From a 2001 article, The Loveliness of Pigs, in the Christian Science Monitor:

Kinnell believes that poetry is inherently personal - it's one person's exploration of life, of what it means to be on earth. But, he adds, poets must take things more seriously. "You can no longer just fool around.... We need a deeper sense of the preciousness of our time here as conscious beings."

That consciousness has always been present in Kinnell's work. Whether he's writing about his family or describing the loveliness of sows, Kinnell's work reveals affection for creatures both great and small. Indeed, he claims that the "other animals are the angels. Human babies are the angels."

A pig as an angel?

"I try to see past the usual clichés about things," he smiles. " 'Pig' is a pejorative word, but if you get to know them, get a feeling for them, you see that they have an extraordinary beauty. When creatures don't have an extraordinary beauty, it's because the person in contact with them is not seeing it. I feel more and more in love with other creatures as I get older."

Some critics use the word "spiritual" to describe Kinnell's work, but that is not a word he would use. When he writes, he addresses his work "to being." He thinks in terms of accuracy, of capturing what seems to be truth in a particular moment and context. "It is almost as if the words are imitations of something else - shapes of reality."

America has a number of great poets that are now over the age of 80 and one of the lesser known of these is Galway Kinnell. Living and writing largely from the North East woodland region, Kinnell has compiled a body of work that touches upon all of the major dramatic themes of humanity, as starting from the singular experience of the individual, with such experiences as love, solitariness, sex, birth, loss and death, but then also extending into the broader issues of war, technology, modern ‘progress’, art, etc. And in the backdrop there remains Kinnell’s love for the natural world. Not a glossed over and imaginary view of nature, but into the blood, piss and shit of nature, as most notably found within various poems he wrote in the 1970's that focus upon specific animals and the crossover qualities that compose both their lives and ours. Poetry too. From one of his more well known poems, The Bear:

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?

There are two reasons why I find myself always returning to Kinnell’s poetry. The first would be his being absolutely at home in the mysteries of the physical world, which is a form of spirituality known to many poets and artists. Kinnell doesn’t turn away from the basic processes of life, as is the case with more religious outlooks, and instead looks at just how nasty it can be, but comes out accepting, even grateful for, our ultimate physicality, our ability to participate and bear witness to life. It’s a viewpoint that in turn allows both philosophical speculations, such as the ability to grasp the infinite because of our ultimate transience, and emotional attachments to the varieties of life experience.

The other reason I return to Kinnell’s poetry is because of his ability to feel and make the reader feel, showing the connections that exist between the physical and the emotional. This is often accomplished through free verse poems which arrange scenarios that almost resemble settings for larger stories, but are then incised with poetic utterances which open new dimensions for relating to what’s being told. Kinnell’s poetry displays the constant interaction we have with our life experiences and the array of perceptions and understandings available to us. And the stronger the interaction, the stronger the passion one has for life. From Another Night in the Ruins:

How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?

The only problem with Kinnell being still alive is that we do not have a Collected Poems published yet. Instead, readers will have to settle with the all too thin New Selected Poems or head to a local library and work with whatever might be on the shelf. But when a Collected Poems is finally published, I will be one of the first to purchase a copy. The amount of his poetry that I have been exposed to is far too thin considering how strongly I react and enjoy his works. I look forward to the day that will be changed.

[The Hermit (Man Resting); Rockwell Kent, 1919]

From the youtube description: Edgar Jerins is a realist artist whose monumental charcoal drawings bring to mind the novels of Russell Banks in their poignant dissection of suffering, loss, family strife, and love.

The Beauty of Things
--Robinson Jeffers

To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things—earth, stone and water,
Beast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars—
The blood-shot beauty of human nature, its thoughts, frenzies and passions,
And unhuman nature its towering reality—
For man’s half dream; man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock
And water and sky are constant—to feel
Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural
Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.
The rest’s diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas,
The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason.

