MPR’s Nancy Fushan profiles and interviews poet Galway Kinnell.

Kinnell reads a selection from his works at Hamline University under the sponsorship of the Loft's Mentor Poet Series, which brings nationally-known poets in contact with local writers.

Transcript:

(00:00:05) Then it was dusk in Illinois the small boy after an afternoon of karting dung hung on the rail fence acept thing. We re to crying dark was growing tall and he began to hear the pond frogs all calling on his ear with what seemed their Joy Soon their sound was pleasant for a boy listening in the Smoky Dusk and the Nightfall of Illinois. And from the Yields, two small boys came bearing cornstalk violins and they rubbed the corn stock bows with raisins and the 3sat they're scraping of their Joy. It was now Fine Music the frogs and the boys did in the Towering, Illinois Twilight, make and into dark in spite of a shoulders ache a boys hunched body loved out of a stalk the first song of his happiness. And the song woke his heart to the darkness and into the sadness of Joy
(00:01:10) poet Galway Cannell reading one of his early published Works called first song. It reflects his interest in capturing the intricate relationship between man and the environment now in his 50s. He's known for his use of nature imagery and unusual sounds in free verse the significance of those elements doesn't seem surprising. Once he begins to talk about those writers who have influenced him over the
(00:01:34) years. Pause the first influence on me in my teens was Edgar Allan Poe. I found his his things like Annabel Lee simply. Contained a magic that I never found elsewhere in the world and thrilled me and it was a profound influence and I don't know quite how where it's gone. But I know it's still there in me. I think I think in fact as a writer, I've spent probably a lot of my time struggling to suppress or escape from that influence because it's a little too. Almost morbidly beautiful for my taste. But then later on I came to like Yates a great deal and is there was that time I started writing formal rhymed metered poetry in in discipleship to his poetry and tried to make my poems sound like his and it wasn't until I was about 27 years old teaching Whitman in France that I turned back to free verse because of because of how it was because I found Whitman just extraordinary and a great freeing influence and at that point I felt much happier with my writing
(00:03:05) Cannell says he spends considerable time refining the phrases establishing the rhythm of a Secular poem Only with that constant revision can he achieve a melding of sound and image
(00:03:17) poetry takes place in sound. I guess I would say it takes place in the in the music of the language and that has to be sounded out and that's why people when write poetry always write by hand and and feel as well as mutter as they as they work. why that should be well it's because poetry is a really is a primitive art and goes back to the time before there was rioting and part of part of at least the effort of poetry is to get into the into the body via the vocal cords, and the Tongue and the lips and the teeth and so on the music of the creation, which is the which is which flows through the language when it's being when it's transformed into into poetry. I mean, that's that's the supreme goal of poetry in my opinion and it certainly was the original function of poetry. And now of course poetry has has branched out. I didn't become and become secular and in even in many cases a kind of materialistic discourse, but every so often in the in the greatest poems and the most interesting poems even now when here's some kind of thrilling and ancient and almost animal music and to me that's when one approaches
(00:05:05) poetry. When you work on a piece, it's almost as though you're sculpting words and I was struck by one poem. Which had was it the under music of Eternity that struck me as being a phrase that rang true then do those things just
(00:05:24) pop in well, sometimes I think sometimes for everybody poems come flow very fast and then other times Or for some than for others more for me than for most they come very slowly and I tend to revise a lot a lot more than most people I think but on the other hand I treasure and and try not to change too much those those passages which seemed to come by themselves. Even if there are lines in the my don't quite understand they have some kind of authority to me. That I don't want to tamper with how many nights have I Lane in Terror o Creator Spirit maker of Night and Day only to walk out the next morning over the Frozen World hearing under the creaking of snow faint peaceful breaths snake bear earthworm aunt and above me a wild Crow crying your yaw. Yaw. From a branch nothing cried from ever in my life. I'm going to read a section from long poem The Book of nightmares and I got read number seven called little sleeps head sprouting hair in the Moonlight when I sleep walk into your room and pick you up and hold you up in the Moonlight. You cling to me hard as if clinging could save us. I think you think I will never die. I think I exude to you the permanence of smoke or Stars even as my broken arms heal themselves around you. I have heard you tell the sun don't go down. I have stood by as you told the flower. Don't grow old don't die. Little mod, I would blow the flame out of your silver cup. I would suck the rot from your fingernail. I would brush your sprouting hair of the Dying Light. I would scrape the rust of your Ivory bones. I would help death Escape through the little ribs of your body. I would outcome eyes the ashes of your cradle back into would I would let nothing of you go ever until washer women feel the This fall asleep in their hands and hens scratch their Spell across Hatchet blades and grease refuses to slide in the Machinery of progress and iron twists weapons toward the true north and men feel as free on Earth as fleas on the bodies of men and yet Perhaps. This is the reason you cry this the nightmare you wake crying from being forever in the presence. pre trembling of a house that falls In a restaurant once everyone quietly eating you clambered up on my lap to all the mouthfuls rising toward all the mouths at the top of your voice. You cried your one word Kaka and each spoonful stopped a moment in mid air in its withering Steam. Yes, you cling because I like you only sooner than you will go down the path to the other side of the darkness your arms like the shoes Left Behind like the adjectives in the halting speech a very old men that used to be able to call up the Forgotten nouns. And you yourself some impossible Tuesday in the year two thousand and Nine and Nine will walk out among the stones of the field in the rain and the stones saying over there one word CG and the raindrops hitting you on the Fontanel over and over and you standing there unable to let them
(00:09:56) in.
