{"id":231032,"date":"2017-04-25T14:41:56","date_gmt":"2017-04-25T18:41:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=231032"},"modified":"2017-04-25T14:42:42","modified_gmt":"2017-04-25T18:42:42","slug":"paying-respect-to-inner-life-231032","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/paying-respect-to-inner-life-231032\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Paying of respect to our inner life\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

April is National Poetry Month, created in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets to celebrate\u00a0an ancient literary genre that captures readers’ minds and hearts as powerfully today as ever.<\/p>\n

Rochester\u00a0has, for generations, taught students the pleasures and possibilities of poetic expression, counted famed poets among its faculty, and hosted an\u00a0array of\u00a0writers who have made exceptional contributions to the art of verse.<\/p>\n

Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning poet Galway Kinnell \u201949 (MA) was often compared to Walt Whitman for his lyricism. When he died in 2014, Rochester Review remembered him with a selection of his thoughts on the practice of poetry.<\/p>\n

\n

This story originally appeared in Rochester Review, January\u2013February, 2015.<\/em><\/p>\n

Galway Kinnell \u201949 (MA) was a towering figure, both literally and as a poet. Part of a postwar turn away from the modernism of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, Kinnell strove to craft accessible poems from the material of everyday life. The centerpiece of his first published collection, a 14-part poem about Manhattan\u2019s Avenue C called \u201cThe Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ Into the New World,\u201d made his reputation, and inspired frequent comparisons to the lyrical style of Walt Whitman.<\/p>\n

Kinnell, who died in October, wrote 10 collections of poetry. His 1982 book, Selected Poems,<\/em> won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In 2000, he returned to Rochester for a reading and lecture as part of the Hyam Plutzik Memorial Poetry Series. The University awarded him its highest honor for alumni, the Hutchison Medal, in 2001. In 1982, Jeffrey Mehr \u201978 interviewed Kinnell for Rochester Review.<\/em><\/p>\n

Here are excerpts from that interview, \u201cWriting Poems: The Thrill of Discovery.\u201d<\/p>\n

The entire interview is online.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Galway
Kinnell and dog, Willie, share a moment in Kinnell\u2019s Vermont home office. (University photo \/ Richard W. Brown)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On Words<\/h3>\n

\u201cOne thing that leads one into poetry is an interest in words. Not words as written things with a referent, but words as sound that the body produces, that fill the mouth and that are therefore in some way psychically identified with the thing they\u2019re talking about. And that have a content which can\u2019t be reduced to a definition. Like \u2018spartled.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

On Music<\/h3>\n

\u201cFor me, music is quite important. It seems the soul of poetry. Poetry has a body as well\u2014the things of the world\u2014so I find it more interesting than music. But often poetry seems to lack a soul. By listening to music, you recover the sense of what poetry must be.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Writing Well<\/h3>\n

\u201cWhen you write well, there is a kind of special mood that comes upon you, different, I suppose, for every person, but for everyone different from just the normal, day-to-day way they feel. And words seem to come on their own. You\u2019re understanding them and shaping them, and yet they come out saying things that you didn\u2019t know you could say.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the Importance of Context<\/h3>\n

\u201cThose people who say, \u2018Homer was writing about exactly the same thing as a writer today,\u2019 are, I think, completely wrong. It seems quite clear that our consciousness evolves, and that we know things differently. . . . For example, Homer didn\u2019t really know that it was intolerable to die. We do.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Critical Reception<\/h3>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve had lots of nice reviews, and I\u2019ve had lots of attacks on my poetry. . . . The only reviews that really can strike dread into your heart are those that actually see what you feel is weakest and then drive the nail right in there.\u201d<\/p>\n

On What Makes a Good Poem<\/h3>\n

\u201cMost good poems address themselves to things that we all know about, and the only preparation we need, as readers, is a kind of paying of respect to our inner life, to the feelings we have that are of no practical importance: the sense of strangeness and the hauntedness of existence; the fragility of our position on the globe, and the fragility of the globe itself; this very peculiar situation we\u2019re in, self-conscious creatures who know that we\u2019re lost in some kind of existence that we don\u2019t understand at all.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning poet Galway Kinnell \u201949 (MA) was often compared to Walt Whitman for his lyricism. When he died in 2014, Rochester Review<\/em> remembered him with a selection of his thoughts on the practice of poetry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":752,"featured_media":239662,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13092],"tags":[1636,13992],"class_list":["post-231032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-arts","tag-poetry","tag-rochester-review"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\u2018Paying of respect to our inner life\u2019<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/paying-respect-to-inner-life-231032\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"\u2018Paying of respect to our inner life\u2019\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning poet Galway Kinnell \u201949 (MA) was often compared to Walt Whitman for his lyricism. 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