Galway Kinnell with Thomas Hilgers and Michael Molloy （interview date 1982）

[In the following interview, Kinnell addresses the issues of poetic inspiration and the relationship of the poet's personal life to his poetry.]

＼Hilgers:］ I'd like to begin by talking not about poetry, but about poets. Does a poet ever stop being a poet?

＼Kinnell:］ It's hard to stop. Many poets should. Wordsworth, for example who did all his best work as a young man, continued cranking out verses during his long life; and none of the late verses were of any use. But poetry is not a profession in the ordinary sense. It's so much a part of what you are. Nothing else takes its place. Being a poet is in part a state of mind. Many people are in such a state; probably everybody is a poet to some degree or another. It's part of being itself. That's why it's so hard to stop.

How is “everybody” a poet? What is there about that state of mind, or what is there in every man's state of mind, that's poetic?

Well, we all use language; and at those moments when we're really deeply affected by something, we often express our response in words. When these come directly out of our feelings, whether we write them down and work them up into a poem that can have a public life or not, in some way we've uttered poetry.

Do you at any time in your own life feel yourself in a super-poetic frame of mind? When you're actually in the process of writing poetry, are you in a different state from what you are right now when we're talking prose?

Yes, I think when one writes well, there does come upon one a kind of heightened state of aliveness, a surge of energy and exhilaration. It may come before you start writing, but it's a sign that you should start.

＼Molloy:］ Does that surge come often after you've decided to start writing rather than before?

No, I think the surge actually comes when writing is the farthest thing from your mind and something in the world or in your memory of the world or fantasy of it engages your attention very intensely. In the interaction between yourself and whatever it is that you've been excited by comes some kind of strange psychological chemical infusion of energy and then you want to express that relationship.

It must happen often that you have such a feeling, such a surge, and the poem never emerges. Are there many unspoken poems in you?

I think there are. I think there are many unspoken poems in everyone. The best layer of existence consists of unspoken poems.

＼Hilgers:］ In today's literary world, we often hear prose spoken of as “poetic prose.” We also have prose poems, and we have poetry. Do you think the former distinctions between the prose writer and the poet are breaking down?

Yes, I think so. The conventional novel proves to be somewhat unsatisfactory to most modern novelists. They want to achieve in their novels moments of poetry—intense, direct expressions of feelings—rather than to accomplish everything through naturalistic narrative. Also, poets often write at a secondary level of intensity, and produce a kind of secondary poem, almost the notes for a poem. These are called “prose poems”—unfortunately so, because the name implies that these notes are the completed thing in itself. To my mind, prose poems are unfulfilled poems, prose-y poems, and they should be so called.

Our conversation so far has been skirting around the big question, the question of just what a poet is. Maybe we can have a go at it in just one other way. Someone like the Russian poet Yevtushenko, for example, may be criticized for being an apologist for political purposes. Does this make him any less a poet?

I'm not in a position to judge the question of a Russian poet's relationship to his society. It's such a difficult relationship. Since I don't experience the same burden, I can't judge how well a Russian poet copes with it. I don't feel that Yevtushenko's work is very interesting, at least as it comes through in translation.

Let's say we had a poet laureate in this country who wrote paeans to Ronald Reagan periodically. Would that be a compromise of the poet's integrity?

I don't know. It depends how the poet feels about Ronald Reagan. He may be currying favor, or he may actually love Ronald Reagan. It makes all the difference. Poetry should enter the political realm; poems should be able to contain one's political opinions. But poetry which doesn't do that may be fine poetry. And poetry which exclusively does that may be fine poetry too.

Is the poet's voice an individual voice?

Yes, in our time and in the modern world, it is necessarily an individual voice. What goes on in a poem is, generally speaking, a very personal struggle between what a poet wants to be and what he's able to be.

＼Molloy:］ You said earlier that certain things engage a poet and bring about, perhaps, a “surge” of feeling. What would you say are the things that have particularly engaged you and brought about the surge for you?

It's hard to say. When I glance back at the poems I've written, they seem to have sprung from many different sources. I can't, for instance, say that animals are the principle source.

Although animals are very important in your poetry, surely.

Animals occur often in my poems, but putting myself in a farmyard will not start me writing poems. If one knew the answer to your question, there would be no such thing as a dry spell. One would just go down to the local pigfarm, or whatever.

＼Molloy:］ Or over to the zoo. I remember reading that when Rama Krishna would go to the Calcutta Zoo, he would be sent off into a trance if he would hear the lion roar. It seemed to be for him some great manifestation of the Divine.

＼Hilgers:］ Besides animals, are there other objects that have particularly attracted you?

