Kirby Doyle (1932 - 2003)Jack FoleyI met Kirby Doyle a few times but was in no way close to him. He was an old North Beach, Beat poet whose work I admired. Kirby’s poetry reminds me a little of Gregory Corso’s: serious, but always with a playful, comic element (often it’s word play, sometimes using ancient words like “’tis”or an ancient, affected style: “These experiences, Sir, / with which I concur-- / You know I do, Sir”). Who has ever written about Pearl Harbor like this--except Kirby? I’m quoting the beginning of “It Is 1941 & I Am Nine Years Old All My Life”:
Deathly silent th’ radiosThe poem ends with a reference to “Christ’s golden dance / of pleasure,” in which Kirby certainly believed. In O Her Blackness Sparkles! I wrote about a San Francisco art gallery called The Batman. It was located at 2222 Fillmore Street and flourished from 1960 to 1965. This highly experimental gallery presented Beat art (later, early psychedelic art) as well as poetry, film, and dramatic productions. Michael McClure’s play, ! The Feast ! was first presented there, with Kirby playing one of the parts. The play was filled with McClure’s “beast language”-- “YEORG!,” “NARGATH!,” “RETORP!” I took the title of my book on The Batman (whose walls were painted what Dean Fleming called “beatnik black”) from “Sapphobones,” a poem of Kirby’s which seemed to epitomize the entire scene: youth, jazz, the erotic, experimentalism (Kirby’s poem sounds just a little like the punning style of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake), the forbidden, the hip rather than the square, drugs used for pleasure (to mix up the mind) but also for self-consciousness, enlightenment. Kirby’s title, “Sapphobones” is an obvious reference back to the early Greek woman poet, Sappho (who, like Kirby, wrote erotic poetry) and a reference as well to one of the primary instruments of jazz, the saxophone. (“Paling” cigarette “smoke” was often a feature of jazz joints!) There are other puns too. (From the Song of Songs: “I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem.”) Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, is present in the poem, as are references to Virgil’s Aeneid, with the spurned lover, Dido. (“Faggots” here means sticks used to make fire--Dido burned herself to death--not gays.) One feels that the beloved being addressed is African-American--but, beyond that, there is a sense of a deep attraction to “blackness” in all its senses. Blackness means the unknown, the unexplored, night, the opposite of everything “day” represents. McClure’s play has a line, “The seen is as black as the eye seeing it” and features “a full measure of black wine.” This is the complete poem:
SAPPHOBONES At a recent memorial for Kirby Doyle, the poet’s daughter said that she both loved and feared her father. More than one person used the word “psychotic.” This poet’s life was complex and in many ways disastrous- “dark.” He was perhaps himself a “Dark Ariel”: purveyor of a joy which was as much destruction as it was joy: I am yet born.In one of James O. Mitchell’s photographs--reproduced in O Her Blackness Sparkles!--Kirby Doyle is staring directly at the camera. He is only momentarily in repose. He is holding a small paper cup in which he has placed the fingers of his right hand. He looks young, anxious, intense, capable of anything: “I am earth uncreated. / There is nothing of God about me.” No one could have guessed the dark times--the poverty, the mental instability, the blankness, the long years in the hospital.
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Jack Foley