The Great Hall at Cooper Union was filled to capacity last night for Galway Kinnell’s 80th Birthday Celebration. Nice to see such an overwhelming turnout.
Highlights and the line-up:
Robert Bly opened with Kinnell’s “The Bear” followed by a tennis anecdote from E. L. Doctorow and “On the Tennis Court at Night”. Mark Doty highlighted transcendence in Kinnell’s work and read from Kinnell’s latest, Strong Is Your Hold, with Cornelius Eady finishing out the first third with Kinnell’s influence on Cave Canem and I believe the poem “Insomniac”.
Edward Hirsch read “St. Francis and the Sow” and Marie Howe followed with a moving story about the role “Freedom, N.H.” has played in her life, how she still remembers the fluorescent light hum and the room in which she first read it with her students, how it said perfectly what she was feeling when her brother passed, and how Kinnell recited it last summer from a “house” her daughter had built out of pillow cushions after a dinner party. Yusef Komunyakaa and Anne Marie Macari finished out the second third.
Then we hit the memorable readings. Sharon Olds’ delivery of the humorous “Oatmeal” before pulling a rhymed couplet veritable “Ode to Galway” from a wine bottle, glitter included. Grace Paley’s irreverent and comic wind-up: “I’m going to read Galway’s poem “Shelly”. When I’m done, I may something, and I may not.” And when she finished: “Alright. Enough of poets.” And she promptly sat down with a wicked and mischievous grin on her face. And Gerry Stern, who read the last poem from Strong Is Your Hold after mentioning he tried looking up some of the difficult words in the poem, only, “They aren’t in my dictionary.” C.K. Williams ended the last third with “The Porcupine”.
Which brought us to the man himself, Mr. Galway Kinnell. I hope I look and sound that good when I’m 80. He read a handful of poems, including “The Cat” and an entertaining story about how his editor, a cat lover, thought the poem dissed cats and wanted it removed from When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone. But any cat lover would know the poem celebrates the feline for the very thing people hate about cats: the feline penchant for independence, mystery and causing trouble. Kinnell gave a haunting reading of “The Fundamental Project of Technology” and read an excerpt from “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ Into the New World,” starting at the very lines I quote in the “Notes & Conversations” to Euclidean City: “On the Avenue, through air tinted crimson / By neon over the bars, the rain is falling.” I re-read his poem today and was struck at how much of an influence it was on me when I was composing Euclidean City.
A lovely night despite many of the annoying dilettantes whispering around us.