Galway Kinnell

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Galway Kinnell at a reading (2013)

Galway Mills Kinnell (born February 1, 1927 in Providence , Rhode Island , † October 28, 2014 in Sheffield , Vermont ) was an American poet , who won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book for his anthology Selected Poems Award in the Poetry category. In his works he dealt with the street life in Manhattan district East Village , meditations on the death , the Juniata River and Mount Monadnock . Kinnell, who was also a MacArthur Fellow in 1984 and was awarded the Frost Medal in 2002, together with Hannah Liebmann also translated selected works by Rainer Maria Rilke into English with The Essential Rilke . His poetry, which touched the core of human experience, made him one of the most important American poets of the period after the Second World War .

Life

Origin, studies and World War II

Kinnell was the son of the Scottish carpenter James Kinnell and the Irish native Elizabeth Mills Kinnell and grew up with three siblings in Pawtucket . From an early age he became interested in the poems of Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson , but also the hymns and sermons of the Pawtucket Congregational Church and the cheerful Irish folk songs sung by his mother .

After attending local schools, he moved to the Wilbraham Academy in Wilbraham at the age of 15 in 1942 , before he began studying Romance languages at Princeton University . His fellow student W. S. Merwin brought him closer to the works of William Butler Yeats , whose works, together with those of Rainer Maria Rilke, influenced him for a lifetime. He also found a kindred spirit in the French late medieval poet François Villon , whose poems he published in recognized translations after he had improved his knowledge of the French language with the support of a Fulbright scholarship in Paris and while traveling through Europe .

During the Second World War he interrupted his studies and did his military service in the US Navy . After the end of the war, he continued his studies at Princeton University, graduating in 1948 with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) with honors. He completed a subsequent postgraduate course at the University of Rochester in 1949 with a Master of Arts (MA).

In the following years he was initially active as a lecturer in poetry for distance students at the University of Chicago and also worked as a teacher abroad, for example in Tehran . The stay there led to the writing of his only novel Black Light , a story about a Persian carpet weaver whose life is changed by a murder.

Beginning of poetry and success with "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ Into the New World"

Kinnell belonged to a generation of poets who sought to end the Anglo-American modernism of TS Eliot and Ezra Pound , and wrote verses that, according to him, could be understood without an academic degree. His works on evocations of urban street scenes, pastoral odes, thoughts about dying and open-hearted investigations of sexuality , which appeared between 1960 and 2008, were so successful that they are still being reprinted.

The Beat Generation that emerged in the 1950s with authors such as Jack Kerouac , Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs , but also poets of New Criticism around John Crowe Ransom , Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren were among his literary contemporaries, but their focus was on laid the formal analysis of structure and meaning. Kinnell, however, tended to go his own way and developed a poetic style influenced by the past.

His breakthrough came with the 1960 poem "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ Into the New World", which literary critics compared with works by Walt Whitman . The poem is a 14-part work about Avenue C in Manhattan that became a major inspiration for his photographic eye and intuitive sense of other people's lives. In the verses, he described the Jews, Blacks, and Puerto Ricans walking the street in the springtime sunlight and the major shops, institutions, and restaurants on that street at the time, such as Downtown Talmud Torah , Blosztein's Cutrate Bakery , Areceba Panataria Hispano , Nathan Kugler Chicken Store Fresh Killed Daily and the street vendors' cars rattling over the cobblestones:

"In the gathering shadows,
wiped-out lives - punks, lushes
Panhandlers, pushers, rumsoaks, all those
Who took it easy when they should have been out failing at some-
thing.
And after dark, the crone who sells newspapers on the street:
Rain or stars, every night
She is there, squatting on the orange crate,
Issuing out only in darkness, like the cucarachas
And dread nightmares in the chambers overhead. "
'In gathering shadows,
wiped out lives - crap, drunkard
Beggars, pushers, soakers, all those
Who take it easy when they fall out of one
Thing.
And after dark, the old woman who sells newspapers in the street:
Rain or stars every evening
She is there, sitting on the orange box,
Only appearing in the dark, like the cockroaches
And terrible nightmares in the overhead chambers. '

Meditations on Dying: Body Rags and The Book of Nightmares

This success was followed by a ten-year period in which he wrote mostly difficult, dismaying poems, most of which dealt with dying, but which in later times became the most widely studied poems in literary criticism and literary studies . Noteworthy poems of those years were “The Bear” and “The Porcupine”, two works from the Body Rags collection , in which the narrator in a certain way became the animal whose agonizing death he described. In "The Bear" the bear swallowed a hunter's bait, a sharp bone wrapped in bacon, and then wanders through the wilderness of the Arctic , slowly dying of internal bleeding. On the seventh day, the starving hunter chasing the bear's blood trail came across the dead bear:

"I hack
a ravine in his thigh, and eat and drink,
and tear him down his whole length
and open him and climb in
and close him up after me, against the wind,
and sleep.
And dream
of lumbering flatfooted over the tundra,
stabbed twice from within ... "
'I hacked
a chasm in his thigh, and ate and drank,
And tore it open along its entire length
And opened it and climbed inside
And locked it behind me, against the wind,
and slept.
And dreamed
From the heavy, flat-footed run across the tundra,
Stabbed twice from the inside ... '

The Book of Nightmares , published in 1971, is no less concerned with death and how life is lived with the constant awareness that everything begins with death the moment it is founded. However, this time the perspectives are different from those in Body Rags : The book-length poem begins with the birth of the first child and ends with the birth of the second, and, among other things, confronts the Vietnam War with sentences like “Lieutenant! This corpse will not stop burning. "('Lieutenant! This corpse will not stop burning.')

