About the death of any friend one feels sadness; with some, though, that sadness is tempered by gratitude, by a feeling of privilege to have been able to live in the world at the same time as the one who’s gone. I knew Galway Kinnell for almost half a century, we were friends for a good part of that time, and that feeling of being fortunate to know him, to be able to be with him, never diminished.
In public and in private, he was a singular presence, physically imposing, with the kind of efficiency and lack of excess gestures that very powerful people can have, but he was also gentle in manner, warm and solicitous, and his voice had a certain resonant kindness, with overtones of sympathy and solicitude, all of which came through not only in person but when he recited his poems to his numerous and enthusiastic audiences. He was a musical, dramatic, moving reader of his own poetry, and, when he had the chance, he liked to read aloud the poetry of others: John Clare and Keats especially, and Whitman, and once I had the pleasure of hearing him read to an audience one of my own poems, which was—there’s no other word for it—thrilling.
A number of years ago, I was assigned to introduce Galway at a reading, and—I don’t remember quite why—I decided for once to tell the truth about the way one poet can feel about another. Here is what I said then, and what I still feel:
"There is a malady to which poets are susceptible, and to which they rarely admit, except to themselves, and even then only reluctantly. I’ve come to call this condition 'the syndrome of the sinking heart.' What sets this syndrome in motion is coming across a poem by a poet you hadn’t known before, or sometimes a poem you hadn’t known, or sometimes even a single passage in a poem, and you’re so taken aback by its originality, its breadth and depth, its dexterity, its ingenuity, its ease, its—there’s really no other word for it—genius, that you think, 'My God, how did he or she do that?' Then, all too quickly, you think, 'I can’t do that.' And then, 'I’ll never be able to do that, my brain can’t do that, my life can’t do that,' and that’s when the syndrome really takes hold, and the heart sinks, down to your gut, to your shoes, to the center of the earth.
"But then, fortunately, what happens—what always, thank goodness, happens—is that one’s envy and dismay turn to admiration and awe, which in turn lead to delight, then—and this part is always astonishing—to a kind of exaltation, which you all at once remember is what poetry is about in the first place. You’re exalted when you’re taken, captured, enraptured by such poetry, because you suddenly know that your own mind, your own life, can indeed do something, be something, you hadn’t ever conceived of them being, because the poem to which you’ve just given yourself has brought you to a way of seeing and thinking and feeling which wasn’t possible before, which simply didn’t exist for you before. So, at the end, the sinking-heart syndrome is transfigured to sheer, miraculous gratitude, and, after you’ve calmed down, even to some hope for something unexpected in your own work.
"Actually, people who write poems do occasionally own up to all this. Once, the poet Philip Levine and I were talking about Galway’s work, about how we first came across it—in both cases, it was with the great, vast poem 'The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ Into the New World,' which is about the Holocaust and Jews, and the Lower East Side and the life of the whole of New York City, and, it seems, everything else—and Phil and I confessed to one another the feeling we’d had back then of not only being dazzled by the poem, being nearly overwhelmed by it, but of recognizing, as Phil put it, that you knew there was someone now who could 'do it.' Neither of us had to tell each other about the sinking-heart syndrome, and neither had to say, either, what 'it' was: to write the poem that our moment in poetic and moral history had been waiting to be written, had desperately needed to be written, that it seemed couldn’t possibly be written, but had been, and oh, how it had been.
"Here’s how 'The Avenue' poem begins:
"Just that far into the poem, you knew you were hearing a voice you’d never before heard, and music that had never been put together in that suddenly now absolute essential way…"
I'll stop there, only to add that Galway never stopped astonishing, from that poem written so long ago to all the many great, original poems since—political poems, poignant and sexy love poems to his beloved wife, Bobbie, and poems of an always touching and forceful sympathy for all creatures, exalted and humble. His poem “Saint Francis and the Sow” is surely one of the great animal poems of all time, as well as one of the most moving poems on religion. It ends,
Galway Kinnell was one of, if not the most, admired poets of his time. His awards were many—the Pulitzer, a MacArthur, the American Book Award—but, beyond all that, there’s no one whose work has so often and with such consistency brought into the world a sense of wonder and exaltation, no one who so often discovered rich new harmonies of poetic language, no one who devised so many metaphors that resonate through so many levels of materiality and spirit, uniting the physical with the moral and passion with thought. In short, there’s no one whose work has elaborated so ample and comprehensive a vision of the lives we’ve lived.
Here are five poems by Galway Kinnell from the New Yorker's archive: "Turkeys," "Astonishment," "I, Coyote, Stilled Wonder," "The Silence of the World," and "Gravity."
