============================
KENNETH IRBY – ARMY POEMS
Published April 2016
============================
6 previously unpublished poems, written during Irby’s time in the US army in 1962: first in Sandia Base, Albuquerque , New Mexico , then Johnston Island
Kenneth Irby published over twenty books of poetry during his lifetime, including The Intent On: Collected Poems in 2009. The poems presented here have been prepared from Irby’s personal archives by that book’s co-editor, Kyle Waugh, who also provides a preface.
Lyn Hejinian has written of Irby’s poetry that it “radiates love”.
Irby died in 2015.
“The ‘Army Poems’ express Irby’s outraged affection for his grossly mistreated, ‘absenced friends’, at least one of whom was dishonorably discharged for ‘committing homosexual acts’ (as the army then put it.) J.G., K.W., Schefelker – even the names are shredded. But Irby carries a company whither he goes: “The people torn apart”, he writes, not by, but “in the Army / are with me.” Against the military’s puritanical fear that seeks not to cleanse the body, but to erase it altogether, in Moloch’s “cloud of sexless hydrogen” (Ginsberg 131), Irby’s ‘Army Poems’ celebrate the edaphic tenderness of the body’s “juice and flesh”. The ecstasy in sharing it—“not a movement to leave the body, but a movement of the whole body to join that which surrounds it” (29)—is an act of chthonic resistance: “the blow job, the eat, the suck // are not dirty,” he insists, “not even to mention, / but imperishable”. Irby is a poet of the anarcho-pastoral. He walks on his own unplanted self.”
From the preface by Kyle Waugh.
17pp, card covers, side stapled.
OUT OF PRINT.