Creative crisis and criticism

After the publication of this book, Kinnell experienced a creative crisis of nine years before he published a new collection of poems in 1980 with Mortal Acts, Mortal Words . Harold Bloom , critic at The New York Times Book Review , wrote on the occasion of the publication that Kinnell had not quite fulfilled the remarkable promise of "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ Into the New World" and suffered from a certain over-ambition that each individual poem must be a decisive event.

Despite this criticism, he continued to work, describing it in an interview with The Los Angeles Times as follows:

"I've tried to carry my poetry as far as I could to dwell on the ugly as fully, as far and as long as I could stomach it. Probably more than most poets I have included in my work the unpleasant, because I think if you are ever going to find any kind of truth to poetry it has to be based on all of experience rather than on a narrow segment of cheerful events. "
'I tried to carry my lyrics as far as I could to dwell in the ugly, so completely, as far and as long as I could digest it. Perhaps more than other poets I have included the unpleasant in my work, because I believe that any kind of truth about poetry can only be found if it is based on all experiences, rather than just a narrow segment of happy experiences. '

Selected Poems , Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award

In 1983, Kinnell was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Award in the Poetry category for Selected Poems in 1983, for his best work after 25 years as a poet. As a result, he became a respected poet, translator, essayist, and teacher who divided his time between his country life in Vermont and big city life in Manhattan, where he was professor and director of the creative writing program at New York University (NYU).

His later works became looser and more personal, with plenty of room for woody poems and flights of whimsy. In “Oatmeal,” for example, the psychological effects of eating oatmeal lead him to conjure up an imaginary breakfast guest in the person of the dead poet John Keats :

"Keats said I was right to invite him: due to its glutinous texture, gluey
lumpishness, hint of slime, and unusual willingness to
disintegrate, oatmeal must never be eaten alone. "
'Keats said I was right to invite him: because of their sticky nature, cardboard
Clunkiness, a hint of slime, and an unusual willingness to
disintegrate, oatmeal should never be eaten alone. '

Most recently, Kinnell, who was also awarded the MacArthur Fellowship of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1984, was honored with the Frost Medal of the Poetry Society of America in 2002 . In 1980 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1997 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

His marriage to Spanish translator Ines Delgado de Torres in 1965 resulted in two children named after characters by Yeats: Fergus and Maud. After his divorce in the mid-1980s, he married Barbara Kammer Bristol in 1997. Kinnell died in October 2014 of complications from leukemia .

Publications

  • What a kingdom it was , 1960
  • Flower herding on Mount Monadnock , 1964
  • Black light: a novel , 1966
  • Poems of night , 1968
  • Body rags: poems , 1968
  • The hen flower , 1969
  • First poems, 1946-1954 , 1970
  • The book of nightmares , 1971
  • The shoes of wandering , 1971
  • The avenue bearing the initial of Christ into the New World; poems 1946-1964 , 1974
  • Saint Francis and the sow , 1976
  • Three poems , 1976
  • Walking down the stairs: selections from interviews , 1978
  • Fergus falling , 1979
  • There are things I tell to no one , 1979
  • Two poems , 1979
  • The last hiding places of snow , 1980
  • Angling, a day: and other poems , 1980
  • Mortal acts, mortal words , 1980
  • Selected Poems: Galway Kinnell , 1982
  • Thoughts occasioned by the most insignificant of all human events , 1982
  • How the alligator missed breakfast , 1982
  • The Poetry Voice of Galway Kinnell , 1983
  • The fundamental project of technology , 1983
  • Remarks on accepting the American Book Award for Poetry , 1984
  • The Seekonk Woods , 1985
  • The past , 1985
  • The geese , 1985
  • Essential Whitman , 1988
  • When one has lived a long time alone , 1990
  • Hard Prayer , 1991
  • Poems: body rags: mortal acts, mortal words: the past , 1993
  • Imperfect thirst , 1994
  • The essential Rilke: Bilingual edition , co-editor Hannah Liebmann, 1999, ISBN 0-88001-676-0
  • When the towers fell , 2005
  • Strong Is Your Hold: Poems , 2006

Background literature

  • Wolfgang Steuhl: Two ways of contemporary American natural poetry: Studies on Galway Kinnell, Gary Snyder and Richard Wilbur , dissertation, Philipps University Marburg , Department of Modern Foreign Languages ​​and Literatures, 1978

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Harold Bloom: Straight Forth Out of Self . In: The New York Times, June 22, 1980
  2. ↑ Members: Galway Kinnell. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 7, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Kinnell, Galway
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kinnell, Galway Mills (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American poet and professor of literature
DATE OF BIRTH February 1, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Providence , Rhode Island
DATE OF DEATH October 28, 2014
Place of death Sheffield , Vermont