Poem of the Week | October 07, 2013
David Kirby: "The Beautiful Theremin Player"
This week we feature a new poem by David Kirby. Kirby is the author of numerous books, including The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems, a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. His biography, Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, was hailed by the Times Literary Supplement of London as a “hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” His latest book of poetry is Talking About Movies With Jesus. He is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University.
Author’s note:
For some time now, I’ve been taken with the idea of how effective restraint is in art. Think about the scene in Macbeth where Ross tells Macduff that his entire family has been slaughtered. Macduff is a general in the middle of a war and has no time to grieve, but of course he can’t quite take in this the terrible news, either. So he says to Ross, “All my pretty ones?” and then “Did you say all?” and gets ready to go back into battle. Watching him control himself is a lot more affecting than it would be if he sat on a rock and sobbed.
So you can imagine how excited I was when I read Michael Byers’ story “The Numbers Man” in a recent issue of Missouri Review. It’s a story which leads you to think, yes, something is going to happen between a teenaged boy and a sexy older woman, and then you realize how much more effective it is that nothing happens at all. Not long after, I heard the writer Lauren Watel read her story “Cul-de-Sac” (you can find it in the current issue of Five Points) in which a woman holding her infant daughter finds one of her teenaged son’s friends at her door instead of in school as he should be. They make awkward conversation, and the kid raises his hand as though to caress the mother. Everything in you thinks he’s going to make a pass, but instead, he says, “Can I hold her?” He wants to hold her child—it’s that simple, that sweet, and it hits a whole lot harder than anything the reader might have anticipated.
My poem isn’t about murder or sex—well, it’s a little sexy, maybe. But the idea is the same, which is that sometimes an artist can accomplish more by doing less, even nothing.
The Beautiful Theremin Player
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