The Presence of Words A new collection invites another read of late Vermont poet Galway Kinnell B Y JI M SCHL EY COURTESY OF RICHARD BROWN
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munificently talented and prolific generation of American poets is leaving us. In recent years, we’ve lost Adrienne Rich, Philip Levine, Maxine Kumin, Daniel Hoffman, Carolyn Kizer, Galway Kinnell, and, in 2017, John Ashbery and Richard Wilbur — all writers born in the 1920s. One of those losses has particular significance for Vermonters. This month, Collected Poems was published as the final testament to Kinnell, who had a home in the Green Mountain State for more than 50 years. The volume assembles poems from all 14 books he published in his lifetime, along with seven newer poems. The book is beautifully paced in chapter-like sequences and introduced with a copious retrospective essay by poet Edward Hirsch. Locals will have a chance to celebrate both book and poet on Wednesday, December 13, at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum. The book’s coeditor, Barbara Bristol, will join readers Tune Faulkner, Jody Gladding, Melissa Hammerle, Bob Joly, Reeve Lindbergh and Lisa von Kann. For newcomers to Kinnell’s work, the event will reveal a writer whose poems are especially accessible via their vibrant and often comic storytelling. They are wonderful to read aloud, full of sonic complexities. Kinnell was born in 1927 in Providence, R.I., the son of a carpenter and a house cleaner, and grew up in the ramshackle mill town of Pawtucket, moving as a teen to New Hampshire. At Princeton University, his classmate was poet W.S. Merwin. After earning a master’s degree and doing some teaching, Kinnell spent much of a decade traveling in Europe and the Middle East, including more than a year in Iran, the setting of his novel Black Light. Returning to an America in tumult, Kinnell worked to promote integration and voter registration with the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In 1968, with other writers and editors, he signed a pledge to refuse payment of taxes in protest of the Vietnam War. The
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Kinnell told Yvonne Daley that he made his home in Vermont because “it’s good to live in a place where you’re not entirely disapproved of, where you’re in some sort of basic agreement with most of the people about how the political life should be organized, about what is the role of the human in the environment … There’s a general respect for the land and the other creatures, which in my mind is essential.” Kinnell would always speak of humans as “creatures,” not granting us a higher status than animals but rather viewing us as exalted by our existence among them. In audacious and generous poems such as “The Bear,” “The Porcupine,” “Flies” and “Saint Francis
KINNELL’S ARTISTIC CREDO WAS SACRAMENTAL CARNALITY,
BOTH SKEPTICAL AND PRAYERFUL.
Galway Kinnell with his dog
anguish and strife of that epoch appear ferociously on the page in Kinnell’s long poem The Book of Nightmares (1971). In 1960, for $800, Kinnell bought a 1750s-era house in Sheffield, in the Northeast Kingdom. For many years, he divided his time between Vermont and numerous colleges, where he taught literature and creative writing. Eventually, he received an endowed professorship at New York University. In 1982, Kinnell won the Pulitzer Prize for Selected Poems, which shared the 1983 National Book Award for Poetry
with Charles Wright. Kinnell served as a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets and produced vital translations of poets such as François Villon and Rainer Maria Rilke, along with editing an “essential” edition of Walt Whitman. From 1989 to ’93, he was Vermont’s state poet, a post later renamed poet laureate. When he retired from teaching in 1995, Kinnell moved full time to Sheffield, where he died in 2014 of leukemia. Interviewed for the 2005 book Vermont Writers: A State of Mind,
and the Sow,” humans are reawakened by transformative encounters with beasts that are marvelous yet real. Kinnell described Sheffield as “a little out of the way. You can’t get anywhere by driving through the town. It’s off by itself, unassuming.” And he told Daley that he appreciated the way his neighbors “respect poetry but don’t idealize it.” Kinnell had a dual subsistence, combining a home on North Country land that he loved with the excitement of traveling as a bard-for-hire to various universities in the U.S. and abroad. “I take sustenance from wanderlust,” he told Chard deNiord — the current Vermont poet laureate — in an interview that will be included in the forthcoming book from University of Pittsburgh Press I Would Lie to You If I Could. In the process, Kinnell wrote splendidly and sensuously of wild locales and cityscapes, and about the denizens of very different places. Whether the details are urban or rural, his strongest poems have the vigor