Collected Poems

Contents

Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Introduction

Editors’ Note

First Poems: 1946–1954 (1971)

Part I

Part II

Part III

What a Kingdom It Was (1960)

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1964)

Part I

Part II

Body Rags (1968)

Part I

Part II

Part III

The Book of Nightmares (1971)

I: Under the Maud Moon

II: The Hen Flower

III: The Shoes of Wandering

IV: Dear Stranger Extant in Memory by the Blue Juniata

V: In the Hotel of Lost Light

VI: The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible

VII: Little Sleep’s-Head

VIII: The Call Across the Valley of Not-Knowing

IX: The Path Among the Stones

X: Lastness

Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980)

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

The Past (1985)

Part I

Part II

Part III

When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (1990)

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Imperfect Thirst (1994)

Proem

I

II

III: Sheffield Ghazals

IV

V

Strong Is Your Hold (2006)

I

II

III

IV

V

Last Poems: 2010–2014

Notes

Acknowledgments

Biographical Afterword

Index of Titles and First Lines

Illustration Credits

Read More from Galway Kinnell

About the Author

Connect with HMH

Footnotes

First Mariner books edition 2018

Copyright © 2017 by The Literary Estate of Galway Kinnell, LLC

Introduction © 2017 by Edward Hirsch

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kinnell, Galway, 1927–2014, author.

Title: Collected Poems / Galway Kinnell ; introduction by Edward Hirsch.

Other titles: Poems

Description: Boston ; New York : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017044904 (print) | LCCN 2017051846 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544874343 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544875210 (hardback) | ISBN 9781328505705 (pbk.)

Subjects: | BISAC: POETRY / American / General. | POETRY / General.

Classification: LCC PS3521.I582 (ebook) | LCC PS3521.I582 A6 2017 (print) | DDC 811/.54–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017044904

Cover design by Jackie Shepherd

Cover photograph by Nancy Carrick Holbert, 1968, courtesy of the University of Arizona Poetry Center

v2.1118

These poems were originally published in the following journals and magazines: American Poetry Review: Jubilate. Catamaran Literary Reader: The Sulphur Baths at Esalen. The New Yorker: Turkeys, Astonishment, I, Coyote, Stilled Wonder, The Silence of the World, Gravity.

When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone, copyright © 1990 by Galway Kinnell. Used with permission of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Introduction

LIKE WALT WHITMAN, his major precursor, Galway Kinnell was a poet of wide-ranging sympathies, deep immersions, who threw himself into the flux. He, too, was mystically physical. He was socially engaged and identified strongly with people in trouble, the fraught and suffering, the injured and dying, the wounded body politic. He was keenly aware of the nonhuman world—he wrote some of the finest animal poems of our era—and defended the rights of the earth in an increasingly technological time. He was obsessed by transience, the need to live in our bodies, and relied on personal experience to try to transcend the self. He found a way to incorporate a humane politics into his large, inclusive, free-verse poems, many of them in sequences, and often adapted a religious vocabulary—one of his defining influences was the King James Bible—for secular ends. He sacramentalized experience.

Much of Kinnell’s poetry is an intense personal testimonial in the face of death. The subject of the poem is the thing which dies, he asserts in his essay The Poetics of the Physical World. In one of the most telling moments of his work, he turns and makes a promise to his infant daughter:

Little sleep’s-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,

when I come back

we will go out together,

we will walk out together among

the ten thousand things,

each scratched in time with such knowledge, the wages

of dying is love.

Kinnell confronts the inevitability of death with a fragile yet fierce protectiveness, which extends not only to his daughter but also to what the Taoists call the ten thousand things.

