The work by Galway Kinnell

Highlights of Poetry. Index of poetry. How to Write Poetry. Books read.

How to write specific forms: Haibun. Haiku. Hay(na)ku. Rengay. Tanka. Concrete. Ghazal. Lai. Pantoum. Prose poem. Rondeau. Rubáiyát. Sestina. Skaldic verse. Sonnet. Terza rima. Triolet. Tritina. Villanelle.

Poets: Adam Zagajewski. Aleda Shirley. Anne Carson. The Beowulf Poet. Billy Collins. Billy Collins exercise. Snorri's Edda. Carl Dennis. Charles Atkinson. Corey Marks. François Villon Franz Wright. Galway Kinnell. Gary Young. The Gawain Poet. Jack Gilbert. Jane Hirshfield. Jorie Graham. Karen Braucher. Karl Shapiro. Kay Ryan. Laureate Poets: Britain; USA. Louise Glück. Len Anderson. Li-Young Lee. Linda Pastan. Nordic Skalds. Pulitzer Poetry Prize (U.S.A). Rainer Maria Rilke Richard Hugo. Robert Bly. Sara Teasdale. Snorri's Edda. Stephen Dunn. Ted Kooser. W.S. Merwin.

Galway Kinnell featured in:
Best American Poetry: 2003 (guest editor Yusef Komunyakaa) with "When the Towers Fell", republished in his Strong is Your Hold.
Best American Poetry: 2001 (guest editor Robert Hass) with "The Quick and the Dead", republished in his Strong is Your Hold.
Best American Poetry: 1999 (guest editor Robert Bly) with "Why Regret", republished as the closing poem in his Strong is Your Hold.
Best American Poetry: 1990 (guest editor Jorie Graham) with "When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone", republished as the title poem in his When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone .

Books:

A New Selected Poems. Imperfect Thirst. Strong Is Your Hold. When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone.

Prose: Walking Down the Stairs, selections from interviews.

Translations: The Poems of François Villon

Time line. Links and Books.

A New Selected Poems

Imperfect Thirst

• Galway Kinnell's 12th collection of poems.

• Acknowledges first publications in:
  • American Poetry Review
  • Antaeus
  • The Atlantic Monthly
  • The Boston Review
  • Brick
  • The Hungry Mind Review
  • The New Yorker
  • The Paris Review
  • Poetry
  • Princeton University Library Chronicle
  • The Threepenny Review

• Sample statistics:
  • 81 pages, but 16 of those are blank or have only a section number, giving 65 printed pages.
  • A proem then five sections each with five poems, giving a total of 26 poems.
  • So 2.5 pages per poem.
  • Sections:
    1. Parents and his childhood.
    2. Coming into adulthood.
    3. A set of five "ghazals.": they lack the rhyme scheme of the classical ghazal. Perhaps Kinnell calls them ghazals because he includes his own name in the stanza, and because his stanzas have jumpy collage-like relationships.
    4. A mixed bag about people and their bodies — his aging father, some lovers — plus a report on his visit to the Scottish Isle of Skye.
    5. Another mixed bag including poems to poets and sometimes bulging with quotations by others.

Strong Is Your Hold

Buy Strong Is Your Hold (2006) by Galway Kinnell.

• Galway Kinnell's 14th collection of poems.

• Acknowledges first publications in:
  • American Poetry Review
  • The Atlantic Monthly
  • Beloit Poetry Journal
  • The Massachusetts Review
  • The New Yorker
  • Poetry
  • Poets and Writers
  • The Threepenny Review
  • The Yale Review

• Sample statistics:
  • Sensual poetry including many words of the senses (data below for the first 10 poems):

    touch.	sound.	taste.	color.	smell.
    In 90% of the first 10 poems.	In 60%.	In 60%.	In 50%.	In 40%.
    Averages about 5.5 words per poem; includes slashed, writhed, caressing, kiss, blugeoned, oozings.	2.5 per poem for words of sound; includes guffaws, yelping, chuckle, hiccupping.	1.0 per poem for words of taste; includes blackberry, eating clover, eating an orange.	Averages about 1.5 words per poem; includes black, green, saffron, rosy.	0.6 per poem for words of smell; includes blossoms; reeking.

    This is about twice as many words of the senses per poems than Aleda Shirley in Dark Familiar and five times as many as in Louise Glück's Averno.

  • Poems grouped into 5 sections.
  • 25 poems in 55 pages of text, so 2.2 pages per poem.
  • Pages per poem shows a mode at 2 pages:
    1. 7 poems.
    2. 13
    3. 2
    4. 1
    5. 0
    6. 2
  • Some of the most common punctuation (compare with those of Louise Glück) from the first 10 poems (of 25, so 40%) in 19 pages show:

    punctuation	frequency
    colon	in 4 (40%) of 10 poems
    dashes	in 6 (60%) of 10 poems
    question mark	in 4 (40%)
    italics	in 2 (20%)
    ellipsis	in 1 (10%)
    semicolon	in 1 (10%)
    parentheses	in 0 ( 0%)
    exclamation mark	in 4 (4%)

  • Addresses 'you' in 1 (10%) of first 10 poems.
  • Stanzas per poem (rough count) shows a mode of 1 stanza, and a preference for an odd number of stanza:
    1. 8 poems.
    2. 1
    3. 3
    4. 1
    5. 2
    6. 3
    7. 4
    8. 0
    9. 1
    10. 1
    11. 0
    12. 0
    13. 0
    14. 0
    15. 1
    with one outlier at 20 stanzas and another at 34 stanzas.
  • Lines per stanza (rough count) shows a broad distribution with a mode of 5 lines; second most common is the 1-line stanza (primarily due to a single poem), and third most common are (equally) 2-line and 4-line stanza):
    1. 17 lines.
    2. 13 lines.
    3. 10
    4. 13
    5. 22
    6. 4
    7. 12
    8. 9
    9. 9
    10. 11
    11. 8
    12. 2
    13. 5
    14. 2
    15. 0
    16. 4
    17. 0
    18. 3
    19. 0
    20. 1
    21. 0
    22. 1
    23. 0
    24. 0
    25. 1
    with outliers at 33 lines, 35 lines, and 36 lines.

