National Poetry Month - Day 11
Today's poem is "Oatmeal," by Galway Kinnell, which you can read here. Four or five years ago, BD and I were lucky enough to be able to hear Kinnell read this poem, in the village hall in Glover, Vermont.
Yes, "Oatmeal" is funny, and hearing Kinnell read it is even funnier, because of his ability to pause at pregnant moments, or to draw out words like glutinous and gluey. It's also refreshing to be reminded that poetry, even as practiced by the likes of Keats and Wordsworth, was in their time, of their world. (Since I'm not a huge fan of Wordsworth, I also get a kick out of his supposed failure at an exercise.)
I chose Kinnell today, because his were the first poems to show me that as good as poetry is at showing us how to see new things, poetry is even better at showing us how to see the familiar anew. As much as Frost inhabited the same landscape, because his poems were around long before I was, and because they were well-known to us from the time we were in school--or earlier, depending on our parents and grandparents.
But I first read Kinnell as a college student in Maine, for a class on "Contemporary Poetry" taught by the late Robert Gillespie, a poet himself. Our textbook covered people like Roethke, Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, who were more recent than Frost, but still mostly dead and gone. (Howard Nemerov was an exception, and years later, when I was in graduate school at Wash U, one of my few pleasures there was crossing paths with him in the quad.) Our first two papers analyzed particular poems, which I enjoyed. The last paper, however, was to read and write about one of four-six new works, all available in the library. I chose, completely at random, Kinnell's Book of Nightmares (1971), in part because I'd been going through a tough time, and in part because, well, it suggested something goth (not that the term had been invented in its contemporary sense).
I read the poems and found references to classics I recognized, as well as references to a "witness tree" and bog and swampland and a bear, put together in such a way that it seemed as if I knew it. And, as I did the research for the paper, I discovered that the poet lived in Sheffield, about 30 miles from where I grew up. This was a landscape I knew. It was a moment of discovery.
Kinnell became Vermont's second poet laureate--Frost was the first. (Ruth Stone is the current poet laureate. Her four-year term ends in 2011.) If you haven't read any Galway Kinnell, I urge you to give him a try.