I just got news from Helen Losse at the Dead Mule that she'd nominated my poem "How It Begins" for this anthology. Thanks to her, and to the Mule. You should go read the other fine work on the site, and get to mine (you"ll have to scroll a bit) when you have time.
Probably everyone knows this poem and this book very well. Kinnell isn't exactly invisible in the poetry world. I loved this poem and this book from the very first time I read it, while I sat on the floor in the old Emerson College at 150 Beacon Street. I've loved kids from a time well before I had any of my own, and I could put myself in this narrator's perspective so easily it was as if I'd suddenly slid from my own life and become a real poet. ;-) I hadn't really read anything that used linebreaks so seemingly haphazard, but powerfully --I got a charge as I read it-- or a voice that seemed so assured of its right to the sentiments expressed. Irony is the rule of the day for many poets, and I don't necessarily cotton to it all the time so Kinnell is a balm for me; I can go back and read BoN and remember how it lit me up the first time and have energy to go back the page with. I'm sort of over his poems now, but the feeling comes back just a little every ti...
We always enjoy your writing, Rusty. Thank you for contributing. You've been a Mule for many years, eh?
ReplyDelete-Valerie MacEwan
Editor/Publisher, The Dead Mule
and all that nonsense one can type after
one's name on a Comment...
Thanks, Val. I've been a Mule since, hooboy, 2000, maybe? 2001? It's been fun, and it's great to have a journal that stays online for ten years--there aren't that many these days.
ReplyDelete