When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone

• Galway Kinnell's 10th collection of poems.

Prose

Walking Down the Stairs

• Selections from 11 interviews with Kinnell, made by various interviewers 1969-1976 and subsequently improved by Kinnell with "l'espirit de l'escalier: the remarks you think of as you walk down the stairs at the end of a dinner party ... that would have made you the Toast of Paris if only you'd thought of them a bit sooner."

• Kinnell groups the questions asked into:
  • Questions of "gossip, albeit of a high order." He includes here "personal testimony. Have I always wanted to be a poet? How did I begin writing? How do I start a poem? Do I revise? [He is a great reviser.] What do I do about dry spells? Do I find translating useful? Which poets do I read? [Whitman, Smart, Rilke, Neruda, Yeats, and many others.]"
  • Questions of "exegesis of certain poems. It is a modern assumption that there is a key to every poem and the author has it. The trouble is that I don't believe this. ... the author may be the last one to know what his work is about."
  • Questions of "poetry in its technical aspects ... I have always firmly believed that in poetry there is no such thing as technique apart from the poems that use it ... [yet] how cheerfully I held forth about these very matters."
  • "Then there are the big questions: How do you teach poetry? Why do you give poetry readings? Is there any point to political poetry? What is the use of poetry in a technological civilization? What is the relation of modern poetry to tribal poetry? These seem to reflect a curiosity about ... what poetry is and what its purposes are."

Translations

The Poems of François Villon

Time Line

February 1, 1927.

• Born in Providence, Rhode Island, USA.
• Will become influenced by Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson.

1948.

• Graduated with a B.A. from Princeton University, at the same time as his friend W.S. Merwin

1950s

• Traveled in Europe and the Middle East.
• To Paris on a Fulbright Fellowship.

1956

• Translations: Bitter Victory (novel by René Hardy).

1960

• 1st book of poems: What a Kingdom It Was.

1960s

• Returned to the USA and became active in the Civil Rights Movement.
• Joined CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and worked on voter registration and workplace integration in Louisiana.
• Arrested for his Civil Rights work.

1964

• 2nd book of poems: Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock.

1965

• Translations: The Poems of François Villon (first version).

1966

• A novel: Black Light.

1968

• 3rd book of poems: Body Rags.
• Translations: On the Motion and Immobility of Douve (poems by Yves Bonnefoy).

1970

• Translations: Lackawanna Elegy (poems by Yvan Goll).

1971

• 4th book of poems: First poems 1946-1954.
• 5th book of poems: The Book of Nightmares.

1974

• 6th book of poems: The Avenue Bearing the Initials of Christ into the New World: Poems 1946-1964.

1977

• Translations: The Poems of François Villon (second version).

1978

• Interviews: Walking Down the Stairs (a collection of interviews).

1980

• 7th book of poems: Mortal Acts, Mortal Words

1982

• 8th book of poems: Selected Poems, which received 1983 Pulitzer Poetry Prize and National Book Award.
• A children's book: How the Alligator Missed Breakfast.

1983

• Won Pulitzer Poetry Prize for Selected Poems (1980).

1985

• 9th book of poems: The Past.

1987

• Edited: The Essential Whitman.

1989

• Became the state poet of Vermont, in which he was preceded by Robert Frost (who remained the state poet of Vermont for some decades following his death).

1990

• 10th book of poems: When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone.
• A poem included in the Best American Poetry: 1990.

1993

• 11th book of poems: Three Books: Body Rags; Mortal Acts, Mortal Words; The Past.
• Completed his 4-year term as state poet of Vermont succeeded by Louise Glück.

1996

• 12th book of poems: Imperfect Thirst

1999

• A poem included in the Best American Poetry: 1999.

2000

• 13th book of poems: A New Selected Poems, National Book Award finalist.
• Translations: The Essential Rilke (with Hannah Liebmann).

2001

• A poem included in the Best American Poetry: 2001.

2003

• One of the first to join Poets Against the War in opposition to the Iraq war of George W. Bush.
• A poem included in the Best American Poetry: 2003.

2006

• 14th book of poems: Strong Is Your Hold, National Book Award finalist.

Links and Books.

Links and Books.

• Best American Poetry series.
• Best Poems by the Best Poets - Some Lists of Winners.
• Laureate: the Poets Laureate of Britain
• Laureate: the Poets Laureate of the U.S.A.
• Other Books of Poetry Form.

Related pages: Books of Poetry Form. Alphabetic list of poetry forms and related topics. Poetry Home. How to Write Poetry. How to write specific forms: Haibun. Haiku. Hay(na)ku. Rengay. Tanka. Concrete. Ghazal. Lai. Pantoum. Rondeau. Rubáiyát. Sestina. Sonnet. Terza rima. Triolet. Tritina. Villanelle.

Other poets: Franz Wright. Jack Gilbert. Jorie Graham. Karen Braucher. Len Anderson. Li-Young Lee. Linda Pastan. Nordic Skalds. Richard Hugo. W.S. Merwin.

Copyright © 2006-2016 by J. Zimmerman The quoted poems are Copyright © 1960-2015 by Galway Kinnell.

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