Galway Kinnell

Galway Kinnell (born February 1, 1927, in Providence, Rhode Island – October 28, 2014) is one of the most influential American poets of the latter half of the 20th century.

Galway Kinnell

Quotes

• A boy's hunched body loved out of a stalk
  The first song of his happiness, and the song woke
  His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.
  • First Song (1983).

• The appeal to heaven breaks off.
  The petals begin to fall, in self-forgiveness.
  It is a flower. On this mountainside it is dying.
  • Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1976).

• The sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
  from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
  the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
  • Saint Francis and the Sow (1986).

• I take a wolf's rib and whittle
  it sharp at both ends
  and coil it up
  and freeze it in blubber and place it out
  on the fairway of the bears.
  • The Bear (1974).

Quotes about Galway Kinnell

• I read a lot of poetry. I keep up, as much as possible, with modern American poetry and I think that I'm very influenced by its rhythms. I like Walt Whitman, and I read all of Yeats a couple of months ago... I've read Galway Kinnell and Carolyn Kizer and Bob Hass, and some of the people who are sort of like poets but are prose writers like Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick.
  • 1980 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)

External links

• The loveliness of pigs: Galway Kinnell searches for the real beauty interview and poem “Daybreak” on the Christian Science Monitor
• Cortland Review interview and poem “The Fundamental Project of Technology”
• "Galway Kinnel reads 'Wait' " for the WGBH series, New Television Workshop
• " 'Since you asked..,' with Galway Kinnell for the WGBH series, New Television Workshop
• Academy of American Poets biography and links to interviews and poems
• Modern American Poetry short biography