Benjamin Libman in conversation with Joseph Kidney about Devotional Forensics
96 pages. icehouse poetry, 2025.
Benjamin Libman: Let’s keep it simple to start. Tell me how you go about writing a poem. Is there a process?
Joseph Kidney: There’s an aspiration to get going as early as possible, but I procrastinate so much that usually things don’t start until after midnight. I gave up drinking about five years ago, but I used to close out writing sessions by having a drink or two, and that slight mental shake-up—which in the best of cases could solve a creative problem by returning to a blockage with a substituted mind—is now simulated more or less by the looming onset of sleep. I will usually read poetry for about half an hour before writing, just to inhabit the proof that the whole enterprise is possible. I wouldn’t be surprised if my habit of writing at the end of the day meant that the poems have a bit more to do with the bustle of the day.
When I write I tend to listen to music, but nothing with language and nothing with a center or too-apparent lines of melody, so that means something ambient, or the stranger kinds of classical and jazz. The poems themselves are built up phrase by phrase, hopefully interlocked in such a way that the whole poem works as a single large gesture, even if it has its own internal fidgets and adjustments. If I come to an impasse, I will tend to begin maniacally chanting what’s there so far, until the momentum of those chants tricks my brain into producing the next sound or stump of the phrase to come.
BL: You spent the better part of a decade studying English Renaissance literature for your doctorate. I know you’ve also been a student of Latin in recent years. The traces of these — Antony and Cleopatra, Virgil — are evident on the surface in Devotional Forensics. How deep do those roots go in your poetry? What are the traces these pursuits have left on your mind?
JK: Obviously, there is a superficial connection because a number of the poems emerged out of readings that were in the orbit of that academic work, though that being said, that orbit, incidentally and willfully erratic, was probably never constricted enough to stay purely academic. At some point the interest of the details themselves tempts you do something more irresponsible with what appeals to your curiosity.
As far as these things, English Renaissance and Latin literature, appear in my own poems, it’s still pretty distinct from anything I work on academically. I don’t think there’s much overlap between my dissertation and my poetry. And that’s partly to do with the fact that as a critic you aspire to operate from a vantage point of higher understanding, always moving towards clarification. The poetry, on the other hand, is more about playing with half-understandings attended to by imagination, seductions of ambiguity, sometimes deliberate misinterpretations of fact made in the service of beauty and rhetorical pleasure.
In your question, the phrasing of “student of Latin” is entirely appropriate, because many of those Latin-adjacent poems are not coming from some deep well of expertise but from exercises in apprenticeship to something I’m not skilled enough to do perfectly, hoping that those very imperfections will play their role in the collaboration of ability and inability that makes up style. I think the opposite case has everything to do with one of the dangers of writing within the range of an apparent expertise. The poetry can then become didactic, or condescending, sabotaging itself with predetermined certainty. You want to keep alive as much as possible the mode of the tentative and exploratory.
BL: What referential root systems do we miss, on the other hand, by focusing on your chosen subjects of study?
JK: Hmm. I’m not sure really. I don’t think I write a poetry that is all that referential, at least in the sense of references that connect only with a reader who has read or seen or listened to the same things that I have. For a reference to work well it should have in the poem an energy totally independent of its source, otherwise it has probably been inadequately incorporated.
Take, for example, the poem that closes by referencing “Luther’s god.” If it had been left at that, you would be staking the final gesture of a page-long poem on a reference that could mean any number of things. Luther, unsurprisingly, said a lot of things about god. But even with the specification given by the poem—a god who loves in the way that conductors dance to music made by dancing—I don’t think the effect of that ending is enriched by hunting down the 28th Heidelberg thesis, with its idea about a love that creates instead of finding what is pleasing to it, which was the initial inspiration for that image.
BL: It has been suggested in another interview that your linguistic allegiances as a poet lie more with the unit of the word than with the unit of the stanza, or the line, etc. Tell me about humor in your poetry.
JK: On one level, I can’t resist it. More often than not, I’m a pretty unserious person. But when it comes to picking the right mood for a poem, the question isn’t should I make this poem solemn and sentimental, or should I make this poem funny, but do I want to try and make this poem comprehensive, as much as it can be in its narrow limit. Many of my favorite writers are deeply upsetting and deeply funny. Flannery O’Connor. Kafka. And what so annoyed the French and Ben Jonson and Dr. Johnson about Shakespeare. They don’t really observe the literary separation of mirth and sorrow, because life doesn’t either. And then there are all these paradoxical effects. Sometimes that kind of selective buffoonery actually helps you toward the goal of breaking the reader’s heart when you want to do so. The humor almost seems to profane the seriousness, making it all the more devastating. As in the Auden Icarus poem. It would be theatrical, artificial, if the ploughman and the expensive delicate ship stopped to observe a moment of silence or muster a cortège. It would accomplish a hollow suitability at the expense of making it unreal, not more sad. It’s more sad that they don’t care. Or that people crack jokes during small talk at a funeral, though who can blame them since on that kind of death-heavy occasion you feel the need to claim the prerogatives of the living, of which humor is one.
BL: I suppose the one thing that the “poem unlimited,” Hamlet, and the very nature of a joke all struggle against is silence. One way I might characterize silence in your poetry is as patience. Except in moments where the effect is welcome (“The shook cape fabricates urgency / and lifting like a curtain at the last, / like fugitive removal between this and that”), the reader is rarely if ever rushed.
