The first day I met Thomas Kinsella, in the fall of 1969, he was questioning what a poem was. The focus was D. H. Lawrence’s “Autumn at Taos” and I remember a tremendous sense of confusion about the situation.

On the one hand, here was the forty-one-year-old Irish poet I’d come from New York to southern Illinois to study with. In his dressy clothes and trimmed beard, he was as neat and formal as I imagined him to be from his poems. He marched in on time and announced I’m Kinsella, with the accent on Kin. I was glad he looked like a sonnet, though surprised he didn’t pronounce his name right. It seemed likely that working with him would proceed in an orderly enough manner—an Irish Catholic and a New York Jew deep in the part of Illinois they call “Little Egypt.”

On the other hand, here was this rollicking chant of a poem by Lawrence, this teeming, excessive paean to a state of mind, and Kinsella seemed to love it. He’d entered it fully, reading aloud in his clipped voice, highlighting the repetitions and echoes, sounding oddly urgent as he passed through the poem. Clearly, this was the active involvement of a reader who believed in the poem, almost despite himself. I sat there wanting Lawrence to tighten the thing up, exercise some control, while Kinsella kept saying that what made “Autumn at Taos” a good poem was how closely it came to the thing it was perceiving. He acknowledged its flaws and mannerisms, but the poem was onto something he valued and wanted to do himself. He talked about stripping away everything that stood between the song and its expression—predetermined forms and logic, imposed shapes, literary reference, anything that suggested the presence of a writer behind the poem. My head was spinning.

The Kinsella I came to study with wrote elegantly structured, lyrical poems in a harshly clear tone of voice (“I fold my towel with what grace I can, / Not young and not renewable, but man”). The Kinsella I found was saying that “the relationship between the thing perceived and the perceiving self must be personal, otherwise it would be sentimentalized and exaggerated.” Later, he spoke about “an articulated descent into the psyche,” saying, “I think this is what poetry is now all about—the growth point.” He said he was toying with automatic writing, exploring the subterranean territory of the psyche. He wanted to achieve a kind of poem that dictated its own form in order to leap from “Phoenix Park,” with its rigidly controlled eleven-syllable lines and narrative framework, which he felt was the best he could do in the traditional way. Talk of technique seemed beside the point.

Even after I learned to separate the man from his poems, an important lesson for any twenty-two-year-old, Kinsella kept surprising me. Challenge was always in the air. He came across as stable and what you might call tidy if it didn’t sound so peculiar. He’d been an administrator in his country’s finance department for many years before coming to southern Illinois and seemed eminently capable of management. But there was also this sense of artistic upheaval around him, an air of quest. We would meet in a small group, just Kinsella and three young writers. He was willing to discuss our work from time to time, but there was much greater emphasis placed on studying poems he would assign. He seemed to be heading somewhere, exploring new territory for himself as well as for us, and was uneasy with formal analysis or exegesis. As we examined in depth the poems he was interested in at the time (Eliot’s “Marina,” Creeley’s “The Finger,” Thomas’s “Fern Hill”), the questions that kept emerging were how the poems communicated, how they removed artificial barriers and achieved meaning, how they approximated the flow of thought.

From the vantage point of 1990, the essence of my bewilderment seems obvious. I’d caught Kinsella at the very moment he was transforming himself into a poet entirely unlike the one I had come to study with.

With the publication of Blood and Family,¹ Thomas Kinsella’s work is now appearing in America for the first time in ten years. The volume, consisting of one long poem and four extended sequences, is typically formidable. Little that could be imported from outside the world of these poems will help one penetrate their layered surfaces; one enters and attempts to follow where the twists of association lead. This is the first page of the book, introducing “The Messenger,” a poem in memory of the poet’s father, who had recently died:

For days I have wakened and felt immediately
half sick at something. Hour follows hour
but my shoulders are chilled with expectation.
It is more than mere Loss
                                        (your tomb-image
drips and blackens, my leaden root
curled on your lap)
                                        or “what you missed.”
(The hand conceives an impossible Possible
and exhausts in mid-reach.
                                                            What could be more natural?)
Deeper. A suspicion in the bones
as though they too could melt in filth.
Something to discourage goodness.
A moist movement within.
A worm winds on its board.
A rim of hide lifts like a lip.
A dead egg glimmers—a pearl in
muck
glimpsed only as the muck settles.
The belly settles and crawls tighter.

Vintage Kinsella. There is the crisp voice laying out a scene and beginning to analyze it, another voice from deeper inside the speaker’s head commenting until a dialogue between components of the psyche is engaged, the call from still another voice—the counselor—for continued penetration (“Deeper”), and then the emergence of familiar symbols from the psyche’s depths.