[The Adirondack Guide; Winslow Homer, 1894]

...smoke dissipated finally into a haze, then rose into the dark sky, undetected by humans anywhere, within the Reserve or without, making it the private knowledge only of the animals and birds residing in the Reserve, the deer and bears and coyotes, the bobcats and fisher cats, the foxes, martins, and mink, the hawks and eagles and ravens on the rock-topped peaks, and, on the lakes below and in the cold streams tumbling into the lakes, the beavers and the loons and the lingering Canada geese, and, standing in the muskegs and shallows of the headwaters of the Tamarack River, the herons and cranes, and the owls returning from their nocturnal hunts to roost in the high branches of the spruce and pine trees, where, still higher and in among the crags, the solitary cougar lifted its heavy head from sleep and smelled the smoke drifting downwind from the Second Lake, and the great cat moved off the rocky ledge and made its way down through the conifers to the open birch forest below and loped still farther down to the bands of oak, hickory, maple, and poplar that crossed the lower valleys that lay between the mountain ranges of the Reserve: all the animals and birds in steady uniform migration from north to south, an instinctual response to the smell of smoke, a felt command registering in their collective brain to track the smoke, not to its source, as humans do, but to where it grew faint and they could no longer see or smell it...............

--from The Reserve, Russell Banks

The Reserve is not like any other Russell Banks novel out there. The gritty realism of the struggling common man is replaced with a post-modern melange of 1930's Hollywood romance cut-outs, insidious sexual undercurrents that would be at home in a Tennessee Williams play, subtle tinges of film noir, characters that might be identified as the uber-elite and in a secluded setting of a wilderness sanctuary deep in the Adirondacks that's exclusive to members only. To do such things as fish and kill rare furry animals. And doing so during the Great Depression. Quite the turn for one of America’s greatest authors and who is known for his sprawling epics.

With the pop approach, the book almost reads like a side project for Banks, as is in vogue with authors these days. It seems like he decided to have a bit of fun with this one. When Russell the Muscle decides to bring out a wily cast that includes Jordan Groves, a wealthy artist who flies about his ego in a sea-plane and traverses the world for new sexual conquests, and Vanessa Cole, a mendacious gadabout that is capital T trouble for everyone that shakes her hand, you can imagine how the irony becomes so heavy you swear the pages are about to fall from the binding. And one can’t help but feel humorously voyeuristic when reading The Reserve, like the narrator is hitting your arm here and there to have you take special note of the juicy parts.

Yet, the book does incorporate serious issues. The usual Banks theme of the sins of the parent inflicted upon the innocent child remains. As well as the blinded difficulties that result when the insatiable male ego does not know when to say when. Or, more importantly, when to acknowledge defeat. And the issue of class division remains as well. Wealthy New England townies don’t survive real well in wilderness cabins without the quaint servant help of the local folk, to do such things as deliver groceries and act as guides through the threatening terrain. In fact, the issues become very serious as the narrative unravels, but the less said the better.

So does the approach work? Does Banks successfully merge plastic with depth? I’d say the novel is close enough where it would be a call to make by each individual reader. I do know that it was a page turner, that I was both humored and appalled, and that I got quite a bit to maw upon when I reached the end. But the book does feel pieced together a bit and I wonder if there was an imbalanced focus upon the plastic rather than the depth. However, despite the characters being presented as ‘types’, there is still enough presented for a reader to feel the blood flowing behind the celluloid.

[The Veteran in a New Field; Winslow Homer, 1865]

Quality can also be a collaboration. When that happens, you might end up with something that resembles Martin Scorse's filming of The Band's farewell performance back in 1976, as captured in their film, The Last Waltz.

[Robert M. Pirsig]

One says of him that he is "interested" in what he's doing, that he's "involved" in his work. What produces this involvement is, at the cutting edge of consciousness, an absence of any sense of separateness of subject and object. "Being with it," "being a natural," "taking hold"-- there are a lot of idiomatic expressions for what I mean by this absence of subject-object duality, because what I mean is so well understood as folklore, common sense, the everyday understanding of the shop...Zen Buddhists talk about "just sitting," a meditative practice in which the idea of a duality of self and object does not dominate one's consciousness. What I'm talking about here in motorcycle maintenance is "just fixing," in which the idea of a duality of self and object doesn't dominate one's consciousness. When one isn't dominated by feelings fo separateness from what he's working on, then one can be said to "care" about what he's doing. That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one's doing. When one has this feeling then he also sees the inverse side of caring, Quality itself.

--from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig

[Mural Fragment; Robert Motherwell]

"I'm not sure what you mean by classical reason."

"Analytic reason, dialectic reason. Reason which at the University is sometimes considered to be the whole of understanding. You've never had to understand it really. It's always been completely bankrupt with regard to abstract art. Nonrepresentative art is one of the root experiences I'm talking about. Some people still condemn it because it doesn't make 'sense'. But what's really wrong is not the art but the 'sense', the classical reason, which can't grasp it. People keep looking for branch extensions of reason that will cover art's more recent occurrences, but the answers aren't in the branches, they're at the roots."

"Sometime look at a novice workman or a bad workman and compare his expression with that of a craftsman whose work you know is excellent and you'll see the difference. The craftsman isn't ever following a single line of instruction. He's making decisions as he goes along. For that reason he'll be absorbed and attentive to what he's doing even though he doesn't deliberately contrive this. His motions and the machine are in a kind of harmony. He isn't following any set of written instructions because the nature of the material at hand determines his thoughts and motions, which simultaneously change the nature of the material at hand. The material and his thoughts are changing together in a progression of changes until his mind's at rest at the same time the material's right."

"Sounds like art," the instructor says.

"Well, it is art," I say. "This divorce of art from technology is completely unnatural. It's just that it's gone on so long you have to be an archeologist to find out where the two separated. Rotisserie assembly is actually a long-lost branch of sculpture, so divorced from its roots by centuries of intellectual wrong turns that just to associate the two sounds ludicrous."

--from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig (pg 167)

Back in my early and mid twenties I would pick up Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and begin reading at any random page. But while I have been quite familiar with the book and Pirsig’s ideas, I had never read the story through from cover to cover. But a friend recently loaned me his copy after reading it, so I thought it was about time to do so.

For those not familiar with the book, Pirsig focuses much less upon Zen and much more in deconstructing Western modes of logical thought and how they have shaped the way Western civilization understands the world, as through scientific reason, rationality, and subjective (romantic)/objective (classic) dualism. The background on the history of Western philosophers is substantial, but of more interest to me would the connections made with our social institutions. The education system in particular as that’s where people are fully indoctrinated into the Western thought process and its social constructions.

As Pirsig was writing for a Western audience, it would be necessary to go through this process in order makes sense of the non-logical methods of comprehension that are introduced in the later half of the book. As someone who has been learning about Eastern thought since being a senior in High School, I would say that this approach works quite well. It doesn’t really explain what Zen is (to do so would be a contradictory effort as the concepts of Zen are transmitted through experience rather than study, as something that’s cultivated rather than acquired), but the book can open a door that allows a realization that new forms of interaction can exist.

While the book is two-thirds philosophical exploration, the narrative is written from the perspective of a man and his young son out on a cross-country motorcycle trip, and this was my main interest in reading the book straight through. The necessary elements for a work of drama are there (the narrator had been formerly institutionalized after a nervous breakdown, he speaks of ‘ghost’ named Phaedrus that is actually his former self prior to electro-shock therapy, his son shows signs of mental illness, etc.) the book never reads as such. Instead, it incorporates a human element to demonstrate how the philosophical concepts are not to be left as vague abstractions and generalities, nor to only critique the short comings of Western civilization’s thought process, but how the same concepts can be applied at our personal lives as well. Deeper yet, to the core of how we comprehend the essence of our selves.

At the end of the book, Pirsig strives to conjoin the rational and the irrational modes of human thought through a notion of Quality. Its a huge concept to pull into a blog post, so I’m hesitant to say much on this out of fear just making a mess out of the concept. But I think I’m safe to say that Quality results when the irrationality of inspiration and creativity finds an expressed form through rational logic, not the other way around. All to often its believed that rational logic is the method for arriving at Quality.

[The Dream; Franz Marc, 1912]

Opening scene for Werner Herzog's, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.

Translation: "Don't you hear? Don't you hear the dreadful voice that screams from the whole horizon, and that man usually calls silence?".

Kaspar Hauser Song
--George Trakl

He truly cherished the sun, climbing crimson down the hill,
the paths of the forest, the singing blackbird
and the joy of green.

Steady was his dwelling in the shade of the trees
and pure his countenance.
God spoke a gentle flame into his heart:
O man!

Silently his footsteps found the city at evening;
the dark lament of his mouth:
I want to become a horseman.

But animal and bush followed him,
house and a dusky garden of white men
and his murderer sought him.

Beautiful the spring and summer and the autumn
of the righteous man, his soft step
past the dark rooms of dreamers.
By night he remained alone with his star;

saw snow fall in bare branches
and in the darkening hallway his murderer's shadow.

Silver fell the head of the one yet unborn.

Whispered In Afternoon
--George Trakl

Autumn sun, rare and hesitant,
and fruit drops from trees.
Silence dwells in blue spaces,
a long afternoon.

Death bells of metal
and a white animal breaks down.
Coarse songs of brown maidens
are scattered in falling leaves.

The forehead of God dreams colors,
feels the gentle flight of madness.
Shadows whirl upon the hill
fringed black with decay.

Dusk full of sleep and wine;
the flow of mournful guitars.
And as if in a dream
you turn toward the mellow lamp within.

A July, 2007 post at the blog for Harper's Magazine provides the following from Trakl's medical records, from a doctor at a field hospital who did not now about Trakl's poetry:

As a child he attempted suicide. At the age of 5 years, he jumped into the water. His most recent attempt earlier this year. Otherwise he was ‘completely healthy’… Excellent student. University studies no difficulty. Served in 1908. During the mobilization, he volunteered for duty. Ordered to the front on August 1… For years he suffered from periodic severe psychological depressions with anxieties, then he began to drink to rid himself of the anxieties. Since his childhood he suffered from hallucinatory visions in which a man would come up from behind him with a knife. These visions had stopped for 12-14 years and suddenly resumed 3 years ago; besides that he often hears bells ringing. He does not believe that his father is really his own, rather he thinks that in the future it will be revealed to be a great lord.

Georg Trakl Dichtungen und Briefe, vol. 2, pp. 729-30.

Well, over the past few weeks I haven’t been busy all the time, as part of my being away included a wonderful camping and hiking road trip down south. Wonderfully pastoral that is, but possibly quite the opposite of Georg Trakl’s poetry. Trakl was born in Austria in 1887 with various mental health issues, possibly including a form of schizophrenia, and found himself being forced to drop out of school in 1905 as a result of various drug addictions. He then went on to become a pharmacist (possible to feed his drug use?) and began to write serious artistic efforts after socializing with a group of European bohemians. Shortly thereafter as a result of his medical background, he bore witness to the burgeoning horrors of World War I, ending when he died of a drug overdose/suicide at the age of 27.

Trakl had his own personal demons while living in a world with even bigger demons, which doesn’t make for a happy life. But it can result in some tremendous poetry. His style is somewhat similar to the German Expressionists, with whom he has been compared to. On the surface, he's ruff, primitive, direct in emotional intent. However, Trakl’s work is filled with surreal subtleties that can appeal to the most trained classicist. His images resonate with confounding depth, on occasion the lyricism of a brief piece demands to be read several times (but note that I am only working from English translations), and there are reoccurring visual and metaphoric motifs to connect his poems into a unified whole. Prominent examples being his consistent note of the seasons, dream like gods/myths and the symbolic use of familial relations, a ‘sister’ being most prominent, to express the poet’s need to extend beyond the individual self and into a greater whole. Quite often the line between reality and the dream world are blurred, which brings in both horror and a sublime transcendence. In short, shocking beauty. His poem, De Profundis:

It is a stubble field on which a black rain falls.
It is a brown tree that stands alone.
It is a whisper-wind that circles empty huts.
How sad this evening.

Beyond the hamlet
The gentle orphan still gathers scanty ears of wheat.
Her eyes gaze round and golden in the twilight
And her womb awaits the bridegroom of heaven.

On their return,
Shepherds found her sweet body
Putrid in the thorn-bush.

A shadow am I, far from gloomy hamlets.
God's silence
I drank from the grove's well.

Cold metal emerges on my brow.
Spiders seek my heart.
It is a light that goes out in my mouth.

At night I found myself upon a heath
Stiff with filth and the dust of stars.
In the hazel-bushes
Crystal angels once more sounded.

(trans. by margitt Lehbert)

For how to track down his poetry, there are several publications out there with English translations. I found my 1973 copy at the local Grand Rapids library. Amazon.com has a collection that dates back to 2006. And some of his works that have been appropriately translated by the American imagists Robert Bly and James Wright are available online here. It would be interesting to compare and contrast the translations out there, as I’m sure the original poems are quite open for interpretation and for determining what would be most important to focus upon with the translation.