Reflecting on Galway Kinnell The Stranger
At The Stranger, Gabriel Heller reflects on The Book of Nightmares by Galway Kinnell, as well as the reality of the poet's death last year: "How could someone who'd reckoned so thoroughly with death actually die?" More:
I was 20 years old when I first encountered The Book of Nightmares, Kinnell's fragmented, hallucinatory book-length masterpiece. Published in 1971, at the height of the Vietnam War, it is a poem about the intimacy of opposites, of extremes: sanctity and horror, birth and decay, love and death; the transcendent and the brutally ugly are mashed up against each other.
In its sheer visceral intensity, the poem blew me away like few works of literature had.
Some years later, I went to New York University to get an MFA in fiction writing. Kinnell, who helped found the creative writing program in the early '80s, was still teaching there, but the poetry and fiction programs stayed mostly separate from each other, and I rarely crossed paths with him. Once in a while, I'd see him in the department offices or at readings, but I never overcame my shyness and went up to him to say how much The Book of Nightmares had meant to me.
*
At this cafe in downtown Manhattan, they throw two shots of espresso in the iced coffee, which is why I like it. It wakes me up.
I move closer to the counter. Everyone around me looks beautiful, immortal. I think of Kinnell's kids, Fergus and Maud. They were babies in the poem. They would be middle-aged now. Their names are etched into my mind.
*
After my own kids are asleep, after I've given them dinner and a bath and brushed their teeth and read Curious George Goes to an Ice Cream Shop five hundred times in a row to my son, I take The Book of Nightmares off the shelf and crack it open for the first time in years and read most of the poem out loud to myself in the living room.
Eighteen years later, it still strikes me as a profound, visionary work.
Rilke, perhaps the greatest modern poet of death, envisioned a poetry meant not to resurrect God, an impossible task, but to restore, independent of God, the sacred meaning of life in the face of death.
Kinnell's death-ridden poem begins with the birth of Maud and ends with the birth of Fergus. The whole poem seems to spring from a newly felt awareness upon the birth of his daughter: A child is born not only to live, but also to die—a truth as simple as it is unfathomable.
Read the rest of this touching tribute at The Stranger.