Marc Estrin

GALWAY KINNELL

Galway Kinnell is an old family friend, godfather to my first wife and still buddy, Nona. Since Arnold was staying, temporarily, at the 92nd

 St. Y, which hosts many poetry readings, and since Galway has often read there, I though it would be nice to have Arnold meet him, and hear him read, “The Bear”, one of the great American poems. The theme of killing something, then using it as protection, seemed profoundly relevant to the American culture Arnold was engaging, and of course, to our own “war on terror”.

THE BEAR

When he awoke, Wenzel still in hand, the sun was reddening and he was famished. Oh God, he thought, I bet all the food stores are closed. He made for the cafeteria. Finished for the day. But there were machines in the hallway outside. He deposited two quarters for a hot soup in a cup, and three quarters for a cold roast beef sandwich on white. Twenty cents bought him an O'Henry bar. The weekly offerings were again posted, on a pillar next to the machines.

 Monday, June 26, 8 PM, Poetry Reading, Galway Kinnell, Kaufmann Auditorium.

He checked his watch. Galway Kinnell. Never heard of him. He had 20 minutes to make up his mind. 

"Need a ticket to hear Galway?"

He turned to see a lovely young woman who might have drifted in right from a Radcliffe dorm. Black tanktop, wrap-around madras, long blond hair and sandals. An expression like Billie Jo's. His heart misplaced a beat.

"Do I know you? From Cambridge?"

"Sorry, no. Sarah Lawrence."

"Do you know Galway Kinnell? You called him Galway."

"Yes. Well, no, I...he gave a reading at my school, and I stayed after to talk."

"Is he good?"

She closed her eyes and shook her head in what might have been "no" but was the most profound of yeses.

"Amazing. My favorite. I've got an extra ticket. My boyfriend couldn't come."

Aha, boyfriend, Arnold thought. Well done. That makes things clear.

"How much?"

"Three? I can make it less if..."

"No, no, three is fine." He pulled out his wallet again. "Change for a five?"

The nice thing about buying an extra ticket from a beautiful girl is that you get to sit next to her. Alison had probably been aware of this in her choice of customer. Both young people had subscribed to an event they each might have liked, but which, under the circumstances, they each knew could not occur. 

But what did occur was quite enough. "Galway" was six and a half feet of hunk, muscular through his corduroy jacket, square-jawed, shock of hair to be flicked out of his eyes. He looked to Arnold like something from the Harvard defensive line. His voice was intelligent, deep, resonant and sensuous. Alison was practically dissolving, triply in love. Bart at home, sick, but Arnold there, shoulder pressing warmly against hers, and most of all, at the lectern, Galway, the man for whom she would leave either of them should he ask, which he didn't.

For Arnold, the poems were shattering. By the end, he thought he might not recover. Early on, Kinnell had read his long, evocative hymn to the lower East Side, "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World." Avenue C. He hadn't been there yet, but he would go tomorrow to see the old men in skull caps, the sons and grandsons, the crone who buys a pickle from a crone, the people who look to the east out over the water and see "Gross-Rosen, Maidanek, Flössenberg, Ravensbruck, Stutthof, Riga, Bergen-Belsen, Mauthausen, Birkenau, Treblinka, Natzweiler, Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz --Villages, pasture-bordered hamlets on the far side of the river." His decision was made. He would move downtown, and share his next life with the poor. Fine. Inspiring. Invigorating.

But the poem that got to him most was none of the above: it was terrifying. Towards the end of the evening, Kinnell read "The Bear." "He always includes this. Everybody wants to hear it," Alison whispered as he announced the title. "He told me he's tired of it, but feels he has to read it anyway." Tired or not, his reading had an effect on Arnold second only to -- perhaps even surpassing -- singing the Mahler 2nd with Lenny, though in an opposite direction.

The poem is narrated by a hunter who, seeing spoor, decides to hunt the bear who left it. He takes a wolf's rib, whittles it sharp at both ends, coils it up and freezes it in blubber for the bear to find and eat. When it has disappeared, he begins to track his victim, soon to be cut apart from within, as rib springs loose and pierces its intestinal container. The narrator follows the bloody turds, until on the seventh day, he comes upon the carcass and hacks

a ravine in his thigh, and eat and drink,and tear him down his whole lengthand open him and climb inand close him up after me, against the wind,and sleep.

The dreams that come within that sleep stagger across life's tundra, bleeding, dying.

Awakening, he imagines a dam-bear giving birth to lumps of smeared fur, licking them into living shape. At some level, he suggests, this spectrum of bloody excretamenta, the turds of birth and death, are his poems, the painful droppings of the great bear Galway Kinnell. As an image of poetic creation it was unique. But Arnold conceived his own variation. The sharpened bone, introduced at birth, was his name. At some point it had sprung loose within. And now what? Could he twist and turn, easing the sharp edges around every jujunal bend, finessing his way to a safe excretion? Or would they rip into his innards and eat him alive? