Galway Kinnell, the Primal, and the Civilized

In "Lastness," the final poem of his sequence "The Book of Nightmares," Galway Kinnell calls a poem a "concert of one / divided among himself, / this earthward gesture / of the sky-diver." In these two metaphors, Kinnell enunciates a profound and carefully wrought idea of poetry. It becomes that harmonizing act that unifies the manifold and activates the condemned. While he accepts the concept of the divided subject, he ultimately recognizes the need for a gesture, the coordination of the body into some attempt at expressing a symbolic meaning. Though condemned to fall and ultimately to die, the skydiver clutches for the earth.

In many ways, these two metaphors exemplify my approach to reading poetry. I try to read the tensions of subjectivity and desire expressed in the poem -- even those poems that at first come off as unified reflections of a confident poetic speaker. In other words, how might the concert be understood as the presentation of divisions among the players? Of what do these divisions consist and how do they arise? And second, how are subjects instantiated by their gestures? That is, how do we become through our actions?

"Lastness" provides its own statement on these questions. The fifth section of the poem recapitulates Kinnell's perspective:

That Bach concert I went to so long ago --
the chandeliered room
of ladies and gentlemen who would never die . . .
the voices go out,
the room becomes hushed,
the violinist
puts the irreversible sorrow of his face
into the opened palm
of the wood, the music begins:

a shower of rosin,
the bow-hairs listening down all their length
to the wail,
the sexual wail
of the back-alleys and blood strings we have lived
still crying,
still singing, from the sliced intestine
of cat.

The section begins with the height of civilization: the Bach concert, and yet it is made possible by the "sexual wail" of the bow across strings made from animal intestines. This is an example of Kinnell's oft-used strategy of mixing the primal and the civilized, suggesting that the latter should not be recognized as the expulsion of the former, but rather a special refinement of it. In fact, the trajectory of this section -- and much of Kinnell's work -- is backwards, stressing the recovery of the primal from within the civilized. While he often takes as his material the wild stuff of nature, he does not jettison civilization; he brings the two together into a tension that marks contemporary life.

More specifically, he continually returns to the question of poetry and expression -- even in his well-known poem "The Bear," which otherwise seems to be a narrative of a hunt, a possession, and a transformation:

the rest of my days I spend
wandering: wondering
what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?

In this final moment, the speaker of "The Bear" has not transformed into a bear but rather recognized the importance -- and difficulty -- of speaking the primal.