On Keiber-Digg’s Gloria Mundi
by Traci Brimhall
Hi, I’m Traci Brimhall, Poet Laureate of Kansas, here for Poets on the Plains. Today I’m excited to share with you a poem by the beloved Kansas poet Michael Kleber-Diggs.
Although Michael Kleber-Diggs was born and raised in Kansas, he currently lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. His debut collection of poems, Worldly Things, won the 2020 Max Ritvo poetry prize and was published by Milkweed Editions. His poems have appeared in numerous wonderful literary journals and anthologies, such as Poetry Magazine, Rain Taxi, McSweeney’s and many others. Kleber-Diggs teaches poetry and creative nonfiction in the Minnesota prisoners workshop.
The poem of his that I’d like to share with you today is called “Gloria Mundi,” which is Latin for “worldly glory” or “glory of the world.”
Gloria Mundi
Come to my funeral dressed as you
would for an autumn walk in the woods.
Arrive on your schedule; I give you permission
to be late even without good cause.
If my day arrives when you had other plans, please
proceed with them. Celebrate me
there—keep dancing. Tend your gardens. Live
well. Don’t stop. Think of me forever assigned
to a period, a place, a people. Remember me
in stories—not the first time we met, not the last,
a time in between. Our moment here is small.
I am too—a worldly thing among worldly things—
one part per seven billion. Make me smaller still.
Repurpose my body. Mix me with soil and seed,
compost for a sapling. Make my remains useful,
wondrous. Let me bloom and recede, grow
and decay. Let me be lovely yet
temporal, like memories, like mahogany.
I really love this poem, and it is so wonderful and beautiful even though it is engaging with something really heavy and dark like death. There’s still so much praise and beauty, and it reads unlike any other side of instructions for a memorial service I’ve ever read. But one of the things I find really wonderful about the poem is that it is a set of instructions. Poems are so often written as a set of statements, so it is delightful to encounter a poem as a list of really tender commandments. We often think of instructions or commands as bossy or severe, but what could be more gentle than “Tend your gardens. Live well.”
Another one of the things that’s really interesting to me in this list of commandments is that Michael keeps returning to the command to “make”— “Make me smaller… Make my remains useful…” On the one hand, it’s the firmest commandment in a certain way since many of the others are so passive. But I also think that’s really beautiful that at this moment of memorial and burial we are being asked by this writer to make something of what remains of their body, of their loss, of memories. That making is part of a worldly eternity, the same worldly eternity that is mentioned with the body blending with soil and seed. And even with that knowledge that the body at that moment would no longer hold the spirit of the person we know as Michael, it still doesn’t seem to be a commandment out of pain but out of love.
And speaking of love, another little thing I love in the poem is that I encounter the poetry collection’s title in it—Worldly Things. Sometimes finding these little clues are called “Easter eggs” in films—where you see a little detail and it connects back to some other key information and gives you additional insight. The book title hidden in this poem also feels like an Easter egg to me. A title can add this whole new filter on a poem or a book, and now all the other poems I see get that same shade and light.
Michael Kleber-Diggs’s collection Worldly Things was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award in poetry. The year it was published, Readers Digest named him one of the “14 Amazing Black Poets to Know About Now.” The book itself deals with a lot of loss, including the author’s father, who was murdered when he was a child. But there are also moments of love and tenderness, such as poems about Michael being a father himself. It is a great collection to read if you enjoy formal poetry, or even if you just enjoy poems where you can feel the kindness and humanity radiate off the page.
Thank you for being with us for Poets on the Plains. I’m Traci Brimhall, Poet Laureate of Kansas coming to you from Manhattan, Kansas, “the Little Apple.”
Gloria Mundi used with permission.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
Traci Brimhall is the current Poet Laureate of Kansas. She's an avid reader of many genres, but her latest obsession has been reading retellings of Greek myths by authors like Natalie Haynes and Jennifer Saint. Those books help her talk to her 10-year-old son about myths, monsters, and demigods while he reads Percy Jackson. She's a professor of creative writing at Kansas State University and lives in Manhattan, KS.
https://tracibrimhallpoet.com/ . Her books can be ordered at https://tracibrimhallpoet.com/works/ .
FEATURED POET:
Michael Kleber-Diggs (KLEE-burr digs) (he / him / his) is currently writing a memoir about his complicated history with lap swimming called My Weight in Water (forthcoming with Spiegel & Grau). He is a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in Literature, a poet, essayist, literary critic, and arts educator. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things (Milkweed Editions 2021), won the Max[NON Ritvo Poetry Prize, the 2022 Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Poetry, the 2022 Balcones Poetry Prize, the 2021 Poetry Center Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award. Michael’s essay, “There Was a Tremendous Softness,” appears in A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, edited by Erin Sharkey (Milkweed Editions, 2023). His poems and essays appear in numerous journals and anthologies. Michael is married to Karen Kleber-Diggs, a tropical horticulturist and orchid specialist. They are proud of their daughter who recently graduated from SUNY Purchase with a BFA in Dance Performance with a Concentration in Composition.
https://michaelkleberdiggs.com/
