David Kirby: On Generosity

Bob Dylan and Shakespeare, For Two

Not to brag—I wouldn’t know what I’m bragging about—but over the years, reviewers as well as readers who’ve contacted me through e-mail or Facebook have occasionally described my work as “generous” and me as a “generous” poet. 

What does that mean? True, I’d rather be thought of that way than as “stingy” or “miserly.” And it might be a euphemism: telling someone they’re generous could mean they talk too much or overstay their welcome. I do send my poems out freely when I think I’ve finished them, but doesn’t every poet do that? These days it’s hard enough to get a letter to the editor of a small-town newspaper published, much less a poem. Solomon urges us to cast our bread upon the waters, and who am I to challenge the king of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, much less one reputed to have 700 wives and 300 concubines?

But that doesn’t bring me any closer to the idea of what it means to be generous, so let me think here about what generosity means in a broad artistic sense, then cite a dozen artists who strike me as giving us more than we might expect them to, which is a standard definition of generosity, and then wrap things up in in a way intended to make generosity less an abstraction and more a working strategy that can be used by poets but also artists of every kind.

As always, the best way to define something is to begin by looking at that something’s most remarkable examples. Right off the bat, Bob Dylan pops to mind. “Tangled Up in Blue” runs to 98 lines, whereas typical songs by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones are much shorter: “Yesterday” is only 24 lines, and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” one of the Stones’ longer efforts, is a mere 77—actually, it’s just 62 lines, since the title is repeated 15 times. 

And look at the number and variety of images in the Dylan song, from a seedy bar to a crash pad in Brooklyn to slavery and lumberjacks and mathematicians and carpenters’ wives, not to mention “an Italian poet / From the thirteenth century,” himself a pretty generous guy in that Dante takes us through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, introducing us to any number of saints, sinners, and monsters, not to mention the Devil himself.

Then there’s Shakespeare. Don’t get me started. Do you think Shakespeare said “I better limit myself” just before he writes Act 2, Scene 1 of Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Oberon tells Puck how he sat on a cliff and saw a mermaid riding on a dolphin’s back and singing such a song as made the very world bend a knee to its beauty and then saw as well Cupid flying between the earth and the moon and firing an arrow at a Vestal virgin and missing her, though the arrow lands on a white flower and turns it “purple with love’s wound,” and this turns out to be the very flower that Puck will now fetch to bewitch fairy and high-born Athenian alike and spark among the characters such japes, jibes, shenanigans, tomfoolery, and star-crossed love as have never been seen this side of the Peloponnesian Peninsula? 

I think not. He could have had Oberon say, “Fetch me that flower,” as he eventually does, but first he gives us a mermaid, a dolphin, a song so sweet as to calm the sea and shake the very stars, not to mention Cupid, a virgin, a flower made magic by the god’s arrow, and all told by a sorcerer to his apprentice in a single speech tossed off as casually as if he were ordering lunch. 

As far as giving you your money’s worth, Shakespeare is also known for inserting a play within a play: in Midsummer, the rude mechanicals perform Pyramus and Thisbe at the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta, and The Murder of Gonzagois staged in Hamlet to expose Claudius’s murder of the title character’s father. But The Taming of the Shrew, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Tempest, and Henry IV, Part 1 also incorporate elements of the play-within-a-play device. 

                     Pinter, Ariosto, Body Horror, Blah-Blah, Blah-Blah-Blah

Okay, Dylan and Shakespeare. What about Charles Dickens? English critic Emma Smith was probably thinking about novels like Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend when she said, “What’s great about Dickens is the maximalist, chock-a-block, teeming sense you get of that world. His work is like an extraordinary baroque cathedral that you could spend your life looking at, absorbed in the detail.” Another scholar, Sarah Perry, notes that “[Dickens’] prose was so strange. What’s magical about his work is how on earth he managed to get away with gritty social commentary absolutely latched to the conditions of the day, but also being completely surreal. It’s a sleight of hand that’s almost impossible to pull off, or even to see how he pulls it off. It leaves me completely agog.”

