Lighthearted on April Fool's Day

April Fool’s Day 2009 brought many jokes to the Iowa City area, one event continued in the day’s jovial manner, was the poetry reading of Dobby Gibson at the Prairie Lights Bookstore. Currently residing in Minneapolis Minnesota, Dobby Gibson received his MFA in fiction from the University of Indiana and was reading selections from his second book of collective works entitled Skirmish. I was fifteen minutes early, and one of the first to arrive. By seven ‘o’ clock the room was filled up with professional young adults conversing about their travel plans to Greece, and amount of free-time they had available to read. There were students, such as myself, who were there to get down to business, with their notebooks in hand and minds ready to experience a solid scheduled hour of readings from a published poet.

The lights in the back began to go dim, as a young lady approached the podium in the front of the room and begins to introduce Gibson with a quote from the film Last Days of Disco. The poems of his first book, Polar, she claimed made him a man who could make “rivers vanish into rivers.” He was described as a tall man, who through the advantage of his stature had the ability to juxtapose a sense of alienation with the feeling of brotherhood. And with those words a tall and lanky man approached the spotlight and felt compelled to read a poem from Skirmish; “What it feels like to be this tall?” From the onset of the reading Gibson held a playful banner with the audience. Multiple times he was reminded of the playful nature of the day and one time even adapted a title of one of his poems to incorporate a suggestion from an audience member.

Gibson continued with “Self Storage” which seemed to centralize around the themes of memory and personal connection held in regard to the memories. Gibson said about one third of the poems in Skirmish, were fortune poems written about a Chinese fortune telling game he played well into to the night one evening that inspired him to write the fortune poems. He told five of them throughout the course of the reading. He soon went back to his first book for some selections. One of Gibson’s finer qualities that streamlined from one poem to the next was his use of alliteration. In both his published works he has a unique way of picking out words you couldn’t imagine flow together and make it work.

Gibson worked his way back to Skirmish, and his attempt to branch into prose poetry with two poems; “Civics Lesson,” and “Chin Music” He ventured more into the transcendental with critiques on ceremony, proclaiming gods gutless in “Civic Lesson.” “Chin Music,” told the story of an outrageous umpire married to a composer with writers block. The poet reminded the audience that is National Poetry Month and saved time for a couple questions, but limited the questions. The reading was over by seven twenty-eight.

By: Spencer Poulos