Kinnell and Fame

Is Galway Kinnell’s poem “The Geese” good? I have thought so. Its long single sentence begins with the geese approaching:

As soon as they come over the mountaininto the Connecticut valley and see the riverthey will follow until nightfall,bodies, or cells, begin to tumblebetween the streamers of their formation,thinning the left, thickening the right,until like a snowplowing skier the flock shifts weight

and ends with their departure:

and trembles away, to vanish, but before thatto semi-vanish, as a mirageor deepest desire does when it getsthe right distance from us and becomes rhythmic.

The poem does one thing Galway Kinnell could do, which is to describe a natural phenomenon with such rapt and respectful attentiveness that the reader not only enjoys the sensation of fresh seeing but also feels inspired to emulate the poet’s attentiveness. If an ornithologist were to tell me that Kinnell’s description of the geese in flight is somehow inaccurate, I would be surprised and disappointed, because I enjoy trusting the poem. (It crosses my mind that a snowplowing skier shifts weight to the ski on the side away from the intended direction of a turn, whereas when “the flock shifts weight” there are more geese on the side toward the flock’s intended direction; however, I don’t want to be bothered by this wrinkle in the simile.) Vivid description is nice, though in itself it is unlikely to make us admire a poem much. The value of “The Geese” depends more on its last three lines, where Kinnell proposes that the flight and the disappearance of the birds is a metaphor for a pattern of human experience, the psychological shift whereby desire moves from sensual immediacy to a more ethereal, imaginative condition; a process called sublimation. In discussions of psychological health, sublimation is often, though not always, recommended to us (lest we injure ourselves striving for too much unrealistic physical fulfillment). The nub of Kinnell’s poem is the word “right” when he speaks of a desire reaching “the right distance from us”—“right” might simply mean that the desire (like the flock of geese) has moved just far enough away to “semi-vanish,” but Kinnell’s tone of awed appreciation makes us feel that “right” means good, healthy, wise. We are left wondering whether the poem has indeed offered us a piece of wisdom. Do we really want our deepest desires to fly gracefully away from present experience to the edge of disappearance into memory or dream? Wallace Stevens often suggested that we should want this. Galway Kinnell, though, became famous in the Sixties as a poet of the body, of sensuality and sexuality; so, when he seems, in this poem in a 1985 book called The Past, to recommend distance from one’s own strong desires, there’s an interesting hint of palinode, of an elegiac revision of attitude by a poet who turned fifty-eight in 1985.

That implication is not borne out by Kinnell’s later poems about sex—to be discussed below—but it is interesting enough to help me call “The Geese” a good poem. And two pages earlier in The Past there is another good poem that works by patiently and devotedly evoking the physical reality of a phenomenon, “Driftwood from a Ship.” More thoroughly than “The Geese,” this poem studies its object, trusting its metaphorical meaning to accumulate in an uninsistent, un-declamatory, un-bardic way, so that we come to feel that the chunk of driftwood is like a person scarred and worn down by a lifetime’s vicissitudes, but we don’t feel oppressed by the simile. A simple poem, “Driftwood from a Ship,” but a good one, made possible by Kinnell’s real talent for seeing.

If you detect caution in my praise, it’s because I feel so doubtful about most of Kinnell’s poems.

Kinnell was born in 1927. I was born in 1949. Those of us who became fascinated by poetry in the late Sixties and early Seventies did what each generation of young poetry nuts does...