In an equally revealing moment from The Book of Nightmares the poet finds a poem suddenly writing itself out on a blank white page. His hand becomes a vehicle: its title, he states, the dream / of all poems and the text / of all loves—‘Tenderness toward Existence.’ Tenderness is an extremely rare quality in modern poetry—it was pretty much banished by the modernists determined to extricate poetry from what they considered nineteenth-century sentimentalities. Suspicious of too much feeling, which they considered romantic or womanly, they sought hardened finishes, the coldness of sculpture. But Kinnell celebrates and capitalizes Tenderness, which is directed outward toward all of Existence, with a sacred embrace.

Despite his sacramental stance toward the physical world, Kinnell vehemently rejected Christianity, especially the Christianity of his childhood. He did not look back on it fondly. I would speak of injustice, he declares emphatically in his early poem First Communion, I would not go again into that place. He disliked theological dogma, and yet the language of religion continued to resonate with him, hence his revision of Romans 6:23, recasting For the wages of sin is death as "the wages / of dying is love. Think of titles like The Supper After the Last, The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World, and The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible. I agree with the literary historian David Perkins that God was absent from his cosmos but not from his emotions."

Throughout his work Kinnell explored the existential consequences of his position—the death of God, the loss of faith—and made a poetics out of it. He recognized that a luminous spark in us makes it possible to dream of paradise, to invent the realm of eternity, a world outside of time. But there is another kind of glory in our lives which derives precisely from our inability to enter that paradise or to experience eternity, he argues in The Poetics of the Physical World. That we last only for a time, that everyone and everything around us last only for a time, that we know this, radiates a thrilling, tragic light on all our loves, all our relationships, even on those moments when the world, through its poetry, becomes almost capable of spurning time and death.

There are lightning-like instances of transcendence in Kinnell’s poems, many incandescent moments, but there is also a tragic awareness that they inevitably dissolve back into time, which is irreversible. He needed to consecrate what is fleeting, unstable, evanescent. I find a credo, a capsule moment, in his tiny poem Prayer, a haiku-like gem with a triple use of the word is, the verb of being. It states the hunger and affirms the quest:

Whatever happens. Whatever

what is is is what

I want. Only that. But that.

Reading over Kinnell’s work as a whole, one finds that he was essentially looking for ultimate meaning, which he could not find in a provisional universe. What he could create was a poetry that embraced our earthly hold, the bonds of connection, the nature of being. His ambition was overarching. He dreamed of a true poem of embodiment, one that would incorporate as much of the available world as possible.

That dream is realized as these Collected Poems, the single work he was writing all his life, his Leaves of Grass. It could be described as Tenderness toward Existence.

Born in 1927, Kinnell came of age in the late forties and early fifties during the era of the New Criticism, with its strong predilection for poetic complexity and impersonality. Like many poets of his generation, he began by writing in rhyme and meter, regular stanzas, fixed forms, and later moved into more open forms. A parallel evolution takes place in the work of Robert Bly, James Wright, and W. S. Merwin, with whom he is often grouped, as well as Adrienne Rich, Philip Levine, Donald Hall, and others. Nonetheless, readers who know only his most well-known poems of the sixties and seventies can be forgiven for feeling a kind of cognitive dissonance on encountering this early work, which shows a determined apprenticeship to the traditional craft of poetry. Here is a committed free-verse poet, a follower of Whitman, an heir to D. H. Lawrence and Theodore Roethke, initially writing in the seventeenth-century mode of the English metaphysical poets, which turned out to be alien to his budding neoromantic sensibility.

Still, it is compelling to see him arduously wrestling with the forms—establishing and breaking up meters, finding and concealing rhymes—and searching for his true subjects. The death-haunted, tragic Kinnell had already spoken, his friend and mentor Charles Bell later noted, though it would take years to recognize. W. B. Yeats was Kinnell’s most enduring touchstone from this period—he thought of the Irish maker as poetry itself—though in the mid-to-late fifties he came to feel that for modern poets—for everyone after Yeats—rhyme and meter, having lost their sacred and natural basis, amount to little more than mechanical aids for writing.

