Poetry isn’t dead. It’s kept alive by the 45 state poet laureates - and who knows how many city and county laureates. Vermont claimed Robert Frost in 1961. He held the title long after his death in 1963. No one seemed to notice until 1988 when a poetry society decided Vermont needed a living poet laureate.
As Governor, I was asked to make the choice. A wonderful idea, I thought. I loved poetry and thereby, loved poets.
Poets are calm, contemplative human beings. But I soon discovered that my choice was fraught with conflict. There were two poetry societies; one in northern Vermont and another in the South. Each was dedicated to his own favorite poet.
I decided to sponsor sort of a poetry reading bake-off in southern Vermont by the two poets. Hands down, widely published Galway Kinnell of Sheffield came out the winner.
Poets and passion seem to go hand in hand. They touch a part of our being that prose cannot, with their musings, their images, their rhythms which are not necessarily rhymes. The poet invites us to walk into an inner space that makes the ordinary, seem extraordinary. We feel what we never thought could be felt, as we accompany the poet down the lines of his or her poem.
Galway Kinnell resembles his predecessor, Robert Frost in that he also appears accessible on the surface, yet mysterious when we probe underneath. He talks about love and death, in ways that move us beyond words. And he draws his inspiration from the Vermont landscape and all of its creatures – the frog, the bear, and the fly. Here’s the first stanza of...
The Porcupine
Fatted
On herbs, swollen on crabapples,
Puffed up on bast and phloem, ballooned
On willow flowers, poplar catkins, first
leafs of aspen and larch,
the porcupine
drags and bounces his last meal through ice,
mud, roses and goldenrod, into the stubby high fields.*
This Thursday afternoon, I’ll join other Vermont poets at the Vermont State House at 3 pm for a public celebration of Galway Kinnell’s life and work. In the meantime, I can’t resist one more short Kinnell poem - about Blackberry Eating.
I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe,icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry making, and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths, or squinched or broughhamed,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy black language
of blackberry eating in late September.*
* Used with permission of the poet
