Transcript
What inspires you from WFSU Public Media? Here's this week's Voices That Inspire. My name is David Kirby. I'm a poet and a professor. You know, my first memories are of my hand holding a big pencil. Probably wasn't a big pencil because it was a regular sized pencil, but I was, I don't know, three or four years old at a tiny hand. It looked big to me, but I was scrolling at words on a tablet and I don't know that I would call them poems, but I was putting together fables or concoctions or things that I thought would get people's attention. All right, different things. I don't write fiction, but I do write a lot of non-fiction. I've written a couple of plays. I do tons of writing for newspapers, but poetry is the place where I veered toward because it became, I realized, the genre where I would have the most freedom. I could go to wherever I wanted to go in poetry, like zero to 60 without any frills or fancy stuff. I could just get there fast. There's a motto that I have. I wanted to get out there. It's make a bumper sticker out of this or a fortune cookie. It's art is the deliberate transformed by the accidental. You start with a plan, whether you're an architect or a poet or you're a mom looking at kids going to summer camp or a dad getting ready to go out and do woodworking in the garage. You know, you make coffee, you get the lights right, you turn on music if you like music during your thinking process and you get going and then the doorbell rings or you remember something from your childhood or an image or an idea just comes out of nowhere and it transforms everything. So getting people to handle both sides of that process, the deliberate part, the practical rational part and then the the lightning bolt part is, you know, that's my job. It's David Kirby. I'm a poet and a professor. You're listening to voices that inspire.