Talking about Movies with Jesus

Poems

David Kirby

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2011
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807140130
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Celebrated poet David Kirby says that when he was a boy he wanted to run away and join the circus but never found one he liked, so he invented his own. Many of the poems in his dazzling new collection, Talking about Movies with Jesus, suggest his personal carnival is still a work in progress.
Much like a traveling circus, Kirby's poems are defined equally by their transient nature and by their destination. The poem "The Phantom Empire" -- which features Gene Autry repeatedly having to escape from a fictional city 20, 000 feet underground in order to make it back home in time to voice his afternoon radio show -- suggests that Kirby has discovered the journey to what one is after is often more entertaining than getting it.
Yet, in frenetic musings on Bo Diddley, a certain First Lady ("Skinny-Dipping with Pat Nixon"), Kirk Douglas, and Gerald Stern, Kirby notes the importance of arrival. Earnest conversations with cultural icons from Little Richard to Jesus reveal to the poet, as a character in his own story, that art, whether a song or poem or scripture, is all we here on earth know of heaven and all we need to know.
Kirby's latest work is at once the caravan, the carnival, and the crowd merging together to form a wondrous collection.

Talking about Jesus with Little Richard

“I am the beautiful Little Richard,” says Little Richard

as he limps to his piano, “and you can see that I am telling

you the truth” before kicking off with “Good Golly, Miss

Molly” and going into “Blueberry Hill,” alternating between

his own hits and standards by Ray Charles, Hank Williams,

Bob Seger, and such lesser-knowns as fellow Specialty

Records artist Larry Williams (“Bony Moronie”) and, withal,

creating “a dream” that is “a memory of the future,” as Greil

Marcus says in The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy

and the American Voice, quoting Steve Erickson’s novel

The Sea Came In at Midnight, though Marcus suggests

replacing “a dream” with “an art.” Good idea, Greil!

That’s the way art works for me, or at least good art.

So what’s bad art? I know, a memory of the past,

i.e, a memory and nothing more, and you’ve already had

plenty of those, right, reader? Little Richard only makes it

to the end of a couple of songs uninterrupted by his own

fizzy glee, biographical bits breaking through (“I was out

there when there wasn’t nobody!”) as well as musical

preferences (“Kanye West is so beautiful! And I like 50 Cent,

but I’d rather have a dollah!”), ads for merchandise (“I’ll sign

posters after the show, but only the big ones!”) and faith

testimonials (“Don’t put a question mark where God

has put a period!”). Also, who else but Little Richard

can say, “I want a big fat white lady to get up on the stage

and dance” and get away with it? “A big fat juicy white lady—

a juicy one, now! And a big fat juicy black lady, and a big fat

Mexican lady, too”? Before the show, I’d been talking

to Nancy, a registered nurse who has been to perhaps

a dozen Little Richard shows in the last couple of years

and is wearing a shiny red dress that causes her to “slither,”

she says, as, indeed, she slides out of her seat and nearly

onto the floor and gathers herself gamely and plops down

again before starting perhaps her dozenth floorward slide

of the evening, though when the Architect of Rock ’n’ Roll

issues his summons for beef on the hoof, Nancy, whom

any gentleman would describe as zaftig, takes off like a shot,

and within seconds she’s joined on stage by another twenty

women, most disappointingly slim, though, through

the magic of rock, somehow they all turned plump and juicy

as they bopped and shook. Speaking of magic, the group

that opens the show is called Falling Bones, a self-described

“party band” that wisely plays covers of everyone from

the day except Little Richard: Chuck Berry, Elvis, the Stones,

Johnny Cash. None of the musicians are spring chickens,

but the front man repeatedly and, after a while, convincingly

points out that the drummer has just celebrated his eighty-third

birthday, so I borrow Nancy’s binoculars, and he doesn’t look

a day over seventy-nine to me. The Falling Bones also say

if it hadn’t been for Little Richard, there would be

no rock ’n’ roll. Not true! It just wouldn’t be as good.