Kinnell found his method and his voice when he abandoned prescribed forms and moved into more improvisational free-verse structures, organic forms. He embraced Coleridge’s idea that a work of art is like a living organism, especially a plant, which originates in a seed, continues to grow, and evolves spontaneously from within, effecting its own secret growth. The metaphor of form that develops naturally appealed to his sensibility. Consequently, his best poems unfold according to an evolving inner logic and assume an architecture all their own. He savored words—their weights, their sounds, their exact meanings—and listened to his own poems as they developed. He downplayed technique and distrusted overly technical or academic discussions of poetry, but he was also a tireless, obsessive, and lifelong reviser of his own poems. One could sometimes see him revising a piece at the podium at the beginning of a poetry reading. He substituted words, slashed phrases, changed line breaks, realigned stanzas. He couldn’t help himself. There was some music that he heard in his head, some rhythm that he experienced in his body, and then tried to get down on the page.

Kinnell began to explore longer, looser, somewhat jagged free-verse structures in the last section of What a Kingdom It Was (1960), most notably in his moving elegy for his brother, Freedom, New Hampshire, and in his breakthrough long poem, The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World, which stakes his Whitmanian claim, though without Whitman’s optimism. He purposefully links the first letter of Christ’s name to a dirty, chaotic street in Manhattan’s Alphabet City, and thus gives a sacred aura to the world of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side.

Kinnell’s postmodernist poem, which unfolds over the course of a single day, doesn’t progress in an orderly or chronological fashion through its fourteen parts. It cuts and weaves, eschewing narrative, describing a cauldron of activity. It seems astonished by its own lists, how many shops it names, how much daily life it needs to describe. Ezra Pound’s collagist method from The Cantos was one point of departure, but as the poet and critic Clive James once noted, It is the Ezra Pound poem that Pound himself could never have written. It is more vernacular, quotidian, democratic. It views history from street level.

T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was another starting point. Like Hart Crane, Kinnell used some of Eliot’s cut-up methods to respond to Eliot’s negative vision of the urban realm and create an anti–Waste Land of celebration and sorrow. Avenue C has a strong kinship to Allen Ginsberg’s poems of the fifties, especially Howl, one of its models. It is a poem without illusions about poverty, especially sympathetic to Jews from Eastern Europe living in a post-Holocaust world (The promise was broken too freely / To them and to their fathers). I love the way it finds beauty on an ordinary, gritty, overlooked avenue, and then builds to a crescendo in the last section:

From the blind gut Pitt to the East River of Fishes

The Avenue cobbles a swath through the discolored air,

A roadway of refuse from the teeming shores and ghettos

And the Caribbean Paradise, into the new ghetto and new paradise,

This God-forsaken Avenue bearing the initial of Christ

Through the haste and carelessness of the ages,

The sea standing in heaps, which keeps on collapsing,

Where the drowned suffer a C-change,

And remain the common poor.

Kinnell launched with one of our major urban midcentury poems, but most of his subsequent work is grounded in the countryside. He believed that poetry should be rooted in the physical world, a form of embodied knowledge, and most of that knowledge came to him in rural surroundings. His poems are animated by the wind, the woods, the night sky, the morning sun. A frog pond, a burnt landscape, a mountainside bursting with flowers. The Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Animals are never very far away in his often ruined, semiwild landscapes. I would say that he anticipated green or eco-poetry, not just because his poems show great sensitivity to the natural world itself, a place that is other than human, but also because they challenge the idea of our dominion over nature. He recognized the complicated interrelationship between nature and humankind.

Kinnell’s poems are shadowed by his knowledge of how hard it is to inscribe the natural world. There is a key to his thinking in the poem On the Oregon Coast where he recalls a dinner with the poet Richard Hugo. At one point the conversation turned to the subject of personification, the attribution of human qualities to inanimate objects, animals, or ideas.

We agreed that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets almost had to personify, it was like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, the only way they could think up to keep the world from becoming dead matter.

