RIP Galway Kinnell

Pulitzer-prize winning poet Galway Kinnell, a lifelong New Englander, recently died at his home in Vermont at the age of 87.

From his NY Times obituary:

Through it all, he held that it was the job of poets to bear witness. “To me,” he said, “poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.”

Here is a link to a tribute to Kinnell by his long-time friend C.K. Williams from The New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/postscript-galway-kinnell-1927-2014

Here is my favourite Kinnell poem and one of my favourite poems EVER (referred to in the above piece by Williams):

“Saint Francis and the Sow”

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

-Galway Kinnell