How Dickens pulls it off is through generosity. He weaves the gritty commentary and the surreal, and just as we get used to the one, he switches to the other. He lays it on thick, the point being you can get away with anything if you’re generous enough.

Like plays? Let’s put Harold Pinter’s Betrayal up against Georges Feydeau’s A Little Hotel on the Side. Pinter’s play has three characters and traces an extramarital affair between Emma and Jerry, her husband Robert’s best friend, as it explores deception, emotional ambivalence, and the cruelty that results when relationships go awry. Feydeau’s play uses the same materials, though his cast includes the two married couples who alone are enough to populate a sex farce but also a philosophy student pursued by a housemaid, Victoire, who adds fuel to the fire with her own romantic entanglements. Then there’s Mathieu, one of the male lead’s hapless friends who arrives on stage with four unruly daughters and whose efforts to keep them in check only adds to the already considerable confusion. The hotel staff, including the eccentric proprietor Bastien and a clueless bellhop, are swept into the maelstrom of mistaken identities, slamming doors, and wild accusations that typify Feydeau’s intricate and fast-paced comedic style. Oh, and the hotel is haunted. 

Are you howling with laughter? If you are, whatever you’ve read or heard or seen is generous. But if you’re simply groaning or smirking, it’s not—dad jokes aren’t generous. The same goes for comedy’s opposite, of course. Tragedy will leave you weeping, whereas a play or poem or story or film that merely troubles you will elicit little more than a sigh. But comedy has an extra trick up its sleeve. In addition to the yucks and snorts and chortles you enjoy along the way, comedy often leaves you with an extra present toward the end, which is that the broken world is put together again: at the end of A Little Hotel on the Side, the truth comes out with no major consequences and everyone returns to their proper places, chastened but aware that their lives, like yours, may be ruffled from time to time but will go on largely unchanged.

For my money, no work is more generous than one of the many epics composed between the time of Homer and the Renaissance. Thre’s The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Beowulf, The Song of Roland, and Gargantua and Pantaguel, but there are also works less familiar to Western readers like The Shahnameh by the Persian poet Ferdowsi which consists of some 50,000 couplets and is variously described as one of the world’s longest epic poems and the longest epic poem created by a single author. 

A personal favorite of mine from this category is Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, in which the hero of the title traverses Europe and Africa as he searches for Angelica, who loves not him but Medoro, while another character, Ruggiero, battles his enemies, rescues the female warrior Bradamante, and flies a hippogriff (look it up). Astolfo travels to the moon to restore Orlando’s sanity. Charlemagne’s forces fight invading Saracens. Magic rings, sorceresses, and enchanted castles abound, as does a whale you can ride like a horse. Fun!

There’s no end to examples of literary generosity such as these, is there? I’d add Melville to my list, but many readers find him too generous—there’s a whaling story in there somewhere in his most famous book, but it’s blanketed with digressions on everything from alehouses to astrononomy—and you could say the same about Melville’s contemporary Whitman except that he already beat you to it (“I am large, I contain multitudes”).  

And I haven’t even mentioned visual artists like Red Groomes, Henry Darger, the Michelangelo of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Such contemporary poets as Hera Lindsay Byrd, Chessey Normile, Karyna McGlynn, Jennifer L. Knox, and Barbara Hamby, who happens to be my wife, but more on her later. Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, sure, but also Chuck Berry, The Grateful Dead, and Phish (whose lead guitarist and co-founder Trey Anastasio defines a typical song by that band as something simple at the beginning and end with a whole lot of notes in the middle). Comics like Bridget Everett, Amy Schumer, Bette Midler, Richard Prior, Chris Rock, George Carlin.  Filmmakers like Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Francis Ford Coppola, and even purveyors of body horror like Coralie Fargeat, whose recent movie Substance depicts the travails of Elisabeth Sparkle (played by Demi Moore), a fading celebrity whose use of a black-market drug to create a younger version of herself leads to, uh, unforeseen consequences. 

I’m repelled by gross-out horror that strikes me as lazy, but a film in which the main character gives birth out of her shoulder to a third (or fourth or fifth) breast that plops out on the stage during a televised New Year’s Eve concert watched by millions? Sign me up!

