Poet James Kimbrell visited GCSU for a Q&A on his craft of poetry and a reading of his most recently published collection of poems titled “The Law of Truly Large Numbers” on Monday, March 10 from 5:00-7:30 p.m. in the Pat Peterson Museum education room.
Kimbrell is a renowned poet and has been a professor at Florida State University for 20 years. His work has been published in anthologies such as the “Pushcart Prize Anthology” and “Best American Poetry” and has received numerous awards, some of which include a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowship, a Ruth Lilly Prize and a Whiting Writers’ Award.
Kimbrell is the author of “The Law of Truly Large Numbers,” “Smote,” “My Psychic” and “The Gatehouse Heaven.” He is also a co-translator of the collection “Three Poets of Modern Korea: Yi Sang, Hahm Dong-Seon, and Choi Young-Mi.”
Travis Mossotti, the author of “Apocryphal Genesis,” called Kimbrell an American Master in his review of Kimbrell’s most recently published collection.
“His poems are perfectly balanced, giving us just enough moments of laughter to keep us from crying,” Mossotti said.
Dr. Kerry James Evans, assistant professor of the Department of English, moderated Kimbrell’s Q&A, kickstarting the conversation on Kimbrell’s craft.
Kimbrell first began with an explanation of the title of his most recently published collection of poems, “The Law of Truly Large Numbers.”
The Law of Truly Large Numbers is a quantum theory that states that with a large enough sample size, anything is possible. Kimbrell believes that, by this law, the growth of the human population makes it so that everything possible when he was born is now more possible than it was before.
If that is true, then there is a chance in Kimbrell’s mind that through poetry, he will be able to reconnect with the people in his life who have passed away.
“I realized I’m not feeling very ready to accept the death of several people and I’m trying to figure out how to hang out with them again,” Kimbrell said. “If I can escape this time boundary, then maybe that can happen.”
In the Q&A session, Kimbrell said that one of the things in poetry that has taken him the longest to curate is his voice. He admitted that his second book felt more to him like an anthology of different poets than a succinct collection, but that he has grown to write poetry that has more of a singular voice.
“There’s some pressure as you get older as a poet to have something very distinctive about your sound,” Kimbrell said. “Your best bet is to just be yourself because nobody can do that better than you. The poets I love the most are the ones who sound like themselves.”
Kimbrell believes that poetry is important to uniquely understanding the world, separate from logic or philosophy. Logic, Kimbrell explained, has a difficult time explaining complex emotional processes of life such as love, fear, anger, and grief.
In Kimbrell’s graduate workshop, when workshopping on a poem about his father, he claimed to have seen on his peer’s faces an understanding of his situation, unlike anything he had ever seen before. It was a difficult and vulnerable, but wonderful experience that made him question if he had ever been understood fully in that way before.
“Anything can be written about if you find the right entry spot,” Kimbrell said. “Think about a big mountain that’s way too steep. If you hang out at the base of the mountain long enough, you’ll find a secret door that’s got a stairwell, but until you find it, it seems insurmountable.”
For Kimbrell, putting into words emotions that are seemingly unreachable, such as the grief after the death of a loved one, is the true achievement of poetry.
“No matter how long my poem is, I am not getting my mother back,” Kimbrell explained. “No matter how many words I use to describe her, she’s not going to magically appear on the page. So now what’s the best you can do? Do justice to grief, to understand it, to help somebody else understand it.
After the Q&A, Kimbrell participated in a reading, introduced by Dr. Chika Unigwe and preceded by the readings of two GCSU poets in the Master’s program, Christina Faber and Kai Elliot Beck.
Kimbrell read many poems from across his published collections, some of which were his title poem “The Law of Truly Large Numbers,” “Making a Turkey Sandwich for Mikhail Barynshnikov,” “My Path to Riches,” “Retirement language,” among others. While the Q&A was an explanation of Kimbrell’s skill and experience, the reading truly showed the scope of his prowess.
“Kimbrell wrote about things I would never even think to put in a poem,” said Ruby Hull, a junior English major who attended the reading. “He found a way to tie numbers and statistics into a poem about love.I thought that was really interesting because I thought about how similar two ideas are even if they seem like complete opposites.”
The Kimbrell reading and Q&A were an outstanding success and an incredible opportunity to discover one of the most promising American poets of the modern day.