It was a real highlight of my life to interview Galway Kinnell in 2008, winner of a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, Wallace Stevens Prize, and former poet laureate of the state of Vermont.

Click here to listen to my 2008 interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Galway Kinnell

Here is a selected transcript of our interview.

Dr. Kent:  Are you working on a new book?  Is there a new project going on?  Are you supporting these?  What’s your plan right now?

Galway Kinnell:  I don’t really have plans you know, usually.  Occasionally I do.  For example, when I wrote The Book of Nightmares, it’s one long poem and it self forms a book.  So from the beginning of that until the end I didn’t write anything else and I considered that I had a plan to finish this poem and publish it but that was uncharacteristic.  I just write poems and then publish them in magazines maybe and revise them from time to time and put them in a little pile and if the pile gets a little thick, then I think well, maybe I should put out a book.

Dr. Kent:  So you mentioned The Book of Nightmares.  I’m curious about and that was concerned with the Vietnam War.  I’m wondering what your take is right now.  Are you writing poetry that’s political then; that was back in 1971, are you still in that place?

Galway Kinnell:  Well not really but partly.  I think in some of these poems I’ve been writing this Iraq War has slid  in and I don’t know provides a kind of context for what I’m writing about, whereas in the Vietnam war I wrote a lot of poems specifically about the war.  Trying to persuade the young people from supporting it.

Dr. Kent:  And now at the same time you also served in the military and from what I gather you were also in Iran?

Galway Kinnell:  Yeah I was in the Navy in the Second World War and I spent about maybe ten years later I spent two years in Iran.  Not quite two years.  Two chunks of two years, maybe it all added up to a year and a half.  I lived in Tehran and I went there as a Fulbright Professor, as a teacher at the university of Tehran and I did and made a lot of acquaintances among the students.  Then my time came to go but I didn’t want to go, I was so attracted by this country and so I stayed around for quite a while after that and made my living by writing for the English language edition of the Tehran Journal.  I translated a newspaper, the first prominent newspaper.

Dr. Kent:  So it sounds like a painful experience through the years to see Iran in the news for the last 25 years.

Galway Kinnell:  Yes indeed.  At the time I was there the money, the oil money had not started to pour in the way it did later and the Shah who was very progressive in many ways in road building and removing any fines for people, women without fedoras and so on.  He was very good in that respect but you could tell that he didn’t really connect with the people.  He stood apart and he could not have stayed in there very long and then the oil money came in.  This was after I left, and then he was able to do whatever he wanted without any fear and his fear, the fear of the Americans who were there and of the Iranian Regime; their fear was of the left.  Everyone was caught by surprise when the revolution came from the right.

Dr. Kent:  How did all of this turn for you into a career in poetry?  Were you a poet even back at the very beginning in the Navy?  When did you sort of start to own your poetness?

Galway Kinnell:  I never call myself a poet.  Robert Frost said that the term poet is a word of praise and therefore one must never apply it to oneself or it sounds like boasting.  But in any case, I was serious about writing my poetry even before I went in the navy and when I was in boot camp I was put in charge of 120 men who had also come into boot camp at that time and I was put in charge because I had taken a semester of college.  Then I fell into the habit at night when everyone was in bed and it was very quiet of reading one poem before the lights went out.  So, I’ve been interested in poetry, in writing poetry basically all my life but I hadn’t published anything then.  When I was in Iran my first book was published in this country and mailed to me.  That was very satisfying to see that book.

Dr. Kent:  I’ll bet and you’ve been in the industry many, many years.  How has the industry changed?  You know, its fascinating to me how different I guess the industry was 40 years ago.

Galway Kinnell:  The publishing industry?

Dr. Kent:  The publishing industry, the poetry industry if you would.

Galway Kinnell:  No I wouldn’t.  I don’t think that it’s an industry though in fact now that you say it; it has sort of become an industry.  When I started everybody was on their own, there were little poetries and people kind of wrote the same way and they gave themselves names and so on but we were all friends and we were all poor and we all lived by.  Some people had money, some of them had money of course like James Merrill and he used his money to help out other poets but basically we took some job some small job somewhere.

We also gave readings in bars and we also gave readings in colleges around the country.  That was the time when this habit of poetry readings in colleges began and it was begun by a woman called Betty Craig who was head of the Academy of American Poets.  And she would send out some of us to go on a reading tour of maybe ten readings in a row and we would come back with what we felt were riches and the universities and colleges we went to didn’t have to pay very much because there were so many of them banded together to give a poet a good fee.  So the idea spread very fast over the country.

