“Broken” by Debbie Kirk. 2008. 8 pages. Kendra Steiner Editions #108. 8141-B Pat Booker Road #399, San Antonio, Texas. 78233 or email django5722@yahoo.com
Debbie Kirk has apparently escaped the cultural terrorists so far, has not been influenced by the middle class, specifically bourgeois, academically-vetted ( and other social management institution vetted) version of life served up in River Styx, Notre Dame review, etc. Kirk immediately emphasizes the immediate and “primitive” over the erudite:
Yeah, I’m itchy,
I smell bad
And
I’ve been wearing the same socks
For a week
(From “I’m so hot it should be illegal”)
Kirk is in the tradition of intuitive poets, like Lyfshin and Patchen, in that she gives you cause to think she is not using any craft at all, which of course, is the ultimate craft. She uses free ranging, breathing verse, which underscores her antidotal style.
Kirk writes from the position of an outsider, of the oppressed and the defeated, of those who find themselves strangers in their own land. She invokes Jeffer’s myth of the wild, isolated, iconoclastic outcast in blunt, elemental. Honest phrases like “My panties are so dirty/from living out of a car” Kirk’s position affords her not only the perspective from which to offer no-nonsense, literal portrayals, but also from which to signal an intense unity and bond with those she represents:
I find beauty
In imperfections
And all the people I know
Who are broken
(Broken)
Kirk’s poems have a clarity that might seem disarming to readers used to picking apart post-modern complexities in the current MFA-Writer Driven academic glossies. The sincerity of her language and quest sears our own lack of nerve, leaves readers wondering where Kirk will go next.
