where they throw huge hogsheads full of beer into the middle distance for fun like Donkey Kong trying to kill Mario in that old Nintendo game, but, boy oh boy, this David Kirby’s Collected Poems is heavy. I wanted this book to fall on me like an anvil on the head of poor Wile E. Coyote and turn me into a coyote-shaped accordion.
Over the years, I’ve bought and read all of David Kirby’s poetry books, and I still have most of them (though some have floated off during various moves), and I don’t think it’s too much for a devoted reader to ask for all of them together in one book the size of an OED in 20 volumes so that, the next time I move, the hulking movers will give each other a sidelong glance and suck air between their teeth and tighten their weight-belts another notch to avoid a hernia before attempting to put it into their 27-foot moving truck, the chassis of which will sink noticeably downward toward its tires with a little hiss once the dolly carrying David Kirby’s Collected Poems is muscled onboard.
Now, poetry can sometimes seem to be a cliquish affair, with lots of people pulling for one thing (the thing they do) and against another thing (a thing they don’t do), and this is generally, though not always, because poets want to promote themselves, which is, perhaps, understandable, but is also ethically dubious and something I’m not here to do. Moi, on the jacket of my first book (The Stranger World, available for purchase now from Measure Press!), I received a blurb that I’m quite proud of: it said, “Ryan Wilson is a poet of nightmares” (which may explain why I don’t get invited to a lot of parties and am, instead of boogying down at present, writing this book review on a Saturday night). I’m here to tell you, gentle reader, that David Kirby is most definitely not a poet of nightmares (though he can write poems that you don’t want to be reading alone in bed at 3 AM when there’s a strange thunk downstairs, e.g. “The Look on That Man’s Face”), and so I’m not just cheering for the home-team when I say that I love this book. I love this book. (However, “full disclosure,” as people say, I did, as editor of this magazine, publish Kirby’s “Bernardo Buontalenti,” which is included in the book I’m presently reviewing, which was published by LSU, which also published my most recent book—In Ghostlight, available for purchase now!— and I actually met David Kirby for the first time, of two times, at the baseball stadium in my hometown where I did, in fact, once cheer for the home-team with some frequency and somewhat less ethical dubiety than I’m presently confronting, though, “full disclosure,” the home-team was not nearly so good at baseball as David Kirby is at writing poems or at judging Little Richard look-alike contests, which latter he also did at the aforesaid baseball stadium while working on his book about Little Richard, who was also from my hometown and whom I cheered for without any ethical dilemma whatever.)
Still, at a measly 280 pages, Kirby’s new book is only about 500% bigger than my latest book of poems (In Ghostlight, available from LSU for purchase now!). I’m a painfully slow reader, and I still read the whole thing within 24 hours. How? I forsook all other obligations, responsibilities, chores, employments, enticements, enjoyments, temptations, and thesauruses to dive into this book like Scrooge McDuck diving into that enormous towerful of gold coins at the beginning of every episode of Duck Tales. Kirby can make you laugh in a companionable way reminiscent of Dave Barry, and he can make you cry in a companionable way reminiscent of E.B. White, and he can make you cry laughing and cry / laugh, which is different (cf. “Cinnamon Toast”), and he’s knowledgeable and informative without being snooty about it, and his poems are full of heart, and herein lies the problem. This scrawny book, which is but 5x larger than my own most recent book (In Ghostlight, available from LSU for purchase now!), only kept me completely consumed, engrossed, delighted, charmed, spellbound, flabbergasted, and gobsmacked for 24 hours, and I need more David Kirby poems, pronto. So, until Mr. Kirby figures this poetry business out and publishes the Brobdingnagian tome that we deserve, a book of his poems so large that a sophisticated system of pulleys and levers will have to be installed by a crack-squad of professional biblio-mechanics in order for the reader to turn its gargantuan pages full of poems in a font so small the reader has to use one of those antique magnifying glasses to read them, all I can do is start over and read this book again and again and again, this book which, by the way, with a conscience clear of all ethical quandaries, I award 0 stars as a piece of gym equipment, since it’s not even heavy enough for me to do my puny little nightmare-poet bicep curls with.