Indeed, despite the decade’s interruption, a reader of Blood and Family feels immediately in familiar Kinsella territory. That feeling is enhanced by the fact that the volume begins with “The Messenger,” which is the poem that concluded his previous volume. This is one of many deliberate gestures back to earlier work. The imagery of muck and mire, of ooze and egginess and animal matter, is here again. One sequence, “Her Vertical Smile,” refers to several other sequences Kinsella wrote about his friend, the late Irish composer John Reidy (Seán O Riada). Another (“Out of Ireland”) revisits Reidy’s burial place, where earlier long poems were set, and is a sequence of seven love poems incorporating details out of Kinsella’s love poems from as far back as the early Sixties. A full understanding of the volume’s longest sequence, “Songs of the Psyche,” also requires recognition of scenes and language from previous poems. A central section of this sequence is, in fact, a return to the “tree with a twisted trunk” from the 1966 sequence “Wormwood.” It incorporates and comments on both the tree and the married couple from that earlier work. Familiar lines, which operate like stage directions, occur throughout (“I settled back and / turned inward”).

All of this shouldn’t imply that the poet has run out of inspiration and is repeating himself. Rather, these connections are meant to show that he is engaged in an ongoing project, with each installment offered to the public as a work-in-progress. Kinsella’s project is a quest, in the form of one extended work spanning the years of his maturity, to re-define for himself what poetry is and what the proper relationship might be between singer and song. Is it possible for nothing to intervene between the song and its expression in poetry? This is the quest he began in the mid-1960s.

First and foremost, Blood and Family reconfirms that the project is continuing. This is not simply another discrete book to add to the shelf.

In 1979, when Wake Forest University Press issued Kinsella’s poetry in two volumes, his career seemed to have reached a point of culmination. One Wake Forest volume contained selected early poems, those on which his substantial reputation had been built. They culled the exquisitely accomplished formal verse he wrote through his early forties, which had prompted critics to include Kinsella among the few poets of the first order writing in English. In addition, the volume ended with a transitional group of poems written in a new manner that was to become characteristic, as in these lines from “Notes from the Land of the Dead” (1973):

Falling. Mind darkening.
                    Toward a ring of mouths.
Flushed.
                                        Time, distance,
           meaning nothing.
                                                                                No matter.

When critic Calvin Bedient got a look at these newer poems, he lamented Kinsella’s “death of the will to order,” feeling that the poet had brooded himself to pieces. Like many other critics, he wanted the old grace and poise of Kinsella’s art. It is worth noting, however, that this new poetry was written during a period widely characterized by protest and rebellion. The university where Kinsella was teaching, like many during the spring of 1970, was shut down by rioting in the wake of the Kent State killings. Poise and grace seemed irrelevant to many poets then, and Kinsella, as the harsh cultural and political observations of his poems always demonstrated, was not immune to such forces.

Even so, the issue in his new poetry was the will to order; it had not died in Kinsella, it had just begun to transform. There was to be another kind of order from now on. That was the logic behind breaking his oeuvre where the Wake Forest collection did, underscoring the idea that post-1968 Kinsella was another writer altogether.

The second volume contained all the poems of this other Kinsella. These were poems he originally published himself, in pamphlets issued by his own Peppercanister Press, founded in Dublin in 1972. They were all extended sequences or long poems in his new manner, feeding off each other, picking up symbols and references as they moved along. Each new piece was an addition to “The Entire Fabric,” as Kinsella entitled one poem. He was being quite clear about the nature of his ongoing project, even providing (in “Vertical Man”) a plot summary of its system and a portrayal of his working methods amid the project’s elaborate blueprints: “remove and put down the spectacles and bury / my face in my hands, in self-devouring prayer, / till the charts and notes come crawling to life again / under a Night seething with / soft incandescent bombardment!”

At that point—in the 1979 Wake Forest volume—there were eight of these Peppercanister pamphlets, whose range of reference included natural history, politics, love, music, aesthetics, philosophy, and psychology. One finished the Wake Forest books wondering what Kinsella might do next, since he’d written that “The Messenger” concluded the series. It seemed possible that the shaping impulse might reassert itself now that literal and figurative fathers had been buried.

Most of what he did next was to translate from the Irish and edit The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse (1986). Those two efforts overlapped and took a long time because, in preparing the anthology, he rejected all but a few existing translations from the Irish and instead translated roughly fourteen centuries’ worth of verse himself. So there has been ten years’ worth of suspense about his work, especially for those who did not have access to the new series of Peppercanisters. Beginning Blood and Family with “The Messenger” lets the reader know at once that Kinsella means us to read his new work as another wing of the project, one which wraps around all that came before.

The point is, this is shaping up to be Kinsella’s Cantos.

