Galway Kinnell’s poems have always ascribed to the artform the unique role of confidante, a confidante when neither confessor, nor colleague will do.   I make this claim without much proof except for the clause that had been originally affixed to the title, “There Are Things I Tell To No One,” which first appeared in the September, 1979 issue of Harper’s magazine.  The original five-section, free-verse work had been printed there with the words,“but to the poem.”   And therefore it is to the poem itself we must turn if we are to decipher what the 1971 essayist means by going “through personality to reach beyond it.”

Is it possible that any poet might attend to him or her self with the same rigorous attention that T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound had turned on the dissectible objects of the world?

Are readers so easily enthralled with a poet’s personality that they might jilt the persona’s or the identity-constructs upon whom their hearts have fixated for decades?

Within the pages of Mortal Acts Mortal Words, Kinnell leaves off the roving eye of an earlier selected poems collection, The Avenue Bearing The Initial of Christ into the New World, and offers an ear.  The ear, it seems, is much more suited for absorbing those intangibles that remain unsaid and poorly navigated in daily conversation.  We can apparently become hung up by these intangibles simply because of the rational mind’s relunctance to come clean.  That is, the sheer gnostic tendency to extracate ourselves from the mess of “Avenue C” and other lower east parts is precisely the problem.  And the irony is killing us.

It’s ironic given the fact that western civilization has built its structures upon Judeo-Christian categories that include incarnation.  It’s ironic given how systematic theologians have told us for generations that the divine has become flesh.   It’s ironic in that the ideal of certain positivist philosophers seems like a moving set of goalposts.  It’s ironic because the safe distance  that politicians promise the electorate only succeeds to the degree that trouble is always around the corner.   And yet… “at such times, I go off alone…”

Kinnell whispers his intention in the poem.  The bawdy crowd will not hear it.   “Those close” to the poet will attempt to manage his melancholy, or perhaps fall victim to behavioral modification techniques themselves.   But what’s at issue beneath the sadness and “on the other side of happiness” is the individual’s capacity to “hear, sometimes.”   Going off “as if listening for God” appears innocuous or trite amid the political tremors of human history.   Nonetheless, Kinnell claims to have accessed a subterranean community, a “we,” whose inherent animal-affinity will not detach us from “that backward spreading/ brightness.”

As distinguished from “God” (to which the Christendom-mob is compelled to subscribe, and may, in 2012, renounce), “a music of grace” will not obliterate our subjectivity.  On the contrary, it “flows…” and “speaks in notes struck/ or caressed or blown or plucked/ off our own bodies…”  This is the sacred otherness, which cannot be named as sacred on the street, as a matter of public policy:

existence already remembers

the flush upon it you will have been,

you who have reached dout ahead

and taken up some of the black dust

we become, souvenir

which glitters already in the bones of your hand.

Everything in italics has been played like a familiar tune.

On the other hand, back and forth we go.

Robert Hass has said of Galway Kinnell’s verse that it grabs death by the scruff of the neck and holds it up to life.

Well, in a similar way, section three of the poem holds life by the gonads:  “the cry of orgasm, also has a ghastliness to it/ as though it touched forward…”  Memory moves in this direction too.  And by it we are caught.   As if flying through the air with the greatest of ease (dis-ease), the poet has simultaneously loosened his grip and re-doubled it while pulling us toward the question that embedded in section four:

can you bless — or not curse –

whatever struggles to stay alive

on this planet of struggles?

Apparently a much more “ardent note” awaits those readers who can genuinely respond in  the affirmative.  But make no mistake:  this elicited, or called-for, response has nothing to do with either the creedal ascent or the moral imperative of the age.   Rather, we become grateful for that animal-creatureliness from which we’ve been trying to hide so desperately.   Consider “spine marrowed with god’s flesh” and “thighs bruised by the blue flower” and “pelvis that makes angels shiver” — a veritable treasure chest of corporeal gems!

Clearly the just desserts of Galway Kinnel are not listed among the pie-in-the-sky menu items of George Herbert or John Donne or Gerald Manley Hopkins.   He is, like Walt Whitman, obsessed with the delights of sex and sexuality.   But let him loose in section five, and the “I” becomes “like everyone.”  The writer, at the close of the poem, hears the same music that he’d heard at the start, but through the “hard cock and the soaked cunt” we might bequeath an individuality that sings amid “the singing of mortal lives.”

Mortality, afterall, isn’t something which damns a human being so much as it unites disparate personalities with the ashes of the cosmos.   There is no need for forgiveness on the level that institutions make it available to the masses.   There is, however, a need to shed the personas by which poetry becomes another means of blabbering on and on, or perhaps cocooning in its own cacophony of dissonant noise.

Kinnell, for his part, has contributed toward the music of contemporary poetry.