Peter Kirn

Peter Kirn works on a 56-acre raw milk dairy in southern Maine. He earned his MFA in poetry from Drew University in New Jersey. His poems appear or are forthcoming in The Normal School Literary Journal, Organs of Vision & Speech, Otis Nebula and Upstairs at Duroc. His first collection of poetry, the intimacy with which stone combusts & praising the nervous life, will be published this winter. Summary: The work of Bhai Vir Singh arrived in my hands at precisely the right time. In his work I found & continue to find a voice & worldview which is ecstatic but not inhuman, serious but not overly dramatic. I found love poems in which the love is requited and unrequited at once—the speaker’s love & attention simultaneously assuaged and left lingering; and speakers who often arrive at a place of peace with struggle without finding its end. His work continues to: transform my worldview, rattle my certainties, and renew my capacity for wonder, clarity & openness. This presentation will look closely at several of Bhai Vir Singh’s poems as a study of exactly how his work performs the tightrope walk of clarity and nuance in the face of ecstasy, wonder and intense desire, and ultimately investigate how & why his work can always be relied upon for guidance & focus “When we get fixed on things we look at.”