                                                        The Zipper Test

I began this essay with an uneasy admission that I don’t really know what the word “generous” means, which could be a limitation on my part but also a tribute to that word’s complexity, unlimited potential for application, and overall unpindownableness. Then again, a lot of arty terms work that way. Try defining “atonality” or “Abstract Expressioism”: wouldn’t it better just to listen to a few works by Schoenberg and Webern and Stockhausen or look at paintings by Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, and Jackson Pollock? But before I list a dozen works by different figures from a variety of fields that hint at the different forms generosity can take, let thank a gentleman named Ed McManis, who emailed me out of nowhere a few months back and, in many ways, provided the starting point from which this essay springs. Mr. McManis had seen a poem of mine he liked and said this about his experience first studying poetry and then teaching it to his own students. 

Having studied with the purists and professors who were shackled and enamored with verse and pentameter and villanelles, well, you get formed a certain way. You start looking for metaphors and alliteration and enjambment—whatever the hell that is—and before you know it, you’re a critic and you’re living by yourself watching Deal or No Deal in your underwear.

All that changed when McManus became the teacher, though.

When I taught poetry to high school kids who didn’t read, who certainly didn’t read poetry or literature or really, anything (I worked with dyslexic and ADHD kids who hated school), I could get ‘em half-interested  by picking poems with blood and guts and “quirky” themes like Kooser’s “The Urine Specimen.” I’d have them take the poem, or book or piece of paper and turn it sideways. Then, I’d mime opening a zipper and I’d tell them to unzipper the poem, and they’d look funny at me and then one brave kid would do it—and you know teenagers—you get one, then they all follow. And then I’d have them shake the page, book, paper . . . just shake everything out of that poem onto the desk. 

The result?

Now with those abstract “thought” and “feeling” poems with broad and lazy language, nothing would fall out onto the desk. However, with a poem like yours? The desk is rattling and overflowing with stuff.

I couldn’t have said it better. To me, a poem is either generous or it’s stingy. It writes you a check or it sends you a bill. Every poem is either a good gift or a bad gift, a fat-tire bike with a bell and a basket or tube socks. That doesn’t mean a poem has to be long to be generous: The— Odyssey is bighearted and bounteous, but so are the poems of Emily Dickinson. 

To be generous, a poem just has to pass Ed McManis’s zipper test: turn the poem on its side, unzip it, and shake it out over your desk. If the poem is miserly, nothing will fall out, but if it’s a generous poem, the desk will be heaped high with images, ideas, emotions.

The zipper test works just as well for songs, stories, movies, sermons, web sites, emails, letters political rants, shopping lists, and these little notes thoughtful people put into their sweethearts’ lunch boxes. Anything the human heart and mind comes up with can write you a big fat check or send you a bill instead.

                                                               My (or A) Top 12

So what have we learned so far? Mainly that it’s hard to define something that doesn’t lend itself to a simple definition and therefore it’s certainly easier, not to mention vastly more important, to illustrate and, by doing so, celebrate that thing. The problem with that approach is that it doesn’t leave the reader with much in the way of takeaway: no crisp summary, hook, teaser, thumbnail, elevator pitch. 

About the best one can say is that, to paraphrase what a couple of friends have said in the course of one conversation or another, the generous work is likely to be characterized by rich imagery, driving rhythms, pleasure in language, and rewards in easy reach; certainly it gives others the benefit of the doubt, is considerate of human flaws and frailty, may indeed be more forgiving of persons and circumstances than they deserve but not ignorantly forgiving—the generous work exudes grace toward the subjects and characters it treats, but it’s also conscious of its grace.

Howvere, as William Blake says (and no writer is more generous than the Funny Bunny of English Romanticism), “Truth has Bounds, Error none.” So let me try to make up for all that spitballing I did earlier with an 12-item list intended to inspire the reader to compile his or her own, bearing in mind that such a list could be three items or 100 and not include a single item on mine as well as consist partially or entirely of items I’ve never heard of. The list that follows, my list, might be an outline for a book, a syllabus for a class, a reading list to be used to while away one’s evening hours and weekends. With one exception, it doesn’t include any of the artists or works mentioned earlier; it could include any or all of them. It could include whatever you want it to.