Born in 1928, Thomas Kinsella belongs to a generation of writers who abandoned formal poetry in mid-career, rejecting its metrics and rhymes, its logic and traditional order, its subjects and stances, in search of freedoms more suitable to the world as they found it. All came to artistic maturity during a time of cultural upheaval, when refashioning one’s style and life was part of the Zeitgeist. His cohorts include Galway Kinnell, W. S. Merwin, James Wright, Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, John Montague, Thom Gunn—poets noted both for their early mastery of the inherited tradition and for their later movement into freer, more flexible verse and open forms.

Kinsella changed in mid-career, but he evolved like none of his contemporaries: he did not become a fantasist, he did not dedicate himself to the stripped-down image and “pure clear word,” he did not become a mystic or withdraw from the self, he was not distrustful of language. Instead, he held onto the notion of form, although rejecting the ordering principles of rhyme, metrics, and those imposed patterns at which he was so adept. Fascinated by the relationship between the thing perceived and the perceiving self, he turned inward to investigate imagination and its muse, seeking an alternative form within the material itself. Since that material was his own psyche, Kinsella’s formal precepts quickly came to resemble those of his countryman James Joyce rather than W. B. Yeats, to whom he was so often compared.

To mid-career, Kinsella had certainly been regarded as a distinguished poet, the dominant presence among his generation in Ireland. There was an image of authority connected with his endeavors, perhaps because of his seriousness, staying power, and the commanding voice that characterizes his poetry. If anyone was going to continue the Yeatsian tradition, some critics thought it was Kinsella. But they overlooked the ominous strain of dislocation in his poems, their obsession with departure and erosion, their growing sense of the gap between imagination and life. The poems are filled with restlessness: “life is hunger, hunger is for order, / And hunger satisfied brings on new hunger / Till there’s nothing to come.”

Then—in the late 1960s—the elegant poet of anthology pieces such as the intricately rhymed meditation “Mirror in February,” or the lyrical terza rima quest “Downstream,” went silent. After the massive “Phoenix Park,” which, along with the title poem, concluded his 1968 collection, Nightwalker and Other Poems, the shaping impulse, so central to his work until then, seemed to have exhausted itself. He could no longer be the poet of the “will that gropes for / structure.” I’ve always taken the little poem “Leaf-Eater” from that collection as the model of Kinsella’s position at this point in time:

On a shrub in the heart of the garden,
On an outer leaf, a grub twists
Half its body, a tendril,
This way and that in blind
Space: no leaf or twig
Anywhere in reach; then gropes
Back on itself and begins
To eat its own leaf.

Never one to do things moderately, Kinsella gave up his career in Ireland’s finance department and moved from Dublin to Carterville, Illinois (what you might call suburban Carbondale), in order to teach at Southern Illinois University and devote more time to his writing. The poem “Phoenix Park” confronts the agony this relocation involved: “One stays or leaves. The one who returns is not / The one, etcetera. And we are leaving.” The stakes were very high for Kinsella at this moment—giving up a career and homeland for the sake of his art, uprooting his family—and there can be no doubt that he was responding to great internal pressure for change.

He began reconfiguring his poetry as well. What emerged were poems exploring the workings of human consciousness. As he said in “Worker in Mirror, at His Bench,” a major poem from this period: “I tinker with the things that dominate me / as they describe their random / persistent coherences … / clean surfaces shift / and glitter among themselves.” Apparently formless, deeply interiorized and associative, his new poems were presented as they emerged from some plane of the poet’s psyche. Their only structural logic was the utterly private connections of one man’s mind. Often, they would begin with a kind of pep talk intended to put the poet in the proper frame of mind: “the beginning / must be inward. Turn inward. Divide.”

It must be said that the strangeness and idiosyncrasy of Kinsella’s new poetry have little to do with the content of his poems. His poems now are about the same things they were always about. Their themes remain the struggle for continuity and stability in the face of overwhelming erosion. “Out of Ireland,” like many other poems, states it clearly enough: “We stumble / in gathering ignorance / in a land of loss / and unfulfillable desire.” The focus of Kinsella’s poems remains married love, the artistic act, and the history of his family and country. What is always changing is the approach, the ways Kinsella finds for poetry to communicate. The poems enact his explorations into the meaning of poetry, its function and uses, and the way its materials are assembled. (A section of “Out of Ireland” called “The Furnace” seeks to capture this quality: “Intensifying, as iron / melts in the furnace / —intensified into flowing fire, / aching for a containing Shape.”) They demand that a reader complete the act of communication, that he be one element of the containing Shape. They invite a reader intimately into the poet’s psyche, lacking order because they emerge from the psyche’s chaos, from its disordered regions. To the extent that there is song, its melody traces the jagged line of consciousness.

