James Kimbrell

Mt. Pisgah

​

It was the middle of the night and I had lived
A long time with that country, with the hay
Rakes and rock paths and the beam bridge
Above the snake-thick waters. It was
The middle of the night so far into the field
The deer began not to notice the moons
In the shallow bean row puddles. That's how dark
Fell over the road that led into town and kept us
All from moving. Still, when the train passed,
Milk shook in its bucket and the earth sank
In a little. So each year when the corn shrank
Back to stubble, the mud strewn with husks,
More than anything silence grew tall there
Between the kitchen window and the shed's
Roof and the one note rust made in the stuck
Weather vane, in the rooster holding north.

-from The Gatehouse Heaven, celebrated with permission of the poet

​

"You think about that one-inch for every hundred years. That really kind of puts things in perspective because you're sitting there looking at one of these cave straws that's about a yard long and you're going "Okay, there's three thousand years right in front of me." We can go back to the Renaissance and that covers about the first two inches. It telescopes time in a way that personally I find very liberating. Time doesn't seem like this big burden of armor that you carry trudging up the hill. It's not a Sisyphean feat just to consider it. You don't feel the weight of all that time. It feels more fleet somehow." -from A Talk With Poet James Kimbrell

​​​

James Kimbrell was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1967. He earned an MFA from the University of Virginia and a PhD from the University of Missouri, Columbia, where he was awarded two Academy of American Poets Prizes. In 1993 he received a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, followed by the “Discovery”/ The Nation Award in 1997. His debut collection, The Gatehouse Heaven, was selected by Charles Wright as the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and published by Sarabande Books in 1998. He is also the author of Smote (Sarabande Books, 2015), My Psychic (Sarabande Books, 2006) and Three Poets of Modern Korea: Yi Sang, Hahm Dong-Seon and Choi Young-Mi, which he co-translated with Yu Jung-Yul (Sarabande Books, 2002). The author Robert Olen Butler noted that Smote “is a book of the dark reality of our daily existence; it is a book of abiding grace.” He is also the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Whiting Writers’ Award. He currently teaches in the creative writing program at Florida State University and lives in Tallahassee, Florida.