There’s always somebody before anybody: John the Baptist

before Jesus, for example, and God the Father before both

of them. I must be about my Father’s beeswax, says Jesus,

and behold, “Jesus had a huge impact on Christianity,”

as the student wrote in his freshman paper. Speaking

of magic again, what is in the black bag that a band member

sets down beside Little Richard’s piano stool? Nancy has

noticed it during previous shows and guesses that it might

be emergency medical supplies, which is reasonable, being

as how Little Richard has limped out on crutches, though

it turns out that the trouble is with his hip (“the pain never

leaves!”), so that, in his flowing tresses and spangled blue suit,

he looks like a sea god who has been clipped by a passing

motorboat. Nor does he lack for acolytes, not to mention

proselytes, apostles, and epigones, for even were there no star

performer, the ten-piece Little Richard band puts on a show

that would have the dead dancing, fat and juicy or not,

and its sound is big on guitars and saxes, so that it is loud

but sweet, like World War III fought with candy howitzers.

“Long Tall Sally,” “Slippin’ and “Slidin’,” “Jenny, Jenny,”

“Keep a Knockin’,” “The Girl Can’t Help It”—they keep

coming, the hits, so that one might say, as Diderot said

of Leibniz, who is best known for his work in philosophy

but who also contributed to the fields of chemistry,

chronometry, geology, historiography, jurisprudence,

linguistics, optics, physics, poetry, and political theory,

that “when one . . . compares one’s own small talents

with those of a Little Richard, one is tempted

to throw away one’s books and go die peacefully in the depths

of some dark corner.” And setting aside for the moment

that Diderot said this not of Little Richard at all, who,

to my knowledge, has contributed nothing to any of these

fields, but of the aforementioned Leibniz, still, it is true

that each of us owes God a death, as someone else says,

and though we may be beautiful, even “old and beautiful,”

as Little Richard describes himself when he engages yet again

with what is clearly a favorite topic, still, as great Achilles

says, “Fat sheep and oxen you can steal; cooking pots

and golden-maned horses you can buy; but once it has left

the circle of his teeth, the life of a man can be neither replaced,

nor stolen, nor bought.” All of us will die, some even “fall

dead,” as Little Richard says one of the sax players’ mothers

did just last week: “She fell dead!” he cries. “Imagine that,

your own mama fallin’ dead!” We all want to die in style,

with flowers on the bed table and a scribe to take down

our last words. But then we fall dead: we’re making

a blueberry pie for the people that love us so much

and that we love so much, and they’re in the other room

reading newspapers and watching the game on TV,

when, bam! There’s a crash in the kitchen, and they come

running in, and there you are in a welter of pie filling

and Pyrex, your glasses knocked sixteen ways from Tuesday

and your cotton house dress over your knees. They’re grabbing

their cell phones now: “It’s Big Mama,” they’re shouting,

“she fell dead!” I figure the band members are my best shot

at solving the black bag mystery, so as I wait backstage

for Little Richard to sign my poster and they leave

the dressing room for the bus, I ask first the bass player:

“Hey, what’s in the black bag?” “Oh, my!” he replies

and pats me on the shoulder. The trumpet player says,

“Hundred dollar bills—I hope!” A sax player may come

closest to the truth when he says, “ Aw, that’s just his

personal stuff.” The security guy warns us not to take

photos or touch the entertainer, but I do want to talk to him,

at least, and I think of Jesus’s words to his disciples

in Matthew 10:16, “Behold, I send you forth as sheep

in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents,

and harmless as doves,” and so, to be wise yet appear

harmless, I say “Willie Ruth” over and over again to myself,

Willie Ruth Howard being Little Richard’s cousin

and someone I’d interviewed earlier this year, so that when

I finally get up to the front of the line, instead of saying,

“I’m your biggest fan” or “you was out there when there

wasn’t nobody!” or some similarly off-putting claptrap,

I blurt out, “Willie Ruth loves you!” And Little Richar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Talking about Jesus with Little Richard
• Paganini’s Kickshaw, the Violin Known as “The Cannon”
• Wrestling
• The Phantom Empire
• Be Not Inhospitable to Fat Babies
• Old Dog Man
• Explaining Gods and Millionaires
• Ode to Gratitude
• Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus
• The Have-a-Go Pensioner
• Big Man’s Got the Blues
• Bo Diddley in Japan
• Hey, Gerald
• Skinny-Dipping with Pat Nixon
• These Arms of Mine
• Bull Cow Moanin’ at Midnight
• Talking about Movies with Jesus
• Notes and Acknowledgments