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| Photo credit: Richard Brown, from GalwayKinnell.com |
I missed the news when it first hit the wire, but the poetry world lost one of its most important voices this week when Galway Kinnell died at his home in Vermont on Tuesday. I fell in love with Kinnell’s work in my 20s and have returned to it periodically since.
Poetry.org has a wonderful tribute, with photos and several poems. But I wanted to point to a particular poem. “The Bear,” perhaps his most known poem (and one of a handful that turned me on to Kinnell’s magnificent gift), is a wonderful exploration of mind and space and time and language. I’ve included a YouTube clip of his reading — he also was a magnificent performer (I was lucky enough to see him read at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in the early 1990s):
I came across “The Bear” originally in an anthology, but then found the book Body Rags, which contains “The Bear,” as well as “Another Night in the Ruins” and “Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond.” It is a remarkable collection that moved me away from the simple approach to poetry I had been following. I was, until that moment, pretending to be some kind of cross between a modernist a la Eliot (I had somehow yet to discover William Carlos Williams) and a beat a la Ginsberg and Corso, with a little Black Mountain tossed in for good measure. Kinnell helped me realize that there were other modes, other voices, and Body Rags sent me in new directions and made me consider the world and the language in new ways.
The literary magazine Cold Front noted Kinnell’s death with one of his more recent poems, “A Promissory Note,” which you can read here and which seems like a perfect epitaph for one of American poetry’s most important voices.
Rest in peace, Mr. Kinnell.
Send me an e-mail.
Hank Kalet 