Kimberly Campanello's An Interesting Detail
Meaning and unmeaning
Sometimes I come across a book that I really like, but which activates my imposter syndrome the minute I try to talk about it. Irish-American poet Kimberly Campanello is drawing on ideas and traditions I vaguely recognize but haven’t studied in any depth. In An Interesting Detail she uses prose poetry and what might be called associative lyric in ways that I’d tend to identify as surrealist, but I’m never sure of the precise boundaries and implications of that term. A bunch of what she’s up to here is surely going over my head. And yet, even knowing that I don’t know how to read these poems, I’m having a good time.
Probably the simplest thing to do right now is to present one of the prose poems in full, so you can get a good sense of what we’re talking about. With my apologies that I can’t figure out how to force Substack to render fully justified text, this one is titled “A Few Words”:
I’ve been asked to sum up in a few words how we measure space, which of course relates to how we measure time. The point of departure ought to be the black plastic cover laid at the foot of the gutter’s descending pipe. It blocks out leaves, animals and mud from entering the water return and therefore the sewer system, but the cover is not nailed down and so it has blown away across the yard and further down toward the back gate and the bomb shelter. I’m not certain why the birds don’t feed on the seed we’ve put out for them or why the only sounds I can hear are of construction vehicles and buses indicating their reversal rather than children playing or rain falling. The school and the depot are equidistant from the table situated inside my house behind the newly installed door with its keys still in the lock. It is rainy out there. I thought I could make a fairly good soup without blending it, but it turns out its constituent parts don’t work well together when apprehended on their own terms.
Is this the appropriate place to confess that I’ve never really liked prose poetry? Partly it’s a sensory thing, that the blocks of text don’t guide my eye and I find my attention slithering all over the place, unable to gain a solid foothold from which to make myself march through the lines in order. Campanello’s pieces hold my interest despite my anti-prose-poetry bias, however.
Looking at the piece above, she’s jumping between abstract (measurement, space-time, distances, part-whole symbiosis) and quotidian (house, school, animals, children, buses, rain, soup). The jumping around induces some dizziness, but the specificity of each part maintains grounding, and the jumps imply or force connection across the levels. In this particular piece I really love the association of a space-time metric with a non-functional cover for a gutter-pipe, something that’s supposed to keep a lid on the messiness of the natural world but, alas, fails. The pipe reference also recalls René Magritte’s famous painting “The Treachery of Images” with its inscription, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”
The sonic image of “construction vehicles and buses indicating their reversal” drowning out sounds of “children playing or rain falling” feels most poignant, not only in its juxtaposition of constructed vs natural, but in underscoring of opposition through the movement into reverse. And don’t those back-up beeps often sound quite plaintive? Then the rain, the locking into the house (against the rain) but leaving the keys in the door (symbolic locking only), making soup (a good rainy-day food) and the leap again to the abstract—can this poem work, the poem asks, when its parts are not blended?
The book includes other, non-prose poems, mostly with short lines of three to seven words apiece. These also involve meta-commentary on the functions of verbal expression, as in “Moving Nowhere Here” where Campanello tells us she is “… stacking some pages / I just printed I am slamming / the stack’s edge against the table / to see how thick / my book is becoming // it is not thick enough / without this poem / to bear the weight / of this poem”.
Trust me—the book bears its weight.
Publication Details
Author: Kimberly Campanello
Title: An Interesting Detail
Publisher: Bloomsbury Poetry
Year: 2025