Kyle Harvey appeared in Issue 41 with Hyacinth and Thirteen Ways of Looking at an Orange, two poems that approach repetition and perception from sharply different angles.
Kyle Harvey in the historical archive
The paired contribution moves between mythic grief and visual play. Hyacinth develops an elegiac sequence through recurring phrases and seasonal return; Thirteen Ways of Looking at an Orange turns a familiar object through a series of compact scenes, quotations, jokes, and historical references.
Hyacinth and myth
Hyacinth draws on the myth of the dead child and the flower that carries his name. Repeated phrases around soil, blood, breath, mourning, and holy static create a ritual structure. The poem moves through darkness toward spring while preserving grief inside the cycle of renewal.
Repetition, grief, and season
Anaphora drives the poem’s emotional force. Phrases return with slight changes, allowing mourning to accumulate rather than resolve quickly. Wind, caves, roots, ash, willow, bones, and bulbs give grief a physical landscape whose seasonal movement extends beyond the individual speaker.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at an Orange
The second poem takes the orange through market aisles, sports sidelines, kitchen tables, painting, Pacific travel, San Francisco, and comic misrecognition. Its title invokes Wallace Stevens while its sequence remains playful and materially specific.
Color, object, and visual thinking
Harvey lets the orange function as fruit, color, painted light, historical cargo, urban object, and joke. Each numbered fragment changes the frame around the same central image. The poem’s structure turns looking into a series of small experiments in attention.
Further reading
Continue through the archive’s pages on imagery in poetry, sound in poetry, and modern poetry.