(00:09:59) If one day it happens, you find yourself with someone you love in a cafe at one end of the poem Mirabeau at the zinc bar where white wine stands in upward opening glasses. And if you commit then as we did the error of thinking one day all this will only be Memory. Learn to reach deeper into the Sorrows to come to touch the almost imaginary bones under the face to here under the laughter the wind crying across the stones kiss the mouth that tells you here here is the world this mouth this laughter these Temple Bones the still UND anst Cadence of Vanishing. In the light of the Moon sends back I can see in your eyes the hand that waved Once In My Father's Eyes a tiny kite wobbling far up in the Twilight of his last look and the angel of all Mortal things. Let's go the string. Back you go into your crib the last Blackbird lights up, his gold wings farewell your eyes closed inside your head in sleep already in your dreams the hours begin to sing little sleeps head sprouting hair in the Moonlight when I come back we will walk out together. We will go out together among the ten thousand things each scratched in time. I'm with such knowledge the wages of dying is love. I only read well when there's someone listening. the reading is not directed at no one it's directed at someone and there has to be someone there when there's a when there's a really fine audience. You actually can it's as though listening creates a vacuum that draws your drawers your voice into it. It actually draws the sound out of you and and it's a rather magical feeling to be reading into in. To a listening into a into a silence so deep it's drawing you into
(00:12:36) it. There is often just a sense of electrical almost response interaction between poet and audience
(00:12:44) sure. There should always be some there's always some response of some sort or another and so one reads in part that response the that relationship is is controlled by the person who's reading
(00:12:59) this idea of control. What kind of If against does that have both in the actual reading sense, but also in the
(00:13:07) writing as far as writing goes the need is just the opposite the need is to let go to say everything you can without self-consciousness to let what you're saying lead. You you can go in the direction of sort of overblown
(00:13:25) emotion. Is that something that happens occasionally for you?
(00:13:33) I think so. Yeah, I think I may be more subject to that than most writers. So. In fact some you know, sometimes I've had trouble reading some of my poems aloud because I've understood while facing an audience something that I haven't understood while muttering the poems to myself namely that there was something a little melodramatic in all those and all those words.
(00:14:21) What do you do in those cases?
(00:14:24) Well, either discard the poem or try to clean it up. So to speak or tone it down or clarify it some way
(00:14:36) revising a poem then could be just a continuous Evolution for the work itself.
(00:14:41) Yeah, and and I think reading sometimes plays a role in revising a poem of the kind I suggested and maybe one of the most exciting things is to be on a reading tour. While writing a poem and every night amidst of the poems, you know that you've got you've written a while back and feel comfortable with everyone every night read the newest version of the poem you're working on until it tastes, right? How
(00:15:11) do you know when it tastes right?
