Essay: On the eve of his visit to the Cúirt literary festival, the work of American poet Galway Kinnell is assessed by Irish poet and critic John F Deane.
Galway Kinnell has written of his experience of reading Walt Whitman: "I understood that poetry could be transcendent, hymn-like, a cosmic song, and yet remain idolatrously attached to the creatures and things of our world."
Whitman's influence opened Kinnell to a world of freer forms, to an expansion of his own sensibility, to an awareness of what poetry can do, and Kinnell has achieved a corpus of work that is big, beautiful and rooted. It is no surprise that he has recently turned his hand to the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1927, Kinnell studied at Princeton and the University of Rochester. He has taught at several colleges and universities and is willing to spend time teaching poetry at summer schools in the States. His kindly presence, and the precision and exacting nature of his poetry, have had a great impact throughout that country. He has won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award but is not slow in offering his work to tiny publishers who are working for the good of poetry in less glamorous areas.
Galway Kinnell is a generous and fetching personality, as his poetry is generous and fetching. At a somewhat aborted Poetry Ireland reading in Mount Street a few years ago, he was happy to spend the evening with a fistful of awed young poets, take his dark-pints medicine, and share his wisdom, poems and gentleness with us. After reading this exquisite and challenging poet, the reader finds himself agreeing that "it might be possible to say everything in poetry". His early work, as in What a Kingdom it Was (1960), touched on Christian tradition, an influence still underpinning the work, but he has since branched away, going deeper and deeper, as both Whitman and Rilke have done, into the self as it suffers this universe. One work in particular has become a classic of 20th-century poetry, the powerful sequence Kinnell called The Book of Nightmares. Here, taking as his point of departure the experience of being a parent, he develops a series of poems that touch on war, suffering, hope, the experience of being an outcast, indeed all of the great themes of perennial importance, treated in this sequence with immense compassion and a formal excellence that would serve any poetry apprentice as an in-house workshop par excellence.
Of the generation of Levertov, Bly, Ginsberg and Ashbery, Galway Kinnell offers a modernist voice aware of the urgency of poetry and its prophetic propensities, its rooting under the epidermis of our living. Like the great John Donne, his work points to a humanity where the individual struggles with himself, first of all, but struggles too with the baser instincts that set humanity at war with itself.
But I guess I'm here. So I must take care. For here
one has to keep facing the right way, or one sees one dies, and one dies.
I'm not sure I'm going to like it living here in the future.
I don't think I can keep on doing it indefinitely.
- First Day of the Future
The detail, rescued from memory, the simple and wholly recognisable moment that takes its place within the vast and natural awareness radiating from such a moment, the humanity of it, the breathing and breadth of the moment of epiphany, the clinging and the healing of love that redeems us: such themes close to the heart sing aloud in Kinnell's work:
You scream, waking from a nightmare. When I sleepwalk
into your room, and pick you up,
and hold you up in the moonlight, you
cling to me hard,
as if clinging could save us. I think
you think
I will never die, I think I exude
to you the permanence of smoke or
stars,
even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you.
- The Book of Nightmares
Kinnell has always been aware of the rapid demise of what is precious to human living. Poetry then, has become for him a way of admonishment. But this is done from the inside out, by a portrayal of the individual's experience of gravity and of grace. From this personal window, looking out, he has written one of the most effective longer poems on the tragedy of the Twin Towers. I do not wish to suggest that he sets himself up as a kind of Jonah or Job to our times, but that his exploration through poetry is a deeply serious one, done with a deftness and lightness that leave the reader gasping with recognition.
When one has lived a long time alone,
one wants to live again among men and women,
to return to that place where one's ties with the human
broke, where the disquiet of death and now also
of history glimmers its firelight on faces,
where the gaze of the new baby looks
past the gaze
of the great granny, and where lovers speak,
on lips blowsy from kissing, that
language
the same in each mouth, and like birds at daybreak
blether the song that is both earth's and heaven's,
until the sun has risen, and they stand
in a habit of being made one: kingdom come,
when one has lived a long time alone.
- When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone
Some years ago, the wise and discrete US ambassador to Ireland, Jean Kennedy Smith, gave a small party in the residence in the Phoenix Park at which she had asked Galway Kinnell to read his poems. The gentle yet resonating voice, the humanity and wholeness of the experience, the kindly and knowing awareness of our earthy living, all of it offered a view of ambassadorship that was richly rewarding and deeply moving. The presentation of the possibility of hope and redemption through such a voice, in such a location, was one of the profoundest presentations I could ever imagine of what has been a once great nation. Kinnell's return to Ireland, and to Cúirt is an occasion to be cherished and celebrated.
Galway Kinnell will read with the Romanian writer, Nina Cassian, on Thur, Apr 21, at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, at 8.30pm. Admission €12/€10