What with vital writers and artists — Rainer Maria Rilke, Pablo Neruda, Paul Celan, Franz Kafka, Joan Baez, Robert Lowell, and others in Memoirs of a Maverick Translator — what with them, a time comes for various other people, events, jokes, unique ideas, and more. They have wild difference, thus not much order or connection.
Hears Duke Ellington’s band “from the womb” when parents Addison Craft and Dora Elizabeth Irby attend one of Ellington’s concerts at the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas.[1]
November 18, 1936
Born in Bowie, Texas, the second son of Addison Craft (physician) and Dora Elizabeth (nurse) Irby.
Knowledge, Duncan McNaughton reminds us, is all of what one’s love becomes capable of.
— Kenneth Irby, from the introduction to Patrick Doud’sThe Man in Green
Over the past half-century, Kenneth Irby’s writing has serially explored the contours and sundry habitations of what he calls the “spiritual landscape” (94) of the North American continent, seeking out and attending its “Lords of the Soil” (319) and “sustainers of the spirit” (91), its “Rock Chalk dogs” (306), “dark gods” (214), “dwellers of the dream” (306), and “mute attendant spirits [who] in-dwell” (331) the objects of his everyday life.