And that as post-Darwinians it was up to us to anthropomorphize the world less and animalize, vegetablize, and mineralize ourselves more.

We didn’t know if pre-Darwinian language would let us.

Kinnell’s sympathetic view of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets (think of such holy eccentrics as Christopher Smart, William Blake, John Clare) runs contrary to John Ruskin’s notion that personification, or what Ruskin called the pathetic fallacy, was a morbid romantic and Victorian phenomenon, a mode that produces in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things. Rather, Kinnell suggests, the personalizing mode was a desperate measure to try to show that the world is alive in all its parts. It was not a way of deadening nature but of trying to embody it. But that method is no longer available to post-Darwinians, who must find a new language to bring ourselves closer to the natural world, not by humanizing it, but by naturalizing ourselves.

Kinnell was influenced in the sixties and seventies by the notion and practice of the deep image. In his polemical essay A Wrong Turning in American Poetry (1963), Robert Bly distinguished Imagism, which he dismissed as Picturism, from the psychological kind of image American poetry needed, which concentrated inner and outer energies, uniting the psyche and the cosmos. The models were Spanish and Latin American surrealists (Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo); the impulse was Jungian. The idea was to break down the icy formalism of the fifties. Like his friend James Wright, another poet of the emotive imagination, Kinnell answered the call. He collapsed the ironic distance between the poet and the poem, embracing the torrid heat of experience. The poet Richard Howard described this work as ordeal by fire. We are not made for transcendence like the phoenix, Kinnell argues in Another Night in the Ruins, but must surrender to our own creative destruction in time.

How many nights must it take

one such as me to learn

that we aren’t, after all, made

from that bird that flies out of its ashes,

that for us

as we go up in flames, our one work

is

to open ourselves, to be

the flames?

There is something archaic in Kinnell’s image-centered poems, something primitivist in his procedure, a way of thinking both very old and very new. This is especially evident in his totemic animal poems, The Porcupine and The Bear. The animals in these poems seem very much themselves, yet they also take on a symbolic or representative character. They are figures of the body, who are both like and unlike us. What is striking is how the speaker in these poems moves from describing the animals into becoming one with them. Imaginatively, the poet leaps into their dying bodies. He enacts a psychological regression or shamanistic flight—living with the animals, fusing and dying with them, and waking up with a new consciousness of his own bodily presence, animal knowledge. The conclusion of The Bear ponders the mystery of his journey as he wonders what, anyway, / was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?

Kinnell is a postromantic poet in the way he seeks a primordial energy—exalted, trance-like starts, regenerative dramas. There is a tremendous mystic propulsion in his work, a longing to overcome our individual isolation, to find some long-lost unity, to join graveolent animals, earthly elements. And yet he also recoils from that need, which entails a loss of self, a dissolution of identity. We desire merging and fear extinction. His poems repeatedly enact that dual feeling or impulse, what he calls a kinship and separation between ourselves and what is beyond us.

I don’t want to underestimate the existential dread that underlies many of the poems in Kinnell’s signature books: Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1964), Body Rags (1968), and The Book of Nightmares (1971). There is a dark-night-of-the-soul quality to many of these lyrics, which often begin in the middle of the night (Poem of Night, Middle of the Way) and/or in the ruins (Ruins under the Stars, Another Night in the Ruins). The salve or response to terror, his characteristic gesture, is to turn from this nighttime dread to the renewable morning world. How many nights / have I lain in terror, / O Creator Spirit, maker of night and day, he begins one of his spiritually oriented poems,

only to walk out

the next morning over the frozen world,t

hearing under the creaking of snow

faint, peaceful breaths . . .

snake,

bear, earthworm, ant . . .

The poem takes one more turn when he looks up at "a wild crow crying ‘yaw yaw yaw’ / from a branch nothing cried from ever in my life." Here he ends on an oddly surreal image that undercuts the consolation of morning.

