GALWAY KINNELL 

1^st February 1927 – 28^th October 2014

When I think of Galway, it is his voice which comes back most strongly – clear, gentle, exquisitely nuanced, yet coming forth with the power of a bellow from the heart of the earth.

This poet who said once of the best poems ‘If a stone could speak your poem would be its words.’ 

I first saw Galway when he came to give a poetry reading at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, as part of their international poetry series then still curated by the legendary Robert Woof. My first impression was of a great bear of a man with this voice which, though soft, could fill the entire room.

It was his second visit to the Wordsworth Trust, and there was a palpable sense of expectation in that packed-full room as the seasoned audience hung on his words totally rapt in complete involvement and the love that I was later to find he inspired everywhere he went.

His New Selected Poems, an update of the book which won him a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, had been brought to this country by Bloodaxe in 2001, gathering together poems from eight collections. From this he read such favourites as “The Bear”, “The Porcupine”, “Oatmeal” and “The Deconstruction of Emily Dickinson” as well as the strong new poems he customarily would write specially for the occasion.

During one of these poems there was a squeal from somewhere behind us and a flustered young woman got up and was rushing with her baby towards the door when Galway made an expansive gesture with his hand and, smiling to the woman, implored her to stay, crying infant and all.

I was sitting with my friend, the writer Elizabeth Stott, and because of my deafness she was kind enough to make notes for me during the interview Robert Woof conducted after the reading.

Pamela Woof asked Galway if he wrote for himself or for his reader. ‘Neither,’ he said, ‘I write for being.’ His use of the language of speech and the first person, he explained, was an attempt to find the quintessential moment deep inside oneself. The more truly one can find this the more likely it is that the poem would be recognized by others.

Afterwards there was a dinner with the poet, and Robert Woof had me sit with Galway’s wife Bobbie Bristol. Usually I found these dinners quite a challenge because of my deafness, but such was Bobbie’s clarity, and patience in writing down the things I could not understand that we could converse freely and joyously. By the end of the meal we were friends and Bobbie invited me to a reading Galway was giving the next day at the Morden Tower in Newcastle, and asked me to take copies of my books with me.

And so the next day I went to see Galway read again in the candlelight and shadows of the intimate space which is Morden Tower. Here, too, he was welcomed as an old friend, having read there before in the wake of the Children of Albion revolution Tom Pickard and his circle had been fomenting.

Bobbie brought me to Galway and introduced us. Galway signed my copy of his Selected Poems and I handed over my promised two books. Despite my protests Galway wrote a cheque there and then with his thick-nibbed fountain pen, saying ‘It is a sweet moment for a poet when someone buys their books,’ in his rich and resonant voice.

It was the start of a dear friendship, the kind of literary friendship that Galway had a gift for, but that I knew I was fortunate to experience even once in my lifetime.

It was a friendship embodied in whichever poem we each shared and worked on together at the time. Galway believed the only way of working on poetry was in the poem itself. The poem for him was a place to negotiate presence in the world, a place where outer and inner meet, to ‘say in its own music what matters most.’

He did not agree with those who described him as a ‘nature poet’. For him, the non-human in all its forms was the essential context in which the human race exists. So he saw no separation between ‘nature’ and ‘us’. Talking to Daniela Gioseffi in her 2001 interview (PoetsUSA) he said ‘I don’t think of myself as a “nature poet.” I don’t recognize the distinction between nature poetry and, what would be the other thing? Human civilization poetry? We are creatures of the earth… only one among the many animal species of the earth.’ Speaking of the James Wright poem “Sitting By the Bank of a River”, he added ‘Without that identification with the other living things of the earth we’ll never save ourselves or the earth.’ What was important was the ability to enter into the inner life of other beings, to make it one’s own, and in so doing to transform both it and oneself. Perhaps the most famous instance where he does this in his own work is his poem “The Bear”.  He confessed in another interview ‘I’ve been close to bears but not close enough to smell them.’ Instead, the ‘imaginary smell’ was ‘not descriptive or naturalistic, but having to do with our sympathetic feelings, our capacity to know the life of another creature by imagining it.’

The remote ruined farmhouse in Vermont which he purchased in 1960 and restored, soaking every inch of it in his own sweat in the process, and which became his family home, was the perfect setting for encounters with bears and other creatures. In a letter to me he wrote:

Last week I was in the house alone, after being away a few days, and just as I turned to go up the stairs to bed I saw a bat. I sort of guided it into Bobbie's study and then it hid somewhere. I don't like them to sleep in the house, so I opened a window wide and closed the door to the rest of the house, and left him to his devices. In the morning he was nowhere to be seen. I am delighted because we haven't had bats for a few years. The next morning I went out the back to pick some blackberries for breakfast. Then I heard someone tapping the upper window of the barn and I looked up and it was--a hawk. I rushed up for I knew he hadn't meant to get into this mess. I took a towel, my implement for rescuing errant birds. When I came up the stairs there he was, sitting at the window. I let him sit a moment, to control my excitement and to give me a chance to observe him, he was a kestrel, or sparrow hawk (so named for their favorite food not their size), with a wonderful russet back dotted with splotches and a handsome tail. But quickly, remembering he might have been trapped up there for three or four days I took my towel and approached him and then suddenly spread it over him and clutching him gently through the towel carried him down and out and looked him in the eyes and let him go sweeping away.’

