Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Here was the real thing, a writer grappling with the most basic and mysterious issues of existence, in heartbreakingly fluid, wry, beautiful poetry.

   One Saturday afternoon, tucked into a booth at the Poetry Library in London, earphones clamped about my ears, I watched a video on
contemporary US poets. One of those featured was Galway Kinnell. Although I’d read a few of his poems, he wasn’t someone I knew much about, but I was transfixed. Here seemed to be the real thing, a writer grappling with the most basic and mysterious issues of existence, in heartbreakingly fluid, wry, beautiful poetry.

   Some years later and I am at the Manchester Literature Festival to hear Galway Kinnell read and to talk to him afterwards about writing
poetry. I now know that he is one of America’s most important and distinguished poets. His 1982 Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in the US, and he is a former MacArthur Fellow, State Poet of Vermont and Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Bloodaxe Books has recently published his latest collection, Strong Is Your Hold. The title comes from Walt Whitman’s ‘Last Invocation’: ‘Strong is Your hold, O mortal flesh, / Strong is your hold, O love.’ Reading the collection on the bus to and from work, I’ve found myself inconveniently moved to tears by easy and exquisite lines on love and friendship and death and family and the sacramental mystery of the natural world.

   Kinnell is a tall, square-set figure, standing at the lectern below the banked seats of the auditorium at Manchester University’s Martin
Harris Centre for Music and Drama. Despite his eighty years and a long day of workshops and interviews, he stands for an hour, reading to us in a measured, cadenced voice, delighting us with the poetry – and with the anecdotes he uses to introduce many of the
poems. It’s a powerful performance.

   Later in the green room, he is obviously tired and doesn’t have
long before he must return to his hotel, but he answers my questions
with thoughtfulness and grace. I begin by asking him about the
process of writing poems. He tells me that there is no process that can be repeated at will, instead, ‘something happens in one’s relationship with the world that makes one stop and wonder. It’s
good to be attentive to such moments. They happen to everybody but most people don’t pay attention. They just brush them aside. A poet should pay attention and then write – see what happens.’

   By deliberately paying attention all the time, he says, eventually it
will come naturally, but it is important to write up the moments as and when they occur. ‘You can write anywhere and you shouldn’t
say: well I’m going to save it until next week when I’m going to be in
my study. At that time it’ll probably be gone. Seize the moment and
wherever you are, sit down on the curb if necessary… so you always have to have a piece of paper and a pencil in your pocket. That way you might lose, but you probably can’t win if you don’t have those things.’

   I ask him if he always knew he was going to be a poet. He shakes
his head. ‘No. It’s the only thing I ever wanted to be but I really hardly ever supposed that I could actually be a poet. I wasn’t quite
sure there were still poets in the world.’ It wasn’t until he was about
twenty that he began meeting poets and realised to his great pleasure
that his ‘wished for vocation had a possibility of success’.

   In writing a poem, I ask him, what is he trying to do? ‘Figure it out,’ he says, somewhat enigmatically, ‘and make it clear. If you can make it clear. Some poems you don’t understand and you never will, but usually the poem takes a course and you’re half guiding it along its course and pretty soon you’ll know what you’ve got there and you can guide it more and that’s about it.’ Sometimes the form comes with the poem, sometimes it comes without a form. ‘Then you have to see where you can fit it, see what will fit it.’

   I ask about line endings. In the poems of his recent collection, as in
previous ones, the lines turn over from one to the next often with an
apparently unstudied ‘naturalness’, eschewing the poised artifice, the
‘look at this clever ending/beginning’ of many contemporary poems.
How does he decide when one line stops and the next begins? ‘I don’t think I really know,’ he says. ‘I used to, because I used to count my syllables. Then I would know when the line ended, but form like that seems to me a little mechanical, so I wait til I see... I try it out and I often change the line lengths later on.’

   We talk about the purpose of poetry. Strong is Your Hold includes a section entitled ‘When the Towers Fell’, which deals with the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center, which he witnessed from his New York apartment, and he has written about conflict and war in the past, including a book length examination of the Vietnam War, The Book of Nightmares (1971). I remind him of the story he told the audience earlier. A young woman he was teaching many years ago came to him one day deeply troubled, threatening to take her own life. Kinnell talked to her for a while and then asked her to come back and see him in three hours’ time. When she did so, he
presented her with a poem he had written specially for her as ‘poetry
was the only medicine’ he knew. In this case, poetry had a very particular purpose and effect – the woman didn’t take her own life –
but, in general, I ask him, what does he think poetry is for? What,
if anything, can it achieve?