On the whole, creatures （earthly creatures） and children （my own children） have been great sources of poetry for me. But also any aspect of life which seems to have a tradition to it—whether a continuing tradition, as one finds in Vermont farms, for example, or broken traditions, as one finds in the slums of New York. The sense of tradition, however distorted, seems to awaken something.

＼Molloy:］ Does that come from your background in religious structures which place great importance on tradition?

It may; but it's characteristic of poetry as a whole. Poetry tries to connect with the sacred past. It tries to find in the present the sacred which the prose glance can't see any longer.

＼Hilgers:］ As you walk around your kitchen, as you walk around the campus, do you see poetic possibilities? Do you ask about what you see, does this thing go beyond itself?

No. I think, as I said earlier, that it's when writing is the last thing in your mind that you tend to start writing. If you begin to think, what use can this kettle of boiling water that I'm making my coffee with this morning have for my poems?, you might write a poem, but it might be a self-conscious exercise. If you're thoroughly absorbed in the boiling of water, on the other hand, that might set you off to write a poem that comes forth more spontaneously.

What is the relationship of your everyday existence to what you write? I know that you don't talk a lot about your private life. But does it come through in your poetry?

Well, yes. At one time I would recast experience and make it quite impersonal; I did that often in my earlier poetry. Now, for better or worse, I write more directly about my own experiences. When I feel like writing about my children I don't try to imagine a fictitious family, and write about that; I just write about my own family and my own children. Some readers are upset that there should be, in my poems, the actual names of my children and my wife, and my own name. They find that close a connection to life inappropriate for poetry. But that's just the way I happen to be writing at this time.

On what grounds is that inappropriate?

Some readers want poetry to be more objective, cast in a more universal mold and not tied to a particular family and a particular place—to have everything be a type rather than another particular.

I'd like to talk a little about other American poets. Recently, when I was talking with Marvin Bell, he mentioned you and the late James Wright, Sylvia Plath, and Ann Sexton as part of the still dominant generation in American poetry. He spoke of himself as part of the next generation which is still trying to make itself heard. Would you make a distinction along generational lines when you describe the American poetry world?

There are a few of the very old poets still thriving, most notably Robert Penn Warren. And then there are a number of people who turned out to be poets who were born in 1926, 1927, and 1928. I don't know why. It may have had something to do with the Depression. That we spent our childhoods in poverty and social dislocation may have given us some longing for a transfigured life. And poetry is an avenue to a transfigured life. Then there is Marvin's generation, which has fewer poets who stand out, I think. Maybe the generation younger than that has even fewer, but it's too early to tell.

Are there any differences beyond the chronological which determine these generations?

It's hard for us to say. A critic in the twenty-first century will see much we hold in common. But what has a poet like Creeley got in common with a poet like Ginsberg? It's hard for us to see through all the obvious differences.

＼Molloy:］ You used the word transfigured when you talked about these people who were raised during the Depression. They seemed to have a need for a transfigured world. Could you elaborate on that?

I just mean that growing up in grim surroundings, as I think most of us did, produced some kind of intense desire for a world that was better, for a recovery of beauty. Poetry seemed the way to find it. My speculation, based on my memories of my own desires, is that I wanted in poetry to find a purity of existence which I didn't find in the world around me. Now it's possible that in a later generation, for whom life was easier, there was no longer that intensity of desire to transfigure the world. In fact, one characteristic of the poetry of the young seems to be a kind of contentment with the world—the daily experiences of average life seem to be regarded as adequate. That's unlikely to be the case in the poetry of my generation.

＼Hilgers:］ Do you sense in your own life more of a contentment coming through? It seems to me that certain poems in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words reflect some sort of contentment.

It's hard to make such judgments about one's own work. I think that Mortal Acts, Mortal Words contains many poems that are easygoing; some of them are basically humorous. Other poems, though, deal with things that are difficult—the deaths of my parents, my relationship to my brother, things of that kind. It's not exactly a peaceful book, but there is no attempt to exacerbate the harshness of life, and there is an attempt to come to terms with the difficult things.

＼Molloy:］ Does the title of the book show a greater willingness to express your subjectives?

Yes. My own life, place, time, and people I'm living with are the subject of that book.

I remember reading at one time something you said about eros and thanatos—that the sensitive person felt both and wanted to reconcile the problems they raised by identifying them. What did you mean by that identification?

I'm not sure what I meant. But there is a point where eros and thanatos are the same thing, where the love of existence passes beyond the love of that part of existence which is one's own time on earth and includes existence beyond one's own time. Of course, at that point one becomes the sprouting Irish grass.