An overpowering dread is the starting point for The Book of Nightmares, which struck American poetry like a thunderclap. Part of its appeal was the way that Kinnell used and transformed his own experience. He was not trying to delve into a personality, like, say, Robert Lowell or John Berryman, but to generalize a self, like, say, Whitman or Rainer Maria Rilke. In an essay called Poetry, Personality, and Death (1971), Kinnell spoke of a poetry in which the poet seeks an inner liberation by going so deeply into himself—into the worst as well as the best—that he suddenly finds he is everywhere. That’s the strategy for an archetypal personal journey across a particularized landscape, like Wordsworth’s Prelude or Roethke’s North American Sequence. Keats called it the egotistical sublime.

The Book of Nightmares is a book-length sequence of ten poems, each one in seven parts, a sort of magical formula. It takes its epigraph, its ten-part structure, and its literary inspiration from Rilke’s Duino Elegies, which Kinnell later cotranslated. He originally drafted a long poem to be called The Things (Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one . . . , Rilke instructs himself in The Ninth Elegy. Tell him of things), which undergirds The Book of Nightmares. Throughout the sequence he struggles to hold on to physical things, to stay the changing world. His true subject is time’s passing, which he looks at with radical innocence and horror, as if for the first time.

In one sense, The Book of Nightmares is a father’s book. The sequence is framed by the birth of the poet’s children—his daughter Maud in the first poem (Under the Maud Moon) and his son Fergus in the final one (Lastness). It begins with him lighting a small fire in the rain and singing one of the songs I used to croak / for my daughter, in her nightmares. It describes the anxiety of a parent who now suffers his own nightmares, not just worry over his own death, which is palpable, but the additional fear of losing or leaving a child. It is thus partly a work of self-instruction, or as he puts it at the beginning of the journey:

Listen, Kinnell,

dumped alive

and dying into the old sway bed,

a layer of crushed feathers all that there is

between you

and the long shaft of darkness shaped as you,

let go.

Here Kinnell starts to page through his book of night fears and counsels himself to surrender to existence, to face death head-on and live with it.

Everything is rent, broken, or torn in The Book of Nightmares. There is an occluded journey up a mountain, which hints at a plot, but mostly the protagonist immerses himself in the dying world. He feels divided against himself. Death figures everywhere in the passage, much of it natural, some institutional or man-made (the Vietnam War bursts to the surface in the sixth poem). There is a longing throughout for an original harmony, a prenatal oneness, the world from which we came, the one into which we will disintegrate, but there is also a terror of it. He is lit by the recognition that "Lastness / is brightness." The psychological goal: to move through the ruins to find grounds for affirmation. This directive to his small son closes the poem:

Sancho Fergus! Don’t cry!

Or else, cry.

On the body,

on the yellowed flesh, when it is

laid out, see if you can find

the one flea that is laughing.

In retrospect, it is possible to see that with Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980) Kinnell started to become preeminently a poet of blessing, if not of gaiety then of transfigured dread. This turn distinguishes him from most of his contemporaries. His poems invariably acknowledge an impending darkness, the deep emptiness beyond, a sort of inner desolation, the constant drumbeat of death, whose work never ends. But they also respond with increasing clarity to the power and beauty of fragile things, impermanent moments. For example, I don’t know of a more instructive anti-suicide poem than Wait (Wait, for now. / Distrust everything if you have to. / But trust the hours. Haven’t they / carried you everywhere, up to now?). Or a clearer assertion of this redemptive leap than the close of Goodbye, his grief-stricken elegy for his mother:

It is written in our hearts, the emptiness is all.

That is how we have learned, the embrace is all.

Beginning with Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, Kinnell also began to explore less splintered, more consecutive and integrated lyrics, some of them a single sentence or stanza. He combines lyrical and narrative values, often extending the duration of a moment through long, snaking sentences that twist and turn over the course of many lines. Look at the opening of Fergus Falling and After Making Love We Hear Footsteps, which enact what Yeats called a passionate syntax for passionate subject-matter. Some of Kinnell’s one-sentence poems are also his most iconic and celebratory, such as Saint Francis and the Sow (sometimes it is necessary / to reteach a thing its loveliness) and Blackberry Eating, which connects the sensual pleasure of picking and eating blackberries with the way that words sometimes fall almost unbidden from the tongue.

