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NY Times, Oct. 29 2014
Galway Kinnell, Plain-Spoken Poet, Is Dead at 87
By DANIEL LEWIS
Galway Kinnell, who was recognized with both a Pulitzer Prize and a
National Book Award for a body of poetry that pushed deep into the heart
of human experience in the decades after World War II, died on Tuesday
at his home in Sheffield, Vt. He was 87.
The cause was leukemia, his wife, Barbara K. Bristol, said.
Mr. Kinnell came of age among a generation of poets who were trying to
get past the modernism of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and write verses
that, as he said, could be understood without a graduate degree. He
succeeded well enough that all of the volumes of poems he published from
1960 to 2008 — evocations of urban streetscapes, pastoral odes,
meditations on mortality and frank explorations of sex — are still in print.
The Beats were contemporaries, as were adherents of the New Criticism,
with their emphasis on the formal analysis of structure and meaning. But
he was inclined to go his own way, developing a lyrical style influenced
by the past. With his breakthrough poem, “The Avenue Bearing the Initial
of Christ Into the New World,” published in 1960, admirers placed him in
the footsteps of Walt Whitman.
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“Galway Kinnell cares about everything,” the poet and novelist James
Dickey once observed. Over the years he lent passionate support to the
antiwar movement, to freedom of expression in repressive countries, to
environmental causes and civil rights. In 1963 he went to work for the
Congress of Racial Equality, helping to register black voters in
Louisiana — an effort that got him thrown in jail, with a pimp and a car
thief for cellmates.
Through it all, he held that it was the job of poets to bear witness.
“To me,” he said, “poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and
saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or
her to be on earth at this moment.”
Wait
by Galway Kinnell
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.
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