Here goes.

•      Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book. Shōnagon was part of the court of Empress Consort Teishi in Japan. In 1002, she completed this three-part work consisting of stories about her time at court, her thoughts on various matters, and then 164 lists ranging from “Things That Arouse a Fond Memory of the Past” (“a night with a clear moon,” “a beautiful child who is just learning to talk”) to “Squalid Things” (“the back of a piece of embroidery,” “the inside of a cat’s ear”). It’s as though the zipper test were invented with this quirky book in mind.

•      Don Quixote. Quixote’s quest is both absurd and profound. He chooses fantasy not to escape reality but to transform it; his is a generously written story about the most generous-minded of heroes. Proof of the novel’s bounty lies in its many adaptations by artists in every genre: visual works by Daumier, Doré, and Picasso; literary productions based on or  influenced by Don Quixote from writers as different Borges, Rushdie, Graham Greene, Milan Kundera, and Nabokov; musical compositions by Richard Strauss, Ravel, Massenet; the Tony-winning musical Man of La Mancha; film attempts by Orson Welles (who didn’t finish his movie) and Terry Gilliam (who did).

•      The History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding not only relates a rollicking tale but tells how to write one. “We moderns are to the ancients what the poor are to the rich,” says Fielding, and “by the poor here I mean that large and venerable body which, in English, we call the mob.” Just as the mob gleefully steals from its rich neighbors, “in  like manner are the ancients, such as Homer, Virgil, Horace, Cicero, and the rest to be esteemed among us writers as so many wealthy squires from whom we, the poor of Parnassus, claim an immemorial custom of taking whatever we can come at.” Fielding reminds us that the greatest authors are the greatest thieves and in that way share not only their own work but also the best work of others.

•      Any opera. Opera is your one-stop shopping experience in the art world: it has song, orchestral music, writing, acting, visual art, costume, and, since operas are taped and archived these days, film. Turn even the worst opera on its side, unzip, give it a good shake, and out fall instruments, voices, hammy gestures, laughter and tears, farthingales and morning coats, not to mention entire armies (even though it might be the same ten men marching offstage and back on again in an endless circle) as well as entire castles or at least their two-dimensional facades. Triple all this if the opera is Mozart’s Magic Flute. 

•      Any Keats ode. His nightingale ode is the most beautiful poem in the English language, just as the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is among the most famous. “More love! More happy, happy love!” cries the poet there. You can’t get more generous than that.

•      Emily Dickinson’s letters. Her poems explode with images and sensations of every kind; see “I started Early – Took my Dog –,” for example, with its “Mermaids in the Basement” and a sea that turns into a suitor so eager that it chases the speaker into town. But so do her letters. Like Fielding, she keeps company with the greats of the past but goes beyond them to tackle writers of every stripe: in their edition of The Letters of Emily Dickinson, Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell note Dickinson’s references to the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Emerson, Longfellow, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Dickens, Tennyson, George Eliot, the Brownings, and the Brontës but also songs and ballads, newspaper and journal articles on current events, scientific discoveries, and travel. Nothing’s off-limits to her or any other truly generous artist.

•      “The Big Rock Candy Mountains” (often called simply “Big Rock Candy Mountain”) is a Depression-era song about a hobo’s idea of paradise where hens lay soft-boiled eggs, there are cigarette trees and free-flowing streams of alcohol, and the dogs all have rubber teeth. 

Copyrighted by singer/songwriter Harry McClintock in 1928, it’s a modern version of the  medieval Land of Cockayne, where roasted pigs have knives in their backs to make carving easy, grilled geese fly right into one’s mouth, and everyone enjoys eternal youth. If you’re looking for an even longer song that’s chockful of goodies, try Don McLean’s nearly-nine-minute “American Pie.”

•      The photographs of Robert Doisneau. Best known for “The Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville,”which depicts shows a young couple kissing on a busy Paris street, Doisneau’s warm, witty photos show children playing in abandoned lots, street performers, factory hands going about their work with patience and dignity, ordinary people enjoying quiet moments in bistros and cafés.  Doisneau hoped his work would make others realize the wealth of their own stores, noting that “people carry with them a treasure of which they’re totally unaware. It’s my job to show it to them.” Doisneau gives you gifts, but he also shows you how to give gifts to yourself.

