This Moment in Time: David Kirby & Barbara Hamby in Conversation

Barbara Hamby has published seven books of poetry, most recently Bird Odyssey and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems. She also has written a book of linked stories, Lester Higata’s 20th Century, and with her husband, David Kirby, edited the poetry anthology Seriously Funny: Poems about Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything Else. “Holoholo” is the Hawaiian word for walking out with no destination in mind. Appropriately, in Hololo: Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press), Hamby walks out into the current American chaos with its inferno of wars, street violence, apocalyptic fantasies, and racial tension. In a book organized in three sections, using an American lingo that embraces slang, Yiddish, street talk, and the yearning to be able to describe her moment in time, Hamby offers poems that encompass our complicated past, difficult present, and unknown future. Writing about her work, the Women’s Review of Books noted that Hamby “has cultivated a polyglot idiom all her own, of anecdotes, erudition, and American pop culture. She combines a deadly serious love for the power of language with irreverence ...”

Poet, critic, and scholar David Kirby is the author of 35 books, including The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems, a National Book Award finalist. His poetry has been featured in numerous anthologies, including several volumes of The Best American Poetry, and his work displays his voracious curiosity about history, science, literature, and popular culture. Fittingly, in Help Me, Information: Poems (LSU Press), his writing moves the way the mind does on a good day, puddle-jumping from one topic to another and then coming in for a soft landing. In The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them (Flip Learning), Kirby presents a lively guide to writing poetry for college students. The book is divided into four sections: “How to Write a Poem,” “How to Write a Really Good Poem,” “Immortality is Within Your Grasp,” and “You Graphomaniac, You.” They are staggered to build student confidence and skill and include works from more than 70 poets – including Franny Choi, Natalie Diaz, Emily Dickinson, Joy Harjo, Terrance Hayes, and Marilyn Nelson – to illuminate key points and stimulate reflection and writing. The Knowledge, writes Kirby, helps students craft poems the way Jimi Hendrix talked about making music: “Learn everything, forget it, and play.”