Dr. Kent:  Now there’s I have a PhD in music, so I know the academic world a little bit.  How is it looking at the field of poetry, is there an academic world?  Is there a pop poetry world?  What’s your take on it?  I know you served as the Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.  What’s your take on what form poetry takes now?

Galway Kinnell:  Well there are divisions in poetry now that are more broad and maybe a little more serious than the divisions before.  I’m not sure but there is something you know there is a poetry that could be read and understood by anyone really and there is another kind of poetry, which is much more refined and worked, generally called language poetry in which even some poets get lost trying to make their way.

So I say it’s a serious division but actually there’s a lot of overlapping of it and sometimes I read with a language poet and the language poet tries to modify some of the difficult characteristics of the poem and I try to pick poems with some more of elaborate poems.  Some language poets are also just regular poets so maybe their coming together a little bit more now.

Dr. Kent:  Speaking of conflict I guess or of coming together, what’s your take on this political situation right now?  It’s so vitriolic and all of that, do you see any connections back to your time being an activist in the 60s and 70s?

Galway Kinnell:  You mean the election or do you mean the situation in Iraq and so on?

Dr. Kent:  Well of the above.

Galway Kinnell:  As far as the relationship of the parties and of the two people running for election, I’ve never heard anything like the words that are coming out of John McCain in this situation.  It seems that he’s doing anything to get elected and there’s actually nothing holding him back.  I think in the past truth was twisted and so on but in general there was a much better spirit between the two parties than there is today.  It’s just been a gradual split I guess and so I don’t know what will come of Obama’s apparent hope to be a moderator in some way in the government between the two parties and so we’ll see.

As far as the situation in the Middle East goes, I think it was a mistake to go in and I think it could be Iraq could be held as a kind of friendly ally if we’re willing to keep a large military force there.  And then the effect would be just like the British and the French and so on in the 19th century as they took over their colonies.  So I think it’s a bad situation to be in and this country is having so much trouble and so much money is being poured into that war that it might undermine this country and we’ll find ourselves a banana republic before long.

Dr. Kent:  Now I say amen from the choir.  Your poetry is something that is universal and has been around in the public eye for so many years.  There’s I guess lets say your most famous poems are ones that resonate with people the most, don’t tend to be I guess political poems but what do you see as poems?  Are they a message to someone?  Is this something that’s just coming out of you?  What is your take on poetry in your own life?

Galway Kinnell:  Well I think I’ve written a number of poems for specific purposes that were outside of poetry.  For example, the poems I wrote about the Vietnam War, they were messages trying to persuade and I’ve written other poems, even some of the more personal poems.  I wrote a poem about a student who wanted to commit suicide and she came in to my office one morning and said her love affair had broken up and she wanted to commit suicide.  So I talked to her a little while and then I made her promise to come back and see me in the afternoon and this was long before they had counselors on campuses, at least on the small ones.

So as soon as she left I set about writing a poem for her called Wait.  Because I just looking in my own experience and I’ve had some pain so bad that it made me think I didn’t want to live.  I waited and then it went away and then I looked back and saw that was what I had done I think it’s the only thing the only absolutely necessary thing that has to be said following the problem after a while becomes possible but not right then.  So I wrote this poem Wait and I gave it to her and she didn’t commit suicide and she thanked me later and so when I read at colleges I read this poem in case there’s somebody in the audience for whom it might have a special meaning and comes up and talks to me about it.

So those are examples of poems I wrote for specific persons but actually I rarely write poems for a specific person.  I don’t write them to unload my emotions.  I write them because they come to me and they seem to embody something that I didn’t quite know before and I try to perfect them and if somebody asks me why are you doing all that work?  I say, for beings, and that seems to satisfy most people but I cant and I cant think of anything other to account for that effort put into writing a poem.

Dr. Kent:  So I would love to hear you read one of your poems if you have a book handy now.

Galway Kinnell:  Well I don’t have a book handy now, but I could get one but your audience might not like that.

Dr. Kent:  Oh, it’s okay; I’ll fill a little space.

Galway Kinnell:  Okay, fill a little space and I’ll come back.

Dr. Kent:  Okay, I’m speaking with Galway Kinnell from Vermont.  He’s a Pulitzer Prize winning poet; author of the latest book, Strong As Your Hold and it’s a pleasure chatting with him about his life and his poetry.  Now he’s running to get a poetry book that he can read us something from.  He was born in Rhode Island and drawn to the poets like Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allen Poe; he graduated from Princeton and he said in one interview that he felt a certain scorn that there could be course in writing poetry.

