Home > Work > Three Books: Body Rags; Mortal Acts, Mortal Words; The Past
1 " When a group of people get up from a table, the table doesn’tknow which way any of them will go. "
― Galway Kinnell , Three Books: Body Rags; Mortal Acts, Mortal Words; The Past
2 " The budstands for all things,even for those things that don’t flower,for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing; though sometimes it is necessaryto reteach a thing its loveliness,to put a hand on its browof the flowerand retell it in words and in touchit is lovelyuntil it flowers again from within, of self-blessing "
3 " The Correspondence-School Instructor Says Goodbye to His Poetry StudentsGoodbye, lady in Bangor, who sent me snapshots of yourself, after definitely hinting you were beautiful; goodbye,Miami Beach urologist, who enclosed plain brown envelopes for the return of your very“Clinical Sonnets”; goodbye, manufacturer of brassieres on the Coast, whose ecloguesgive the fullest treatment in literature yetto the sagging breast motif; goodbye, you in San Quentin, who wrote, “Being German my hero is Hitler,” instead of “Sincerely yours,” at the end of long, neat-scripted letters extolling the Pre-Raphaelites:I swear to you, it was just my way of cheering myself up, as I lickedthe stamped, self-addressed envelopes, the game I had of trying to guess which one of you, this time, had poisoned his glue. I did care. I did read each poem entire. I did say everything I thought in the mildest words I knew. And now,in this poem, or chopped prose, no better, I realize, than those troubled lines I kept sending back to you,I have to say I am relieved it is over:at the end I could feel only pityfor that urge toward more lifeyour poems kept smothering in words, the smell of which, days later, tingled in your nostrils as new, God-given impulsesto write.Goodbye,you who are, for me, the postmarks againof imaginary towns—Xenia, Burnt Cabins, Hornell—their solitude given away in poems, only their loneliness kept.Galway Kinnell "
