Featured Poet: Kevin King, Brentwood
Kevin King is the author of the novel ALL THE STARS CAME OUT THAT NIGHT, Dutton, 2005. He is the recipient of last year’s poetry fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. Finalist in fiction in New Hampshire State Council on the Arts competition and in Massachusetts Artists Foundation competition. Poetry awards from The Plum Review, The Hollins Critic, and The Meredith Poetry Exchange.
Of his poem, Kevin writes:
My son is now eight, going on nine, and still surprises me with some wonderful lines, some great non-sequitors. I would emphasize Wonder, with a capital W, since that is the sense that gets transmitted. The ‘darkness’ here is, thus, illumination. The poem also owes something to my quasi-professional though more auto-didactic work in linguistics, which is related to the field in which I most frequently teach, ESL.
The Very Darkness
The hallway light, I point out, somewhat
truculently, superfluously, is out.
Which somehow signals my three-year old son
to pick up his two shoes—“I’m putting them,”
he says, “in the very darkness.”
I could imagine him saying ‘the very dark,’
but where did the -ness come from?
What part of the cranial disk has already been
encoded with suffixes?
I’m thinking of adjectives lining up for their -ness,
like knights being dubbed,
or mittens fastened to a coat sleeve,
while common nouns stir in discontent,
proper nouns dally only with the hyphenated,
and verbs vie to take them for a stroll
on that old, yellow, large-lined paper.
Then the boy who would be poet turns tyrant,
corrects my irregular verbs and plurals,
tells me where to put my own foots,
takes me out of my noncountable
discontentedness.
For more information about Kevin King visit:
- www.cortlandreview.com
- His novel, All the Stars Came Out That Night is available through Dutton (the publisher) and any other vending site like www.amazon.com.
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