Joseph Kidney

Photo credit

Madhur Anand

Biography

Joseph Kidney is the author of Devotional Forensics (icehouse poetry), winner of the Griffin Poetry Canadian First Book Prize and shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Best Canadian Poetry and are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Copper Nickel, and The Cincinnati Review. He won a National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Poetry, the Poem of the Year award from Arc Poetry Magazine, the Short Grain Contest from Grain, and The Young Buck Poetry Prize (now the Foster Poetry Prize) from CV2. He has received support from the Banff Centre, Wildacres, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Civitella Ranieri. His full-length debut, Devotional Forensics (icehouse poetry) is a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. He currently works as a lecturer at Stanford University, where he completed his PhD in Renaissance drama.

Micro-interview

Did you read poetry when you were in high school? Is there a particular poem that you loved when you were a teenager?

I was more into reading novels than poetry in high school, maybe because I was not yet smart enough to appreciate poetry. The first poem I ever loved was "As I Walked Out One Evening" by W. H. Auden.

When did you first start writing poetry? And then when did you start thinking of yourself as a poet?

I started writing something akin to poetry while I was the lyricist for a progressive death metal band in high school. I probably thought of myself as a poet before I had written a poem of any worth, upon realizing which I dis-identified, only to come back to an embrace of the vocation after a few poems had found their way into literary magazines.

What do you think a poet’s “job” is?

The poet's job is to write poems. What is a poem? It is part of a particular and elevated sub-genre of fiction. And I would say of poetry what Henry James said of the novel: "The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting." One way of being interesting is to write sentences that have not been written before.

If you have a poem in our anthology what inspired you to write it?

The poem gives, reliably or otherwise, an account of its inspiration, which is a combination of living through a bad fire season in California and thinking about the paradoxes to which love poetry has been drawn (the cold fire and hot ice of desire).

If you had to choose one poem to memorize from our anthology, which one would it be?

I would memorize "Journey of the Magi" by T.S. Eliot in the winter, "Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins in the summer, "A Short Story of Falling" by Alice Oswald in the fall, and "To Autumn" by John Keats in, of course, the spring.