And of course as we’ve been talking about, he was an activist in the 60s and he joined CORE, The Congress of Racial Equality, and as a fieldworker and was involved in the civil rights movement as well as of course writing the book that he was speaking about, the Book of Nightmares.  A book length poem about the Vietnam War as well as in 1968 he published a book called Body Rags and that was a civil rights book.

Galway Kinnell:  I’m here.

Dr. Kent:  Well I’ve been bragging about you for the last minute here.

Galway Kinnell:  Okay.  Now I’ve got a whole stack of my poems.  I have a wonderful dog, he’s a mixture between a lab and what are those nice French dogs with white?

Dr. Kent:  I’m not sure.  He sounds very nice.

Galway Kinnell:  Okay so I could read since I mentioned it, I could read the poem Wait.

Dr. Kent:  That would be wonderful.

Galway Kinnell:  Okay.  I’ll find it here.

Dr. Kent:  And you wrote this quite a while ago or was it fairly recent.

Galway Kinnell:  Yeah, it was quite a while ago.

Dr. Kent:  Are there poems that, let’s say, have you had poems fall on their face?  Do you have the one stack that are good poems and another stack that are ready to be burned?

Galway Kinnell:  Oh you mean in these new ones I’m writing?

Dr. Kent:  Any of them yeah.

Galway Kinnell:  I mean in the past I couldn’t do anything about the poems they’re published and that’s that but in the case of the ones I’m working on and writing the new ones, I haven’t tried to judge them at all because sometimes the poem that you think is least promising suddenly comes around and its one that seems most interesting.  So here’s this poem, Wait.

Wait — Galway Kinnell

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time.

(“Trust the Hours” (Wait) by Galway Kinnell, early version read by author 2008)

So that’s it.

Dr. Kent:  What a beautiful poem and I imagine that did a lot to cheer her up.

Galway Kinnell:  Yeah, I hope so.

Dr. Kent:  You know your poetry, along with others is something that’s moved me over the years and it must be a good feeling indeed to have so many people that read your poetry and take away that spiritual feeling from it of I didn’t necessarily want to take my own life, but there were times when I was down, when I turned to poetry.  So you must take great pride in that.

Galway Kinnell:  Well I don’t take great pride but I’m glad of it, yeah.

Dr. Kent:  Well it’s been a real honor speaking with you.  If you have another short poem, I’d love to hear you read another.

Galway Kinnell:  Okay, I can read lets see here’s a section from The Book of Nightmares.

Dr. Kent:  Is The Book of Nightmares still available?

Galway Kinnell:  Yes, it’s always been in print and it’s sold about 120,000 copies.

Dr. Kent:  My goodness and its especially timely now so — The Book of Nightmares.

Galway Kinnell:  Here’s a little passage about the birth of my son. 

3 — Galway Kinnell

A black bear sits alone
in the twilight, nodding from side
to side, turning slowly around and around
on himself, scuffing the four-footed
circle into the earth. He sniffs the sweat
in the breeze, he understands
a creature, a death-creature
watches from the fringe of the trees,
finally he understands
I am no longer here, he himself
from the fringe of the trees watches
a black bear
get up, eat a few flowers,trudge away,
all his fur glistening
in the rain.

And what glistening! Sancho Fergus,
my boychild, had such great shoulders,
when he was born his head
came out, the rest of him stuck. And he opened
his eyes: his head out there all alone
in the room, he squinted with pained,
barely unglued eves at the ninth-month’s
blood splashing beneath him
on the floor. And almost
smiled, I thought, almost forgave it all in advance.

When he came wholly forth
I took him up in my hands and bent
over and smelled
the black, glistening fur
of his head, as empty space
must have bent
over the newborn planet
and smelled the grasslands and the ferns.

(from The Book of Nightmares by Galway Kinnell, 1973 Mariner Books)

Dr. Kent:  Wow.  What a beautiful poem

Galway Kinnell:  Thank you.

Dr. Kent:  The readings are so incredible. The newest book Strong as Your Hold has a CD of poems read by the author also. That’s put out by Mariner Books.  Thank you so much for being on the show, it’s been my honor and especially to hear you read and tell about your life.  Thank you so much.

Galway Kinnell:  It’s been a pleasure for me; thank you.

Dr. Kent:  Have a wonderful day.

Galway Kinnell:  Thank you very much.