JK: I know what you mean and I do think it’s compelling to characterize poems as little bulwarks against silence, though there is a way of enriching poems by folding into them the silence that surrounds them. I think of that short Yeats poem that begins “Speech after long silence; it is right.” That being said, I don’t entirely hate that quality of “nervously over-talking” that you mention. That can be dramatically interesting. Why can’t this person sit quietly with themselves? I would like to know.
But I’m glad that you point to the idea of patience, which is something I think about a lot. I do consider myself a Shakespeare guy, and even though we Shakespeare people are engaged in a centuries-long battle against the Miltonists, most of my thinking about patience begins with Milton. I would agree with you in associating patience and silence, but it is the figure of Patience in probably Milton’s most famous sonnet who pipes up and consoles the blinded speaker. And even though Milton is for us now a very old author, one of his major preoccupations is the feeling of belatedness, of having arrived too late to this world. While it might sound paradoxical, patience can be a remedy to that feeling of belatedness, both in helping you endure and in redeeming the time that has already passed. History as an endlessly prolonged expectation.
BL: You have said that “devotional forensics” is the theological equivalent of “infer[ring] the weapon from the wound.” Tell me more about your poetic theology, in these poems and others you have written.
JK: Well, it’s a common operation to sketch out what something might be or have been according to the traces it has left. This can be the forensic sciences when the perpetrator has disappeared, it can be tracking an animal you are hunting, it can be theology if it seems the creator has withdrawn, but you can also just call it reading. I suppose I am preoccupied with loss and think that there is a duty to consecrate loss so that it doesn’t become doubly lost.
I know the title also suggests that there is something criminal about creation, and maybe there is if you have to supplant something in order to create. But I’m also concerned with a form of worship that is directed towards what is going away. Maybe cherishing it. Though you do run the risk of making grief such an automatic stance towards the world that you create or accelerate the losses that keep the lights on in the factory of grief that poetry can be. That seems like a bad way to live.
I don’t know really what a “poetic theology” would look like, unless it took the form of a learned ignorance. But I do think that image you mention is a good example of something I am interested in which goes to the heart of how I think about poetry. Really, I think of poets as being in the business of connectivity, connections that are either made or discovered. That is why metaphor, and the way you deploy it in time across syntax, is probably the single most important thing in poetry. You are trying to find sensuous and intellectual ways of restoring or simulating connection to what appears scattered and unrelated. You are cultivating a way of looking at the world in which everything is missing something else, everything is characterized by radical dependence.
BL: In “Dove or Kestrel,” perhaps the single poem that most affects me in the collection, the speaker meditates in four parts about his brother. In all poetry there seems to be this tension between the will of another, inscribed in the shared resource of language, and the “condensed and clenched” decision of the poet. Does this tension ring true to you?
JK: I think that’s probably true. On the one hand, you have all these solitary thoughts and feelings, though no doubt created and defined by some relation to other minds, and then you try and put them into language, if they do not already exist as language, which only means anything if it is legible to other people. When you try to do new things with language it is almost as though you are submitting minor alterations to the universal committee of your fellow speakers. I’m not sure where language philosophers are at these days with the possibility of a private language, but the idea seems meaningless to me.
But decisions, the idea of control, are probably less independent of others than we can be led to assume. Writing in a predetermined form is maybe the clearest example of spontaneity set against the control of form. Though when that is working best it feels harmonious, or contrapuntal, not antagonistic. That feeling, almost like a dance of control surrendered and asserted, accompanies, often rarely, the best stretches of writing. There is something almost companionable about it, the way friends banter. Maybe some of that appears in this poem about my brother. Though, as you say, it culminates in my decision, whatever that decision is. A natural ending place for a poem is an epiphany, but I wanted to conceal the nature of that decision from the reader (maybe in an over-reaching reassertion of control) because I wondered whether the movement of a decision, and the pleasure that is joined to it, could work alone as a concluding gesture.
Apparently, the last thing Henry James said before he died was “So it has come at last, the distinguished thing!” but I don’t think anyone can say for certain what “it” was.
BL: “Whenever you lose a thing / it helps less to ask how it’s made you poorer / than how it’s made you sharper.” This line, from “The Crisis Men and the King of Sacrifices,” attests to loss as a sort of whetstone. Can you talk about this poem, which brings the reader into the psychology of a people trying to fortify their town against impending crisis?
JK: I wrote that poem one summer when I was reading a lot of Livy. I wanted to make something that almost read as a paragraph extracted from a vaster work that is for whatever reason no longer available. Livy definitely has theories about history, but he reads as more of a chronicler than a historian, if that distinction still obtains.
Catastrophes have a way of simplifying life, perhaps because they threaten it utterly. You enter into a desperate relationship with possibility, the first stage of which is identifying necessity and devoting yourself to it exclusively. The image you mention belongs to a sort of poetry that I try to avoid, which is the poetry of reassurance and euphemism. But again, maybe catastrophe brings that out of you.
Joseph Kidney is a Canadian poet whose poems have appeared in Best Canadian Poetry and are forthcoming in The Iowa Review. He won a National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Poetry and the Poem of the Year award from Arc. His full-length debut, Devotional Forensics, was published with icehouse poetry in 2025. He currently works as a lecturer at Stanford University, where he completed his PhD in Renaissance drama.
Benjamin Libman is the author of The Third Solitude: A Memoir Against History (2025) and Voyeur, forthcoming from Coach House Books. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Yale Review, New Left Review, and elsewhere.