(00:15:13) Well, I suppose the expression tastes right means that you don't know you just taste it and it's right. It's like a cook. How does he know it tastes right? But he tastes it it tastes good and I think poetry is a bit like that. It's kind of it's it's not explicable. I have a son whose name is Fergus I have recorded some of his adventures in verse this is called Fergus falling. I used to call it Fergus Falls of that. I was soon as soon told what was what and I it takes place in Vermont and and On those those pine trees that were planted during the soil Bank program under Eisenhower in the various abandoned Farms. There are now about or this time. They're about 30 feet high and he fell out of the top of one of them and he survived I should say that because there may be some false suspense in the poem. He climbed to the top of one of those million White Pines set. Have to cross the emptying pastures of the 50s some program to enrich the rich and rebuke the forefathers who cleared it all once with ox and acts climbed to the top probably to get out of the Shadow not of those forefathers, but if this father and saw for the first time down in its Valley Bruce Pond giving off its steam in the afternoon. Pond where Clarence akeley came on Sunday mornings to cut down the Cedars around the shore. I'd sometimes hear the slow spun days of his work. He's gone where Milton Norway came up behind me while I was fishing and stood awhile before I knew he was there. He's the one who put the cedar shingles on the house some have curled or split a few have blown off. He's gone where Gus Newland logged in the cold snap of 58. The only man willing to go into those woods that never got More than 10 below. He's gone Pond where to Ward's of the state wandered on Halloween the National Guard search for them in November in vain the next fall a hunter found their skeletons huddled together in vain. They're gone Pond were an old fisherman in a row boat sits drowning hooked worms when he goes he's replaced and he's never
(00:18:10) gone.
(00:18:13) And when Fergus saw the pond for the first time in the clear evening saw it sold - down there in its old place in the valley. He became heavier suddenly in his bones. The way fledglings do just before they fly and the soft Pine cracked. I would not have heard his cry if my electric saw had been working. It's carbide teeth speeding through the Bland Spruce of our time or burning black arcs into some scavenged Hemlock plank, like dark circles under eyes when the brain thinks too close to the skin, but but I was sawing by hand and I heard that cry as though he were attacked we ran out. When we bent over him, he said Galway in S. I saw a pond his face went gray. His eyes fluttered closed a frightening moment. Yes a pond that lets off its missed unclear afternoons of August in that Valley to which many have come for their Reasons from which many have gone a few for their reasons. Most not we're even now An old fisherman only the Pinetops can see sits in the dry gray wood of his rowboat waiting for
(00:19:41) pickerel.
(00:19:47) And this this poem is about Fergus of a few years earlier than the prime of his first oedipal phase. It's called after making love we hear footsteps. For I can snore like a bullhorn or play loud music or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman. And Fergus will only sink deeper into his dreamless sleep which goes by all in one Flash. But let there be that heavy breathing or a stifled come cry anywhere in the house and he will wrench himself awake and make for it on the Run. as now we lie together after making love quiet touching along the length of our bodies familiar touch of the long married and he appears in his baseball pajamas that happens the neck opening so small he has to screw them on which one day may make him wonder about the mental capacity of baseball players and says are you loving And snuggling may I join He Flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child in the half Darkness. We look at each other and smile and touch arms across his little startlingly muscled body this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making Sleeper only the Mortal sounds can sing awake this blessing love gives again
(00:21:46) into our arms those two poems are from canals newest book to be published this month mortal acts mortal
(00:21:59) words. The phrase comes from P track. He used
(00:22:04) in a poem
(00:22:06) and one of his last poems. He said Mortal Mortal acts and Mortal words have put their burden on my soul. And he meant by that that he had he had been prevented from from liver living truly. Holy and and Christian Life by his interest
(00:22:31) in
(00:22:32) the things and creatures and experiences of this world, and he regretted that I think he was wrong to regret that and so I've I'm using the title asserting kind of gladness in being absorbed by those things.
(00:22:53) What is the gladness for you?
(00:22:56) Well, I don't I don't know that. That you're not asking me in that question to compose a poem is after all that's what but most poems even those even those claiming to be about the next world are celebrating. the things and creatures and the events of this world and to to find what's moving and beautiful and Attractive about them is produces the kind of gladness. I have always felt a certain division in that respect a certain divided State of Mind divided loyalties between this world and some desire to transcend it. And I think I've sort of solved those those two Tendencies and I know you're going to ask me what's the solution is a lot of people might profit from but again, it's nothing I can tell
(00:24:10) you. You've reached midlife in a rather calm and Resolute stage.
(00:24:18) Well, I don't know as in such matters. You should follow the advice of Aristotle, which is only when your life has come to an end. May you turn back and characterize it as such and such or such and such because if you characterize it too early as being a happy life great, Misfortune May. Quite easily before you the next day and likewise in the middle of my life having arrived here firm and Resolute would be tempting the gods too
(00:24:54) much poet Galway Cannell. This is Nancy Fusion.