FORUM CHAT
Amy Wilson Interviews poet James Kimbrell

Two poems from The Law of Truly Large Numbers,
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025

Elegy for Hello

Because I am a Leo,
I take things personally,
as when the cashier at Walmart
starts running the pork loin
over the bar code reader
without saying hello, and so I
say hello, which seems like
an insult at this late point
in our otherwise silent
interaction, a hurtful hello.
A judgmental hello. I get
that ours is a meeting of
primarily commercial import,
but what’s a hello cost?
Then I think, maybe she’s just
done with hello. Maybe she’s
saving hello for her four-year old
whom she will pick up
from the daycare that costs
two week’s wages before
driving home to the water drip
around the living room
light fixture. On the other
hand, maybe she’s just roughing it
and after work she’ll drive
her Benz to Golden Eagle
where she’ll report on her day
whilst sipping a cocktail
with a slice of grapefruit
at the 9^th hole clubhouse.
I worked the register
at Greer’s, served a tour or two
at Sac-N-Save, and unless I
was toting a leaning tower
of frozen pizzas from the walk-in
and couldn’t see you through
my frozen glasses, I
said hello. Likewise, I said
hello to the Walmart cashier
whose nametag read “smile
JOYCE Our People Make
the Difference!” and mine wasn’t
a hello that says, what the hell,
Joyce, can’t you see me
standing here with my unchecked
tater-tots being a human
amongst humans in a somewhat
dehumanizing warehouse
jam packed with jeans,
wrist watches, frozen hamburger,
televisions, live crabs? No,
mine was a friendly hello.
And Joyce looked up and smiled
and said hello back, and we
both relaxed a little, and I
quit trying to imagine her life
beyond the conveyer-belt
that inched my items toward her hand
until she ran them, one
by one, over the red laser.

Self Portrait at One Hundred Miles Per Hour

You need the camera moving at the same speed
as the ‘72 Dodge Duster driven by a guy named Pogo
so you can catch me laughing my idiot head off
while my buddy, Pop-tart, pukes into a Slurpee cup.

You need to drive the camera alongside us to see
how ambition runs sideways, let your shutter
click at the rate of hashmarks zipping beneath us
to understand how hilarious not dying can be.

And death is right beside us in a golden bondo’d
El Camino that means to nose ahead, so close
I can’t tell whose stereo rocks, “Will you meet me
in the middle, will you meet me in the air?”

The tractor trailer loaded with pulpwood can’t help
how fast we’re going, nor can the pine trees
flanking the straightaway before the horseshoe turn.
You need to crank the wind up, get a face full

of flash bulb ready for those who will survive.
Like a balloon at a porcupine dance, something pops
in the curve and we limp across the finish line.
Three tires, one rim, back to Ron Spear’s garage.

AW: Good afternoon, James, it is great to chat with you about your latest book of poetry, The Law of Truly Large Numbers. This collection explores both grief and love, and the statistical principal that in a large sample set anything outrageous is likely to occur.  Some of your poems reveal the loss of siblings and parents, the loss of home, the weight of illness, and love. Could you begin by discussing the intersection of statistical probability, as it applies to these themes in your collection?

Qualifying everything with the caveat that I’m no statistician, I’d say that probability computations are a part of our daily lives. We move through the world in a network of expectations. We suffer when those expectations are not met. Statisticians attempt to make sense of that experience by transposing experience into data sets just as poets transpose experience into image sets, a way of making sense of the past and of navigating an unknown future. We see this dramatized in the act of gambling in a casino, but we also see the casino as a microcosm of life and art more broadly. Surely, we’ve all been on the heels of some awful news and wondered, what next? As long as there is a decent probability of something better, there is hope, a chance for a foothold, and then the poem itself becomes that foothold. And while we suffer unmet expectations, we also gain unexpected windfalls, mercies like love, beauty, grace.

AW: You often fuse humor with pathos in these poems, which was just enough to keep me from crying, at times, while perusing these poems over and over. Was this a deliberate, intentional move as a poet, or did humor emerge organically, spontaneously during the writing process?

When we weren’t fighting as kids, my sister and I kept each other laughing. Even if our parents had divorced and we were in a new town without a car, or a television, or extended family, we could still make jokes about things, or about each other, or ourselves.  My use of humor on the page increased simultaneously with the number of people that I love who passed, which is to say that humor helps navigate grief and loss. It also serves as an inroad to the heart. It disarms and makes us more present and available to each other, and better able to withstand otherwise difficult circumstances and to reach other in our most unreachable moments.

AW: In the landscape of your poems we find the use of everyday, common objects such as formica, anti-frizz conditioner, lavender and citrus scent, a Walmart name badge, which are also vehicles for the expression of spiritual concepts and symbols of love. Could you provide a few examples, and how you came to fuse the ordinary, the inanimate—with the ideas of the abstract?

If we consider the gap between the animate and abstract as a zone of possibility, the dance between the two becomes an adventure, a kind of knowing that differs from what the abstract or animate might offer by themselves. The same might be said of the sacred and the profane, high and demotic diction, thought and feeling. Coleridge discusses the poem as the site in which discordant elements are held for a moment in harmony, and my thinking has been informed by him on this and other points, especially with regard to the imagination. As for the spirit, what is spirituality if not a zone of possibility? Considered from this point of view, the field of ordinary experience begs to be written, recorded, unfolded, unpacked.

AW: I wonder what new projects you have on the horizon that we can look forward to from you in the near future? We look forward to what is next from you and many thanks for visiting with Forum today.

I’m nearly halfway into a currently untitled collection. It’s a bit soon for me to judge how these poems are building on my previous work, but I think there’s a change that happens over the years and that I hear in the work of many poets, especially older ones, that I admire: they are totally comfortable in their own voice, which reflects both experience on the page and knowledge of one’s own strengths and limitations, a stage no less ambitious, but that stands more squarely in the shadow of one’s own reality and comes with acceptance, poise, maximum beauty.