Dobby Gibson

At Prairie Lights. It is April First. I am waiting to hear Dobby Gibson read.

Originally, I was planning to write my review on Big Poppa E; however, my cousin called this morning and asked if I was aware Dobby Gibson was in town. He’s an acquaintance of hers, she says, from the year she spent in Minneapolis; she says his poetry is “quietly unbelievable.” I promise I’ll go.

At the bookstore, I am inundated with bearded gentlemen and cardiganed women that I know. I smile and whisper “hello.” I note for not the first time the slightly absurd backdrop in front of which poets perform.—we are in the self-help section, abundant with capital letters and alternate question mark/exclamation point sequences: You Mean I’m NOT Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?! and Don’t Call ME a DRAMA QUEEN!, etc. A woman takes the microphone. She introduces the poet with a quote from the movie The Last Days of Disco: “Tall people tend to have great personalities…” And indeed, Dobby Gibson is tall—his lankiness is the first thing I notice when he strolls to the podium. I’m not great at estimating heights, but I would guess, if forced, that he is at least 6”3. And I’m not great at guessing ages, but I would guess, if forced, that he’s in his late thirties or early forties. He wears hip-ish square black glasses and a starched white shirt; his manner is scholarly and coolly aloof. He speaks for a few moments about his new book, Skirmish.

Gibson opens with a poem entitled “What It Feels Like To Be This Tall.” The piece establishes him right away as an outsider, not only in the poetry field (the poem contains a snide comment about academia) but in and throughout his own life. I am drawn immediately to his poetic voice—plain, simple, very close to everyday ordinary speech. He seems to have been influenced by Frank O’Hara or perhaps William Carlos Williams (and indeed cites O'Hara as a major influence during the brief question-and-answer session at the end. ) His manner of speech, and his word choice in his poems, is soothing and familiar.

He follows this with a series of poems, each simply entitled “Fortune,” inspired by a severely mistranslated manual. The “Fortunes” are short pieces of deft beauty. I notice that the last line of each is something seemingly ordinary that, by virtue of being the last line, becomes extraordinary: “You will get your wish, but / it will arrive too late.” “You wear expensive shoes, / which you sometimes use to kill spiders.”

In the middle of his between-poems chitchat, a mentally challenged women interrupts his banter. She mumbles something indistinguishable and then says, “April Fools!” Gibson seems first surprised, then flatly unamused; he moves quickly to his next piece. I think about this for a second—in his poetry, Gibson seems somehow cool and open-minded; however, in reality, he was pretty clearly flabbergasted by this slight obstacle. In other words, he reacts radically differently than I would expect him to react if I had never seen him, but only read his poetry. This is an unusual benefit of live poetry readings, I think—you can observe the poet in action, and glean new information from his appearance and his behavior, information that you would never have access to otherwise and which can be enlightening when reading or hearing his poems. By watching Dobby Gibson in action, I feel like I have new insight to his character and thus to his poetic voice—an awkwardness, a certain defensiveness. I may be wrong about these qualities, but I feel as though I know the poet and his poems better, simply by seeing him in real life.

Gibson reads some prose poems, and then one last “Fortune”—a breathtaking piece about the sacredness of everyday life. I think about what my cousin said—Gibson is somewhat “quietly unbelievable.” He’s not an ostentatious poet, he doesn’t seem to be competing for attention; rather, he speaks to his audience of mundane wonders, the true wondrousness that can be found beneath the banality of our lives. I’m glad I went.

Madeleine Wurm