When Katherine Gibbel offered a free poetry workshop at the Howe Library, I signed up right away because I knew she was a deeply poetic, craft-oriented person with an MFA from the University of Iowa. I wanted to learn from her. I’d often seen Gibbel in the basement of Baker Library working in the Book Arts Studio, and the walls of my bookstore boast many of the small wonders she prints there, under the auspices of Send Me Press. Gibbel is also known as a detail-oriented person, who runs the day-to-day business of the English department.
Perhaps I was expecting something more formal from Gibbel that day at the Howe, but what she taught was a sort of poetic freedom, an openness. I remember she taught, among other poems, Lucille Clifton’s “Let there be new flowering” and she created a workshop where the participants were made to feel expansive, airy, and able to make declarative statements that sort of lingered in the air, long after the poem closed. We flowered. We were made new.
Reading Katherine Gibbel’s debut poetry collection, Little Sound, I am reminded of those exact feelings. She taught us to write in that expansive, airy way because it is the way she writes. Six poems comprise the entire book, but those six poems feel as big as the space she writes about in the fourth poem “Prairie” and nearly as big as the final poem “The Cloud of Unknowing” that looks closely at the death of her English Department colleague, Monika Otter.
Gibbel’s time spent in the Book Arts Studio pays off here, as her lines defy conventions, floating on white space at times, and stabbing into it at crucial moments. This is a book that surrounds you, a book you can live in, punctuated by phrases that flash. Here are some of my favorites:
From “Prairie”: the room and I listening/ to a minute and a half/ of meadow;
From “The Cloud of Unknowing”: Monks drew little hands, manicules, in the margins of books to annotate or correct, their fingers gently sloping down in that lazy, crossed way.// On a tour in Ravenna, where Dante died, I learned some premodern artists did not depict God’s face for fear of creating a false idol: instead God descends as a hand.
If you want more of this lyric precision, more time spent in the air, if you want to reconsider the way that lines and stanzas can sit on a page, or get lost in a cloud for a while, then get your hands on this gorgeous debut right away. Be prepared to bloom.
Rena J. Mosteirin is the author of Disaster Tourism (BOA Editions) and Experiment 116 (Counterpath Press). Mosteirin is co-author, with James E. Dobson, of Moonbit (punctum books) and Perceptron (punctum books). Mosteirin teaches at Dartmouth College and owns Left Bank Books in Hanover.