He was profoundly engaged in the world in life as in his art. An outspoken critic of the Vietnam war, he toured the country with fellow poets giving anti-war readings. He was active in the civil rights movement and worked in the field for the Congress of Racial Equality and was injured and arrested during a workplace integration in Louisiana. He described in an interview how at first he threw himself into action to the extent of excluding his own poetry, but later gained a better understanding of the relationship of art and life. In the time I knew him he would often express concern about our treatment of the earth and the environment. He always chose an alternative to flying where possible. He once said, speaking of his friend Stanley Kunitz: ‘Rilke said, “There is an ancient enmity between our lives and the great works we do.” Stanley believes in an ancient collaboration between our lives and the works we do.’ The same could be said of Galway himself.

As Poet Laureate for the state of Vermont between 1989 and 1993 he worked tirelessly to bring poetry to new audiences and to bring poets to the state, organizing readings that he insisted should be free to attend. It was fitting that the state honoured him with a special gathering and reading at the Statehouse in August 2014 two months before he died of leukemia.

Though he was a wonderful, erudite and inspirational teacher and mentor to many, and held university posts, Galway was never in his heart an academic. His own, typically modest version of this was to claim that he had never been allowed to teach literature to students, but ‘only’ creative writing. The truth was that he was so deeply committed to the inner life of the poem that he would always keep a portion of the year free from the duties of university work. “Deconstructing Emily Dickinson” is a poem that gives a glimpse of his feelings about the relationship of theory and poetry. His own approach was like that of Whitman, to deal with inner life through real things. Indeed, he originally started writing The Book of Nightmares under the Rilkean title The Things.

Galway would half-jokingly claim to know nothing of rhythm and technique, though the reality was that he believed that ‘in poetry there is no such thing as technique that can be talked about apart from the poems that use it.’ What he called ‘form and convention’ was something he saw himself reacting against, as had, in their own time, Wordsworth and Coleridge, or Pound and Eliot. The essential thing for him was, not theory, or the finding of a more correct theory, but ‘a personal, psychological question: whether one can get past the censors in one’s mind and say what really matters without shame or exhibitionism.’ For him, ‘form properly speaking also has to do with the inner shape of the poem.’

Well known for constantly rewriting and reworking his poems, and discarding them if he was not satisfied (Bobbie had joked to me about his 2006 manuscript for Strong Is Your Hold that it reminded her of their much-loved friend and neighbor Grace Paley’s book title Enormous Changes at the Last Minute) he did so, I believe, not because of a concept of seeking perfection but because in that process was the place where he lived his life.

In addition to his own poetry collections (Strong Is Your Hold, the last one, was published in 2006, and brought to the UK by Bloodaxe in 2007: I understand from Bobbie that a posthumous volume may be in preparation) Galway’s other publications included one novel coming out of an early period as a journalist in Iran and translations of Rilke, Villon and Bonnefoy. Translation was, for him, a way to enter most deeply into poems of another language, and in so doing to experience transformation oneself. Indeed, this could be said of his approach to the English language itself, which he spoke of loving ‘more than he could possibly say’ in that Dove Cottage interview. No other language, he said, had so many ways of denoting real things. His own vocabulary was unusually vast and rich, and he loved to rescue and use little known words with expressive qualities that embodied his poem in a very direct and corporeal way.

He was generous to his fellow poets, supporting many with his encouragement, recommendations, hospitality, friendship and also material help. He several times offered to help me with the expense of travel to the USA and at the end of my 2010 visit – the last time I saw him – insisted on giving me a generous cheque for the two days I spent helping him prepare some poems for a reading. And I knew he was generous also to others.

He did not subscribe to the divisions and factions in the poetry world, but celebrated the wide diversity in the practice of poetry and told Gioseffi how he had enjoyed reading with a cowboy poet and supporting slams. Self-serving displays of cleverness he described as ‘nastiness’ and he never engaged in such himself. He was quite capable of calling out a respected peer on sexism as an extension of his love and care. He confessed he had become less and less fond of the ‘grand style’ with age, or a poetic stance placing the ‘good’ poet against ‘bad’ others. Self-knowledge and a searing honesty about oneself and one’s own capacities for evil were vital, and were at the heart of his own work.

Strong Is Your Hold, with its Whitman epigraph from which the title was taken, is haunted by a clear-eyed awareness of approaching death. Death had always been a central theme for Galway. In “Neverland (Imperfect Thirst)” he suggests, in speaking of his sister as she nears her own death, ‘Knowing death comes, imagining it, smelling it,/may be a fair price for consciousness.’

In an interview Galway had said ‘I don’t take at face value the doctrines that suggest some further individual life for a person. The most difficult thing for the human being is the knowledge that he will die.’

Galway chose the title Imperfect Thirst from a passage by Sohrawardi, a Persian mystic poet, which he places at the beginning of the book:

          ‘If your eyes are not deceived by the mirage

          Do not be proud of the sharpness of your understanding;

          It may be your freedom from this optical illusion

          Is due to the imperfectness of your thirst.’

Steeped in awareness of death, the book ends with a description of how Galway heard his sister’s voice for a short time ‘from under the horizon.’ It is as if the strength of his thirst at the limits of human life and consciousness creates a question, a gap in his knowing. It is in his willingness to acknowledge and engage with that gap – the negative capability of Keats – that Galway is almost a mystic himself, a mystic for a skeptical age.

Josephine Dickinson              

Back to POETRY