•      Dr. King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech is an extraordinary example of a conventional address suddenly turning magical. Meant to urge action on civil rights for African Americans, King’s prepared text focused largely on how America had defaulted on its promise of equality. But as he spoke, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson cried, “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” and with that, the speaker pivoted to the dream imagery that Jackson had heard him use in earlier speeches: the valley that shall be exalted and the mountain laid low, the children who would one day “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” the Black boys and girls who will join hands with white ones as sisters and brothers. Like that, what would have been merely a great speech became an immortal one.

•      Tom Stoppard. The author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Arcadia writes plays that make you hurry from the theater to the gift shop to buy a copy so you can read what you just heard and revel in it again. When one of the characters in the latter play talks about the excitement of living in a time when traditional assumptions about science are giving way to ideas like chaos theory and fractal geometry, he says, “The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.” Stoppard writes like the love child of Shakespeare and Fielding, shoveling information at you a mile a minute but always in a way that leaves you wanting more, more, more.

•      “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang. Often credited as the first commercially successful rap song, it’s on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and was included on NPR’s list of the 100 most important American musical works of the 20th century.” But that’s not why I’m including it here. The music’s not especially innovative, the lyrics are silly, and it goes on too long — “Rapper’s Delight” is the Moby-Dick of hip-hop. Music is notoriously difficult to write about; instead, the proof is in the listening. Give this infectious tune a spin, and if your windows are open and there’s a cemetery nearby, don’t be surprised if the dead climb out of their graves and start dancing with you.

•      Barbara Hamby’s “Ode on Luck.” I’ve already noted that Barbara’s my wife, meaning that I’m prejudiced, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Read it and you’ll see why I include in an essay on generosity a poem that ends this way: “I’ll tell you / who’s lucky—everybody and nobody in the same milkshake; /  you put in a scoop of chocolate, a scoop of raspberry-/dishwater sorbet, a squirt of kerosene, and lo and behold, / there’s a cherry, and what can you do but put it on top.”

                                                        I Love You, World

That’s it. And I haven’t even mentioned The Canterbury Tales, which—okay, enough! As in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, be it Goethe’s 1797 poem or Paul Dukas’s musical composition from a hundred years later or the Mickey Mouse cartoon that is one of the most memorable parts of Disney’s 1940 Fantasia, once you get going on this theme, it’s hard to stop.

Although “theme” isn’t quite the right word, is it? For artists, as with anyone who chooses it, generosity is a way of life. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Derek Walcott said that “the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world,” and that means falling in love with everything in it. I’m a poet, but I’m also a music writer. Over the years I’ve noticed that the people who have the strongest feelings about different types of music—they’ll tell you they don’t like country, for example—aren’t musicians, whereas those who actually sing and play for a living tend to like music of every kind.

Speaking of which, a recent New York Times obituary of shape-shifting musical icon David Johansen, who co-founded the punk/glam rock New York Dolls band and then reinvented himself as lounge-lizard cabaret crooner Buster Poindexter and later became a film and TV actor, radio host, and raconteur, cited the artist’s”joyful spirit and endless productivity.”

Aren’t those two qualities the same?

~~~~

Author notes:

The comments on Dickens by Emma Smith and Sarah Perry appear in a March 2, 2025 article by Killian Fox in The Guardian entitled “Who is better, Dickens or Shakespeare? We asked nine prominent writers.” (It’s hard to say, but the panel seems to give a slight edge to The Bard). 

The two friends mentioned at the start of the section called “My (or A) Top 12″ are Karl Chwe and Kimberly Ann Priest. Thanks, you two.

As for that Barbara Hamby poem, you’ll have to subscribe to The New Yorker, but it’s worth it. Here’s the link. 

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Copyright 2025 David Kirby

David Kirby (born 1944) is an American poet and the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. His many books include The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them (Flip Learning, 2021) and The Winter Dance Party: Poems, 1983–2023 (LSU, 2024).