   He considers the question. ‘People may put it to many uses, but you can’t say poetry was for that. Somebody might read it at a wedding or a funeral or their grandmother’s bedside or to their children or to themselves but it wasn’t for that. It wasn’t for that in
the sense that the person who wrote it didn’t think: hmm, I’m going to write this for my granny at her deathbed… but the story I told
about writing the poem for the girl, that was deliberately aimed at that predicament, that particular person, so this can happen anyway.
Anything, even rage – you’re so mad at someone you have to write
it down – anything can produce a poem.’

   One of the things I love about his poetry is the way that it seems
to value the private spaces between people in very intimate moments, but poetry also has a public dimension, and is about making the private public. Should poets be witnesses to what is going on around them?

   Despite his own work, Kinnell is a little sceptical. Political poetry is
‘hard to write and it often doesn’t come off, though if it comes off, it
can be quite powerful. It can be done. Good thing to try.’

   I tell him about my experience of reading his poems on the bus: how they moved me to tears. Is this effect intentional, and, if so, does he imagine a reader as he writes or does he write to something in himself? ‘I don’t think one writes for a reader. I think one writes for being, to bring the poem into being. I could say that’s the most you can do, but I guess you can do more – perfect it and publish it.’

   But are there never things that he feels one shouldn’t say or write,
perhaps because they are too personal? He doesn’t think so. ‘I used to be reticent in my poems but, I don’t know, I now think there are
very few things that you should hold back – things that you think might injure people you care for… It doesn’t matter if you get hurt. And it’ll do you some good to, what can I say, lower your threshold for writing about… for self-revelation. It would be a good thing actually when writing deliberately to write things you never could say and survive it…’ He smiles at me. ‘Self-revelation improves a poem. If you can get over the embarrassment, the reader is not usually embarrassed.’

   He agrees when I ask him if writing a poem is a kind of moral quest, an effort to find out how to live properly. ‘Everything, if you
look at it closely, needs examination.’ And it’s true, he believes, that you learn from writing, but that isn’t why you do it. Unlike many poets, who seem very wary of the ‘I’, the apparently personal, in a poem, even if it’s not exactly the poet speaking, Kinnell usually writes in the first person. I ask him about this. ‘Some things are better said with the ‘I’ because you can tell what you know. But you don’t need to put yourself into every poem.’ He notices that the
poems by others that interest him most ‘are the poems where I sense a person talking even though no such thing has been indicated in the
poem. The intensity of the voice means something’s happening within somebody. When you feel that you get more gripped by the poem.’

   His poems move easily between an everyday external ‘table and
chairs’ reality to a kind of internal, metaphorical world, sometimes a
heaven or a hell, as if this has equal truth. In ‘The Man in the Chair’, for example, what begins as a description of Kinnell’s father and his relationship with him descends as the poem finishes ‘through the paper, the desk, the floor, / the surface of the earth, the roof / of that dismal region where they stood / two or three of them, who had
reached up / and had him by the foot, and were pulling hard.’ In
another poem, ‘Oatmeal’, one of his best-known, he imagines eating
breakfast alone with his imaginary friend, John Keats.

   I ask him if this is the way he understands the world – and if this
is how the influence of earlier poets manifests in his work. It is as if
Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman or John Keats have become characters in his mind who embody certain ideas or values and with
whom he is engaged in an ongoing internal dialogue. But he won’t
elaborate on this – ‘I don’t know,’ he says, ‘I think so’ – and anyway, we are running out of time.

   As a final question, I ask him what he thinks of interviews and
whether the work should simply stand on its own. ‘Well, I don’t think an interviewer should ask the writer to explicate the work and I don’t think the writer should agree to,’ he says. ‘I think certain things are off limits in interviews because when the author says this poem means x y and z, the author may be all wrong. A poem has a way of taking over. The author thinks he’s writing it but the poem is writing itself.’