Nine years ago,
in a plane that rumbled all night
above the Atlantic,
I could see, lit up
by lightning bolts jumping out of it,
a thunderhead formed like the face
of my brother, looking down
on blue,
lightning-flashed moments of the Atlantic.
A Kinnell poem is typically densely rich in imagery and this poem is very typical. The controlling image of the poem is flight and it will be referenced with frequent mention of birds, but the bird is missing here, replaced by the jet carrying the speaker. A close examination of these lines reveal that that the stanza is comprised almost entirely of imagery, to the point that it is easy to lose the threat of the narrative. What does the speaker actually see? One must penetrate with studious focus to figure it out.
the rest of my days I spend
wandering: wondering
what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?
The concluding lines of this poem leave the speaker in a moment of transformation and epiphany after a horrific experience of tracking and killing a bear and then opening its carcass so he can crawl inside for protection against the weather. Awaking and crawling free, he is a changed man and so is his approach the life of being a poet.
The bud
stands for all things,
One of Kinnell’s most anthologized poems, the verse is conferred with versatility for being teachable on account of the deceptively simple opening. The poem’s opening assertion of the primal significance of the bud is an open-ended question allowing for myriad interpretation. Within that philosophical chasm capable of being filled with an assortment of opinions and explanations is the purely literary characteristic of the two lines. Kinnell’s decision to situated the “the bud” alone as the sole representative of the opening line helps to open up the frontier of this explanatory analysis. Like the bud of a flower, the two words contain both the strength to carry the poem forward and the vulnerability of their isolation.
the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths and squinched,
This poem starts out with Kinnell’s typically rich imagery as a first-person narrative of the speaker going blackberry picking in September. The berries are fat and ripe and pricks on their stalks are compared to a magic invocation designed to protect them from being plucked. Everything points to a simple poem about the pleasures of the natural world; a common theme for Kinnell. Midway through, however, the direction of the poem suddenly shifts focus, taking an unexpected left turn and following a path in which the center of the verse is not imagery, but theme. With these lines, that sensual experience of eating blackberries transforms into a metaphor for writing; or, really, for any analogous process of creativity.
I have fled, have
jogged
over fields of goldenrod,
terrified, seeking home,
and among flowers
I have come to myself empty, the rope
strung out behind me
in the fall sun
suddenly glorified with all my blood.
“The Porcupine” is another of Kinnell’s poems finding its way into anthologizes and textbooks. The popularity of the poem is certainly attributable to its accessibility, but perhaps also because it is a definitive example of an overarching thematic patina which can be applied to so much of the poet’s body work: finding the connection between humanity and the various creatures with which it shares the world. These creatures are not limited to the shared kinship of being mammals; Kinnell finds associations with houseflies, amphibians, birds (as mentioned) and others. Still, arguably, the relationship between man and beast may well find its most inextricable linkage in the most unexpected of mammal: the spiky little rodent that nobody loves.