Kinnell continued to pursue the physical world until it yielded a kind of spirit flowing through the body. As he explained in part two of There Are Things I Tell to No One:

I say God; I believe,

rather, in a music of grace

that we hear, sometimes, playing

from the other side of happiness.

Time and again, Kinnell tells us, this music is as close as we’ll come to paradise, a song we sing to heal ourselves.

Kinnell’s obsessive meditations on time take on a retrospective glow in The Past (1985). Here I sat on a boulder by the winter-steaming river and put my head in my hands and considered time—which is next to nothing, merely what vanishes, and yet can make one’s elbows nearly pierce one’s thighs, he recalls in the first poem, The Road Between Here and There. In a way, that road marks the passage of the entire book as Kinnell’s imagination turns to childhood memories, to men, including himself, getting older and weaker, to friends who have died, some of them poets, like James Wright, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Hayden, Richard Hugo (This one or that one dies but never the singer), to watery landscapes from the past, which at times seemed eternal (Here / waves slap not in time but in / evanescence, a rhythmless medium).

Writing about The Past, Robert Bly observed that Kinnell often refers to a transformative power that gives radiance to the gross life of flesh; and transfigures the flesh because the radiance comes from beyond the flesh. He imagines and represents two movements: the movement down into earthly body, dirt, appetite, gross desire, death; and a movement toward sunlight, time, fulfillment, lily blossoms, purity, narcissus flowers, beauty, opening. Kinnell often divides these two movements or desires, a conversation between two sides of himself, into different poems, which speak to each other, but he combines them in the last poem of the book, The Seekonk Woods. At one point he looks down and states, I want to crawl face down in the fields / and graze on the wild strawberries. The next moment he looks up and asserts:

I want to lie out

on my back under the thousand stars and think

my way up among them, through them,

and a little distance past them . . .

Kinnell’s longing is palpable, but he rejected any philosophy that rejected the body, a too-easy transcendence, a suspicious upward movement. He recognized the danger of leaving our physical lives behind. And yet he also loved those moments when things shined with a seemingly transcendental light. This explains the extravagant assertion at the end of The Olive Wood Fire when he recalls holding his young son in the glimmer of a fire burning low at night: In my arms lay Fergus, / fast asleep, left cheek glowing, God. Here God operates not so much as a supreme being—the speaker is not worshiping his son—but as a metaphor for the embodiment of something he feels is sacred, a moment freed from chronological time. Kinnell appropriates a supreme name for a secular experience, which he considers holy and cannot otherwise describe.

Against the relentless pressure of loss, the past getting longer, the future looming, Kinnell recurs to those epiphanic junctures when chronology seems to collapse and the world, through its poetry, appears to spurn time and death. Some of those are regained in memory. Thus the close of his beautiful poem That Silent Evening:

Then I will go back

to that silent evening, when the past just managed

to overlap the future, if only by a trace,

and the light doubled and cast

through the dark the sparkling that heavened the earth.

Kinnell consolidated his achievement with his final three books: When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (1990), Imperfect Thirst (1994), and Strong Is Your Hold (2006). This phase commences in late middle age with a deep, nearly debilitating loneliness and guilt, sometimes poignant and rueful, as in the sequence of ten thirteen-line sonnets, When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone. Each of these one-sentence poems begins and ends with the same title phrase, which takes on a haunting resonance. Here he dwells among regrets so immense the past occupies / nearly all the room there is in consciousness. At other times, however, Kinnell treats the subject of disfiguring loneliness with comic zeal, as in the poem Oatmeal, wherein he recommends breakfasting with an imaginary companion, in