Parent Poems

During the early months of the Covid pandemic I spent a good dealt of time with two books: The Poems of Norman MacCaig and Galway Kinnell’s Collected Poems. Both books drove me to write.

At first, I suffered MacCaig’s poems. His collected works span from the 1940s through to the early 90s and I read the first thirty or so pages in much the same way as I imagine someone working on a production line might suffer the monotony of their work: I’d bought the book and I felt I had to read it. It wasn’t until I came to poems like Wet Snow (1952) and Climbing Suilven (1954) that I felt I was reading someone whose words might work for me.

Climbing Suilven feels like climbing a mountain. Its rhythm is the treading of the hard up-miles and as ‘parishes dwindle’ as the climber ascends, its world becomes the world ‘between my feet’ — ‘parish[es]’ of ‘stone… tuft’, the next rock, the next step, head down, the leg-burn of it all until the poem reaches its climax and ‘suddenly / my shadow jumps huge miles away from me.’ Nothing speaks of a reaching a peak, of lifting the head and of seeing all that lies beyond and below in the way that that line speaks. The majesty of it all. I copied the poem into a file that I keep for poems that I admire and it has stayed with me. In general though, poems are treacherous things: inconstant as water, any one poem is never the same thing twice.

When I read a poetry collection, I bookmark poems that resonate with me in some way so that I can copy them to my file; when I come back to transcribe them, it’s not unusual for me to wonder why I marked them up in the first place. Such is the momentariness of poems. In as much as poems read and loved when aged twenty will not necessarily be poems loved and read when sixty, so neither will poems read on a grey Tuesday morning in bed be felt the same way when read on a grey Sunday in bed or in sunshine on the bank of the Po. Poems are conversations. Sometimes we are ready to, want to, can, listen to a particular poem and at other times a poem’s words are broken voices in a mist.

Typically, poems that resonate with me make we want to speak back. They trigger something. Many of MacCaig’s poems did this and drove me to write my own poems — not so much in response, but because the thoughts within them sparked thoughts within me. You could call them parent poems. Galway Kinnell’s Collected Poems birthed a few poems for me pretty much from the off.

Before reading Kinnell’s Collected Poems, I’d only previously come across his work through a few poems in anthologies. Those few spoke enough to make me want to read more. His poetry makes me feel that I’d like to have had him as a friend — even if in reality I might not. The Bear was the first of Kinnell’s poems to really stand out for me. It is a poem of twelve stanzas and seven parts. In it, the voice of the poem smells bear. It whittles a stick to two points and hides it in blubber, hoping the bear will eat it. It does, and the voice follows the bear as it bleeds from inside ‘the first, tentative, dark / splash on the earth.’ When the bear dies, the voice finds it, eats and drinks from it, tears it open and climbs in. Now the voice is bear ‘lumbering flatfooted / over the tundra / stabbed twice from within’ and knowing that one day it too will fall. As it wanders, it wonders ‘what, anyway / was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry / by which I lived?’ A poem that from the outset is a poem about writing poems, about where they come from, where they go, about how they form from, and themselves form, the writer, about how painful, unwanted, how pointless, how grand they can be to write. To a poet, what is there not to like?

When one has lived a long time alone is another of Kinnell’s poems that has stayed with me. A poem of ten stanzas, each of thirteen lines, and each of which begins and ends with the line ‘When one has lived a long time alone’. Its rhythm is incantatory. It was published in a book of the same title when Kinnell was in his early sixties. I read it when I was not far off mine. The first seven verses of the poem are full of animals: a fly that the one who the one who has lived a long time alone will not swat, but lets go; a mosquito, a toad, a snake — the foul things one friends when living ‘among regrets so immense the past occupies / nearly all the room’. By verse five, the long-lived one has found some ease and companions doves, grasshoppers, frogs, a flycatcher, a woodpecker, a pig, porcupine, worm, butterfly — believing that one’s purpose is to know them, having discovered that ‘one likes / any other species better than one’s own, / which has gone amok, making one self-estranged’. The poem is a running from people, from what they do, and from what oneself as a person does, and a running towards the other, to nature, the ‘natural’, to simple. And yet a person cannot be other than a person, this the misanthrope knows and comes to terms with towards the end of the poem having realised that the snake, the bird, the insect, step away to be with their own kind and ‘the hard prayer inside one’s own singing / is to come back, if one can, to one’s own’. It’s a beautiful poem. Sad in many ways, yet full of love, full of hope. In speaking of animals it speaks of other ways of being human. The tragedy is that the trajectory we are on as a species seems each day one step further removed from that which does us and our planet good.

I came back to Kinnell’s poem in early 2022 and as I read it again it drove me to write a poem. In When one has lived a long time, I borrow Kinnell’s first line and make it mine. The poem was published in Ink Sweat & Tears and I would like to thank Helen Ivory, Editor, for seeing something in it.

When one has lived a long time

(after Galway Kinnell)

When one has lived a lone time alone
and not alone your time become
someone’s history and you have grown
tired of yet another war and the world
has it in for you simply for being
wrong nation wrong colour wrong
construct in all its fairy-tale fictions
you begin the long slow weaning from lives
someone makes it their business to spoon
24/7 into your small ever so human head
and dream of an island fish sea-wind
and a life lived companied by no more folk
as can live a long time alone
and not alone on a handful of salty acres

References

You can read Galway Kinnell’s The Bear at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42679/the-bear and you’ll find some of Norman MacCaig’s poems at the Scottish Poetry Library. The books I’ve cited are Collected Poems, Galway Kinnell (edited by Barbara K. Bristol and Jennifer Keller, and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and The Poems of Norman MacCaig (edited by Ewen McCaig and published by Polygon).