Remembering Galway Kinnell

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by Elizabeth Hoover


When one has lived a long time alone,

and the hermit thrush calls and there is an answer,

and the bullfrog head half out of water utters

the cantillations he sang in his first spring,

and the snake lowers himself over the threshold

and creeps away among the stones, one sees

they all live to mate with their kind, and one knows,

after a long time of solitude, after the many steps taken

away from one's kind, toward these other kingdoms,

the hard prayer inside one's own singing

is to come back, if one can, to one's own,

a world almost lost, in the exile that deepens,

when one has lived a long time alone.

Section 9 of “When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone,″ from New and Selected Poems: Galway Kinnell

Born in Providence, R.I. in 1927, Galway Kinnell was part of a generation of American poets reacting against the allusion-laden work of the Modernists. The son of working-class immigrants, he wanted to write poetry that could be understood without a college degree. With deep sympathy and lyrical intensity, he celebrated the diversity of life in the East Village, delighted in the vivacity of his children, and memorialized lives lost in the World Trade Center attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Over his some 40-year career as a published poet, Kinnell produced an astonishing body of work marked by an intense and compassionate observation of the world around him. His observations often included the difficult or unpleasant. He told the Los Angles Times that he sought in his work “to dwell on the ugly as fully, as far and as long as I could stomach it.”

That willingness to confront the ugliness of this world carried into the work he did supporting the antiwar movement and advocating for environmental causes. In 1963, he was arrested for registering black voters in Louisana while working for the Congress of Racial Equality.

For Kinnell, poetry was a way to bear witness. He remarked, “Poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.”

Kinnell died on Oct. 28 from leukemia. We remember him as a poet who penned “the hard prayer” calling us back to our communities, our families, and our times. He call us back to do the work of loving and living together, though “our own kind” can be troubling, difficult and, at times, ugly.

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Published: Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Last Updated: Tuesday, November 7, 2017

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