This will all sound like gobbledegook unless you can see a whole poem. Quoting, however, is tricky, because the typical Kinsella poem now is either an extended fifteen-page sequence relying on angles and interconnections among its parts, or a four-hundred-plus-line extravaganza. Here is another section of “The Messenger.” It occurs at the poem’s end, following a deep childhood memory and preceding the moment the father’s coffin emerges from chapel:

A cross grain of impotent anger. About
it
the iridescent untouchable secretions
collect. It is a miracle:
membrane and mineral in precious combination.
An eye, pale with strain, forms in the dark.
The oddity nestles in slime
functionless, in all its rarity,
purifying nothing. But nothing can befoul it
—which ought probably to console.

Kinsella’s poems tell a reader very little in the normal sense of speaker-to-listener. Instead, they rely on a dynamic relationship in which the reader must participate or else the poems will simply collapse.

So Blood and Family is notable for several reasons. Like the periodic installments of Pound’s masterwork, it both clarifies and expands what came before. Taken alone, as a separate book, it presents a decade’s work by a major writer at the peak of his career, ardently pursuing his complex aesthetic. To the extent that its individual poems can be appreciated independently, the volume contains two of Kinsella’s most powerful and accessible works, “The Messenger” and “St. Catherine’s Clock.” Further, Blood and Family emphasizes again that Kinsella is through with traditional poetic structure and earnestly engaged in the modernist task of making it new. Moving him still closer to his ideal, where nothing should intervene between the song and its expression, Blood and Family is a challenging and harsh book, by turns funny and tender, an interesting thing to read. In other words, this is The Goods.

But for a long time I’ve been thinking about the paradox this new work presents: it gets harder and harder to like Kinsella’s poems, but easier and easier to appreciate them. This is not simply a matter of their being difficult—not even his early lyrics were easy. Rather, I think the lack of surface appeal results from Kinsella’s having eschewed poetry’s musical qualities in his absolute devotion to the thing being perceived, which, in his case, is an edgy, jangling psyche.

Nevertheless, the scope and originality of what he is doing are awesome. To illustrate the point more fully, perhaps like should be replaced by hear. It gets harder and harder to hear his poems. It’s not just Kinsella’s approach to poetry that has changed, it’s his very conception of poetry’s purpose as well. One doesn’t listen to a Kinsella poem any more, one studies it.

This is not to say that the poems fail to communicate. They do, but in a way that may be more demanding than for readers of the Cantos. Neither a shelf of reference books nor an ear for music would serve a reader well with Kinsella. He suggests what the experience is like for both poet and reader in “Songs of the Psyche”:

Yet it is
                    a matter of
negative release:
of being thrown
                    up out of a state of storm
into a state of peace
or sleep,
                    or a dream,
or a system of dreams.
By normal process
                    organic darkness,
in potentia all things,
would summon
                    Self firstly into being,
a Shadow in actu,
an upright on a flat plain,
                    a bone stirs
in first clay
and a beam of light struck
                    and snaked glittering across a surface
in multi-meanings and vanishes.

Each poem is an almost overwhelming challenge to its readers. Each is an ambitious effort to “see how the whole thing works,” as he said in the brilliant 1976 sequence “A Technical Supplement.” With enough re-readings, and especially with adequate grounding in Kinsella’s recent work, the poems eventually yield their vast richness. But it is certainly rarified work, whose appeal is limited the closer it comes to achieving its goals. The song of Thomas Kinsella is not for every audience.

This is poetry of high ambition, conceived on a grand scale and demanding the fullest engagement. Indeed, there is a feeling of urgency and importance about all Kinsella’s projects—the poems, with their historical and psychological sweep reminding the reader of a less high-hat Pound; the translations, where Kinsella seems determined single-handedly to replace more than a millennium of accepted renderings; the anthologies, both The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse and the Dolmen Press’s An Duanaire, 1600–1900: Poems of the Dispossessed (1981), edited with characteristic independence and sweep. But still, even for one who admires the work and the man, something elemental about poetry is lost in the bargain as awe replaces deep feeling.

For me, several issues emerge from the encounter with Kinsella’s newer work. It underscores that traditional poetics are somehow a critical element in communicating emotion. Stripped to most direct utterance, with nothing between the singer and the song, the poems cast their readers adrift on the stream of consciousness, seeming to grant intimacy in exchange for power. Close as they are to the poet’s psyche, they seem to utter rather than to sing. I can appreciate them, work over them, and feel as though I am in touch with the poet—but I am not moved to read them aloud, not stirred by their music. I cannot feel them before I understand them.

Finally, why is Kinsella so obsessed with how to communicate? I take this to be more than just a concern with the forms of poetic expression. His love poetry, his poetry of familial and national history, and his poetry of the artistic act have now merged and in each strand the fundamental concern is that continuity is compromised. There appears to be a deep-rooted despair over not being able to bridge the boundary between self and other. At its center, Kinsella’s poetry remains the work of a man exploring through words his sense of utter isolation within the self.

Note

1. Blood and Family, by Thomas Kinsella; Oxford University Press, 89 pp.