Transcripts

MARIANNE COMBS: Dobby Gibson says he became entranced with poetry as a distraction from a book he was writing.

DOBBY GIBSON: It felt like I was breaking the rules. I was doing something that I shouldn't be doing. I was supposed to be working on this novel, which I did work on and finish. But poetry kind of works underground. And it gives me-- it still gives me-- that feeling that I'm doing something a little bit secret, which I like.

MARIANNE COMBS: Gibson has since abandoned fiction and devoted himself to poetry. Skirmish is his second book of poems. And it contains, amongst other things, a collection of short poems all titled "Fortune."

DOBBY GIBSON: "Fortune." We think we are little gods. Yet the one thing we fear most is to be left alone. So we carve one another's names into the desktops, drop rocks from the trestle. We invent and overuse the long vowel. To be loved, speak with your hands. To learn how, open a magazine and try to catch the little cards as they flutter to the floor. Some numbers come with secret powers. Some secret powers come with little power at all."

MARIANNE COMBS: Gibson says he was inspired by a set of Chinese fortune sticks. The accompanying explanatory book contained fortunes that were so badly translated, their meaning was a complete mystery. But Gibson says they still held an attraction.

DOBBY GIBSON: I think there's something about the language of fortune telling. If I say to you, I'm going to tell your fortune, I could almost say anything. And that language is going to be really charged. And you're going to make associations that you might ordinarily not. So that was really exciting to me as a poet.

MARIANNE COMBS: Gibson's poems are often open-ended, leaving the reader to puzzle over the meaning. Gibson himself readily admits he finds his own poems mysterious. He says writing a poem for him can be both a monumental task and an absolute joy.

DOBBY GIBSON: Words aren't actual things. They just represent things. And in the space between the sign and the signified, there's a lot of room for mystery and misunderstanding. And that's both the beauty and the power of poetry. And it's great frustration, I think.

MARIANNE COMBS: Many of Gibson's poems deal with the struggle of writing and finding the right words. Stephen Burt teaches poetry at Harvard University and just finished a book on reading poetry called Close Calls with Nonsense. He became familiar with Dobby Gibson's work several years back when he taught at Macalester. Burt says he's enjoyed reading Gibson's new work.

STEPHEN BURT: Dobby's poetry does several things that are hard to do together, each of which would be fun and sparkling and vivid done separately. But together, they really give his poetry a rare set of qualities.

MARIANNE COMBS: Burt says you never know where Gibson's next line will lead. And he writes with a strong sense of both modern dialect and the intricacies of the English language. He likens Gibson's work to that of poet Wallace Stevens and admires lines of Gibson's such as, "they call it 'falling asleep' because discovering you have nothing to hold on to is how it always begins."

STEPHEN BURT: This is a poet who is quirky and funny and idiosyncratic and unpredictable from line to line, and yet who takes in, who does justice to experiences that we think of as normal or unremarkable, that are very widely shared, and experiences that are, as his poetry shows, quite remarkable and quite strange.

MARIANNE COMBS: Burt says, Gibson exposes the hopes and fears contained within mundane actions, whether it's setting down a bar of soap on the sink or making pancakes. Burt quotes TS Eliot, who said, "Poems are raids on the inarticulate." Burt says Dobby Gibson's book of poetry, Skirmish, does just that. Dobby Gibson celebrates the release of Skirmish, published by Graywolf Press, and reads some of his poetry this Friday night at Open Book in Minneapolis. Marianne Combs, Minnesota Public Radio News, Saint Paul.