[S]T. JOHNSBURY — About 50 people gathered at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum last week to remember and honor the poet Galway Kinnell.
It was a celebratory occasion, but one tinged with sadness — celebratory because Kinnell’s “Collected Poems” had just been published, and yet sad because Kinnell, who died in 2014, is still much missed by his family and friends.
“We wanted to be here together tonight,” said Bob Joly, director of the athenaeum, as he opened the event. “It’ll be sort of like the old days.”
Kinnell, a major American poet who had received many awards, including the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, had a home in Sheffield and was the first Vermont state poet named since Robert Frost. During Kinnell’s tenure, from 1989 to 1992, he traveled throughout the state, giving classes and readings. Many of his poems were based on his life in Vermont.
His “Collected Poems,” a 588-page volume, contains all his published poems, an introductory essay by the poet and critic Edward Hirsch, and editorial and biographical essays. The collection is ample evidence of the deep significance of his life spent in poetry, and its publication is a significant literary event.
The volume is described by Hirsch as “the single work he was writing all his life, his ‘Leaves of Grass.’” It was edited by Kinnell’s wife, Barbara Bristol, and by Jennifer Keller.
From his early, more formal work, to later poems written in free verse, Kinnell has wrestled with the basic mysteries of human existence. His poems often focus on the sacramental qualities of everyday life: birth, death, love, sex, the beauty of nature. They are clear and accessible, and often contain flashes of humor, yet plumb the depths of human experience.
All of those qualities were evident in the poems chosen for reading last week in St. Johnsbury. The five readers were all close friends or associates of the poet.
Melissa Hammerle, who taught writing with Kinnell at New York University and now teaches writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier, noted Kinnell’s deep interest in the actual sounds of language. In a class at NYU, she said, Kinnell had played a tape of animal sounds, so she read “The Music of Poetry,” which recounts that experience:
“… to let the audience hear that our poems
are of the same order as those of the other animals
and are composed, like theirs, when we find ourselves
synchronized with the rhythms of the earth …”
Kinnell’s connection to nature and to other living creatures was profound. Later in the evening Joly read Kinnell’s famous and much-anthologized poem, “The Bear,” in which the poet smells a bear, wounds it, chases its blood trail through miles of snow, and finally guts and crawls inside the still-warm creature. Thus completely unified with the wounded, bleeding and now-dead bear, the poet asks:
“… what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry,
by which I lived?”
Reeve Lindbergh, a writer and friend of Kinnell’s, read “Saint Francis and the Sow,” a poem that, like many of his works, combines the poet’s love of animals with his own experience and reading — and a bit of humor — to express his belief in the sacred nature of life and existence.
The poem begins:
“The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers from within, of self-blessing …”
And recounts the tale of St. Francis blessing a sow, so that the great creature, nursing its 14 little piglets, finally remembers and blesses herself, experiencing “the long, perfect loveliness of sow.”
Lisa von Kann, an organizer of the evening and formerly the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum’s library director, had set up several of Kinnell’s readings there. She read “Fergus Falling,” a meditation on fatherhood, his Sheffield neighbors and mortality, and a poem written near the end of his life, “Astonishment,” which concludes with the lines:
“… Our time seems to be up — I think I even hear it stopping.
Then why have we kept up the singing for so long?
Because that’s the kind of determined creature we are …”
Tune Faulkner, of St. Johnsbury, said she had typed and retyped many of Kinnell’s late poems as he wrote and revised, and re-revised them. She choked up slightly as she read the final lines of one of those poems, “The Silence of the World.”
“… From across the valley, the thud of an axe
arrives later than its strike
and the call of goodbye slowly separates itself
little by little from the vocal chords of everything.”
“It’s hard to read these words when he’s not here,” she said, and many in the room with her could certainly agree.
After the readings, the attendees mingled, remembered Kinnell and bought copies of his “Collected Poems.”
