Sunday Poet: Galway Kinnell

Early on in the Sunday Poet series, when I generally only posted a single poem, I posted an entry on Galway Kinnell's "The Bear." Since I have long admired his work, I'd like to post more of his fine poetry.

Wait

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don't go too early.
You're tired. But everyone's tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

*****

Poem Of Night

1

I move my hand over
slopes, falls, lumps of sight,
Lashes barely able to be touched,
Lips that give way so easily
it's a shock to feel underneath them

The bones smile.

Muffled a little, barely cloaked,
Zygoma, maxillary, turbinate.

2

I put my hand
On the side of your face,
You lean your head a little
Into my hand--and so,
I know you're a dormouse
Taken up in winter sleep,
A lonely, stunned weight.

3

A cheekbone,
A curved piece of brow,
A pale eyelid
Float in the dark,
And now I make out
An eye, dark,
Wormed with far-off, unaccountable lights.

4

Hardly touching, I hold
What I can only think of
As some deepest of memories in my arms,
Not mine, but as if the life in me
Were slowly remembering what it is.

You lie here now in your physicalness,
This beautiful degree of reality.

5

And now the day, raft that breaks up, comes on.

I think of a few bones
Floating on a river at night,
The starlight blowing in a place on the water,
The river leaning like a wave towards the emptiness.

*****

Two Seasons

I

The stars were wild that summer evening
As on the low lake shore stood you and I
And every time I caught your flashing eye
Or heard your voice discourse on anything
It seemed a star went burning down the sky.

I looked into your heart that dying summer
And found your silent woman's heart grown wild
Whereupon you turned to me and smiled
Saying you felt afraid but that you were
Weary of being mute and undefiled

II

I spoke to you that last winter morning
Watching the wind smoke snow across the ice
Told of how the beauty of your spirit, flesh,
And smile had made day break at night and spring
Burst beauty in the wasting winter's place.

You did not answer when I spoke, but stood
As if that wistful part of you, your sorrow,
Were blown about in fitful winds below;
Your eyes replied your worn heart wished it could
Again be white and silent as the snow.

*****

Here is the biographical info on Kinnell from The American Academy of Poets:

Galway Kinnell was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1927. He studied at Princeton University and the University of Rochester. His volumes of poetry include A New Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), a finalist for the National Book Award; Imperfect Thirst (1996); When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (1990); Selected Poems (1980), for which he received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980); The Book of Nightmares (1971); Body Rags (1968); Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1964); and What a Kingdom It Was (1960). He has also published translations of works by Yves Bonnefroy, Yvanne Goll, and Francois Villon, and, this year, Rainer Maria Rilke. Galway Kinnell divides his time between Vermont and New York City, where he is the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University. He is currently a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.

Here is a little bit about Kinnell's work from The Poetry Archive (where you can find some live recordings of him reading his poetry):

Kinnell has said "if you could keep going deeper and deeper, you'd finally not be a person . . . you'd be a blade of grass or ultimately perhaps a stone." It is this search for the essential that marks out Kinnell's poetic territory: like the bear of one of his most celebrated poems, he digs in for the winter. Kinnell is a devout poet, honouring the earth and all the creatures, including the human ones, which share its surface. He is drawn to writing about the moment of birth, sexual joy, and death - when our most basic nature is revealed. There is anger at human destructiveness, and he writes of a desire to escape, as in his sequence 'When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone'. There is also tremendous tenderness, particularly evident in the poems for his young son and daughter.

For all the plain grandeur of his language with its Biblical cadences, Kinnell is not a remote figure. The deep resonance of his voice brings out both the wisdom and intimacy of his poems, as embodied in the closing lines of 'Lastness', a section of his long poem, The Book of Nightmares, where he bends over his newly born son: "and smelled/the black, glistening fur/of his head, as empty space/must have bent over the newborn planet. . . .".

Kinnell's most recent work has an element of transgression, of breaking down the barriers of what a poem may be or be about. I will leave you with a recent poem from the Sept/Oct issue of American Poetry Review:

Walnut

On the pot-holed road from the Port
Authority Terminal the Newark Airport bus
sighs up and down as if moguling.
In my experience, motion of this kind
while sitting in a bus often increases
the size of the penis. It does so now.
A mixed sign. In certain operas
the desire for sex and the allure of death
seem to be present just before or just after
each other but occasionally simultaneously.

Consider the love life of the prostate.
During love-making this gland, which is,
as doctors like to say, the size of a walnut,
and has very few pleasure fibers in it
but a great many for pain, transmits
the sensation of pain with growing intensity,
until at last, when our walnut can no longer bear it,
the duct opens and semen bursts out and gives
shuddering relief or ecstatic joy, as you like.

Climbing the Pulaski Skyway on a faulty
pneumatic suspension, the bus gasps
and blows and develops a bucking rhythm
that lets me imagine what the fuck-
ing of buses could be like. Minutes later
I find myself thinking the bus moves
like an antediluvian mammal
being shoved to its grave without first
having been fully persuaded its time is up.
Though not kept informed explicitly, the penis
instinctively senses this turn of thought, and shrinks.

Galway Kinnell's new book is Strong Is Your Hold.

You can find more about Kinnell at these websites:
~ enotes.com: a look at Kinnell's life and work.
~ The Poetry Archive.
~ Wikipedia entry.
~ Poem Hunter.
~ Famous Poets and Poems.
~ Modern American Poetry entry.

Tags: Sunday Poet, Galway Kinnell, poetry, poems