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Galway Kinnell | |
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The Critics: "One of the true master poets of his generation. . . . There are few others writing today in whose work we feel so strongly the full human presence." Morris Dickstein "At a time when so many poets are content to be skillful and trivial, Kinnell speaks with a big voice about the whole of life." Robert Langbaum "The subjects and themes to which he has returned again and again are the relation of the self to violence, transience, and death; the power of wilderness and wildness; and the primitive underpinnings of existence that are disguised by the superstructure of civilization. Kinnell's approach to these topics is by way of an intense concentration on physical objects, on the constant impingement of the other-than-human on our lives." Charles Frazier "By turn and with level facility, Kinnell is a poet of the landscape, a poet of soliloquy, a poet of the city's underside and a poet who speaks for thieves, pushcart vendors and lumberjacks with an unforced simulation of the vernacular." Vernon Young "Kinnell's willed choice and his one necessity are to explore the confusion of a life beyond salvation, a death beyond redemption. The result is often compelling reading." Alan Helms, "It is increasingly clear that Kinnell's ambition all along has been to hold death up to life, as if he had it by the scruff of the neck, and to keep it there until he has extracted a blessing from it." Robert Hass "We see that the idea of paradise gets reborn in the cultivation of waste places. . . . Life is found in death, fountains in deserts, gain in loss, spring in winter, light in darkness. All these matters are the recurrent subjects of Kinnell's verse. He is a hero of the Absolute whose civilization exists in a burning mind which dreams forever upon itself, its first imagining." Jerome McGann "The persistence of fire and death imagery throughout Kinnell's poetry forces us to disregard, or at least to minimize, the habitual expectation of ironic distance that we bring to much modern poetry. His obviously attempts to be a poetry of immersion into experience rather than of suspension above it." Charles Molesworth "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World is one of the most vivid legacies of The Waste Land in English, building its immense rhetorical power from the materials of several dialects, litanies of place, and a profound sense of the spiritual disintegration that Eliot divined in modern urban life. And, like Eliot's, Kinnell's is a religious poem. . . . Since it is impossible to isolate any single passage from the magnificent sprawl of this poem, I can only suggest its importance by stressing that my comparison of it to The Waste Land was intended to be less an arbitrary reference than an effort to estimate the poem's durable achievement." James Atlas "Kinnell's work is proof that poems can still be written, and written movingly and convincingly, on those subjects that in any age fascinate, quicken, disturb, confound, and sadden the hearts of men and women: eros, the family, mortality, the life of the spirit, war, the life of nations. . . . He always meets existence head-on, without evasion or wishful thinking. When Kinnell is at the top of his form, there is no better poet writing." Richard Tillinghast The Poet: "I've tried to carry my poetry as far as I could, to dwell on the ugly as fully, as far, and as long, as I could stomach it. Probably more than most poets I have included in my work the unpleasant because I think if you are ever going to find any kind of truth to poetry it has to be based on all of experience rather than on a narrow segment of cheerful events." Interview, How poems begin: I always have poems in progress, and these I carry around all the time. I've never faced a blank slate. It might be rather frightening, but also perhaps thrilling. I'd like to try it. How poems finish: Unless a poem comes to have the authority of a finished poem, an inevitability about it, it isn't a poem. You know when the poem is done, not so much because it completes an idea, but because it tastes good from beginning to end. Music in poetry: It comes from a sense of language, what is called an ‘ear’, an appreciation of the music language is capable of. Music itself is something else; it has its origin elsewhere. I listen to music a lot, and I have faith that it can only help my poetry, but I have no evidence that it does. On translation: In translating, you learn a vision and how to embed that vision in your own language. If you translate with respect for the great original, you can discover new sides to yourself, you can stretch and change your own way of writing. On the other hand, if you seek to use the translated poem as a step toward a new poem in English, nothing may happen. On readings: I'd like an audience to get the whole poem, but minds wander, a listener fixes on something and the poem goes on without him. As for myself, if I feel I'm reading well, and if I have a responsive audience, I get a reassuring sense that things I write out of the most private experience can speak for others too. On readers, ideal and otherwise: I try to write my poems as truly as I can. After that it's out of my hands. I don't write with a view to giving something to the reader. One's own self, projected, is the ideal reader. Anybody who recognizes the poem and puts something of his or her own experience into it is the ideal reader. The less than ideal reader is the one who reads without engagement, very often, the critic. On submissions: Never think of any magazine as being too small or insignificant to be worth publishing in. A magazine becomes significant when interesting people appear in it. If you keep writing, and keep getting better, eventually you'll come to the point where magazines will seek you out. Nobody gets published right away and there's no hurry: If you're no good, it doesn't matter anyway; and if you are good, your time will come sooner or later. (To read more, see Kinnell’s collection of interviews, Walking Down the Stairs, and/or view the comprehensive biographical materials on the Barnes & Noble website <www.bn.com>)
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