When I was but a pup, still in high school or just barely out of it, I would frequent the South Campus environs of the University of California in Berkeley, where in the Café Med on Telegraph Avenue almost any given afternoon, I would see a bearded fellow sipping a cappuccino & almost invariably writing intently into a notebook. Somewhere along the line, somebody pointed out to me that this fellow was a poet. “Oh,” I thought, “so that’s how they do it.” Soon enough, I had my own notebook & table at the Med & was gradually getting accustomed to choking down the strange bitter taste of cappuccinos.*

 

It would be several years, literally, before I would muster the courage to introduce myself to that poet – he seemed so much older, at least 25, & his sense of concentration amid the chatter, sound of dishes & coffee house music – the Med in those days favored classical – was truly awesome. It seemed as though he were contained in a bubble of perfect focus. His name, it turned out, was Kenneth Irby, and he had some sort of grad student or post-grad job with the University, operating, if I recall correctly, a mimeograph machine.

 

It also took me awhile to understand fully what a wonderful writer Irby was. As was evident even with his early books from Black Sparrow, Irby was completely persuaded by the poetics of Projectivism, perhaps because he came to it with the most exquisitely tuned ear of any poet I have ever encountered. It was as perfect a marriage between a poet’s gift & his practice as one might imagine.

 

For all of his obvious & intense devotion to the process of poetry, Irby never did demonstrate much of the anxious attention to publication, fame or the “career of the poet” that, in fact, enables many a lesser writer acquire a far wider reputation. Plus, Irby was part of a difficult generation, too young to have appeared in the New American Poetry, too close in age to really separate out fully from those older guys into something identifiably new & marketable. While some of the poets from that “tweener” generation did go on to establish themselves in their own right – Ronald Johnson, Kathleen Fraser, Joanne Kyger, John Taggart, Clayton Eshleman – many, such as David Schaff, Seymour Faust, Jonathan Greene, Gail Dusenbury, Harold Dull or Robert Parker, dropped out of sight entirely while others transformed their aesthetics in some dramatic fashion, as did Daphne Marlatt & David Bromige. Some, like Irby and George Stanley, have continued to produce excellent work, but have done so at a considerable distance from any major scene: Irby has been in Lawrence, Kansas, for years; Stanley taught for a long time in the northern reaches of British Columbia.

 

So when I found a poem by Ken Irby in the new issue of No, adrenalin rushed through my system. The poem, “[Record]” – the brackets are part of the title – recounts, as I read it, a dream in which Irby confronts the dead, specifically his mother & Ed Dorn. While Irby has always liked dreaming as a source for his poetry, “[Record]” is in some ways an unusual work for him, using a good deal of the parallel construction one associates more with the Beats:

 

And when you die, or when you think you’re dead, or when you dream you’ve died

your feet are turned backwards and your legs and loins but not your waist

and your arms embrace your head and backwards too and one of them waves goodbye to the air in the air

and the dancer on your belly whirls and reaches to regenerate the sun

and rides your body like a boat curved on into the sun

holding all you’ve ever done up like a ticket from amongst the snakes

and blossoms sway to tickle your navel, the entrance and the exit, the swivel and the plug, the cast and the release, and the call

 

That’s just a taste, just one of the poem’s eight sections, but typing it up here, reading it aloud as I do, makes me want to holler with excitement. The rhythms capture perfectly an otherworldly sense of ecstasy, death not as loss but as passage. Whether or not this should be what eventually greets us – or greets us only in dream – is to a large degree not relevant, because Irby’s use of rhythm makes it credible, one hears it in the body as well as in the mind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Some of the terminal hipness of all this drained away when a high school teacher of mine, Ken Davids, published a novel with Grove Press about life at the Med, The Softness on the Other Side of the Hole. Having come full circle, Davids now writes about coffee. I, on the other hand, haven’t had a cup in 13 years.