One Art

BY PROF. VAROL AKMAN

Galway Kinnell

"I never call myself a poet. Robert Frost said that the term poet is a word of praise and therefore one must never apply it to oneself or it sounds like boasting."

Galway Kinnell was born February 1, 1927, in Providence, Rhode Island. His parents were immigrants from Scotland and Ireland. When he turned five, the family moved to Pawtucket so that his father could get a job during the Great Depression. Kinnell came to love poetry when he discovered, in an anthology in his parents' bookshelf, the verse of Edgar Allan Poe. He was magnetized by the musicality of Poe's work. (Later, he would also become fascinated by Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.) When he entered Princeton, he already knew that writing poetry was his only ambition in life. He graduated summa cum laude in 1948, later earning a master's degree from the University of Rochester.

Kinnell served in the U.S. Navy and then traveled to Europe and the Middle East, studying in Paris as a Fulbright fellow. He lived in Tehran for two years, first as a Fulbright professor at a university and then as a writer for the English language edition of an Iranian newspaper. Returning home in 1960, he became active in the Civil Rights Movement and worked on registering African American voters in the South. Joining an effort towards workplace integration in Louisiana, he was arrested. Kinnell once remarked that since his formative years he had accepted as true that all men and women are equal and should be treated as such. Poems inspired by his association with the Civil Rights Movement and his vigorous dissent against the Vietnam War appear in Body Rags (1967) and The Book of Nightmares (1971).

Critic Ralph Mills regarded Kinnell's first book, What a Kingdom It Was (1960), as "one of those volumes signaling decisive changes in the mood and character of American poetry." His other volumes of poetry include Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1964), Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980), Selected Poems (1980), The Past (1985), When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (1990), Imperfect Thirst (1994), and A New Selected Poems (2000).

A former MacArthur fellow, Rockefeller grantee, and State Poet of Vermont (in which he was preceded by Robert Frost), Kinnell served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. In 1982, Selected Poems won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Kinnell was awarded the Frost Medal by the Poetry Society of America in 2002. More recently, he was winner of the 2010 Wallace Stevens Award. (The jury included among others Marilyn Hacker, Sharon Olds, and Marie Ponsot.)

The following piece about death and love - visit
http://www-tc.pbs.org/newshour/rss/media/2006/12/kinnell_note.mp3 to hear it from Kinnell's voice - is from Strong Is Your Hold (2006), his most recent collection dedicated to his wife. It is a version of "mind uploading," the (as of yet) imaginary process of scanning a brain and copying its contents elsewhere. Interviewed by Chard deNiord in The American Poetry Review (2011), Kinnell elaborated on the irreligious tone of the poem:

CD -- In your elegies for your sister and your mother, you use the words "elsewhere" and "someplace else" to describe that realm they have crossed over to. In your poem "Promissory Note," you use the word "oblivion" to describe what follows death. These atheistic references remind me of Whitman's musing on death in "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," where he also resists using religious language to describe the after non-world.

GK -- I must have been 18 or 19 when I realized that much of Christianity is made of wishes. When I graduated from college, my mother asked me if there was a heaven. I thought: Who am I to crush her hopes? I said, "I don't know." "What?" she replied rather indignantly, "You spent four years at Princeton and you didn't even learn if there is a heaven!!" In retrospect, I don't think she was hoping that my answer would strengthen her faith, but simply hoping to find the truth.

NOTE:  I am planning to devote one of my forthcoming columns to reader favorites. Please send mail to akman@bilkent and indicate the poems you like best. I will list all submissions (along with your name, unless you instruct me otherwise) and feature a few of them.

Promissory Note

If I die before you
which is all but certain
then in the moment
before you will see me
become someone dead
in a transformation
as quick as a shooting star's
I will cross over into you
and ask you to carry
not only your own memories
but mine too until you
too lie down and erase us
both together into oblivion.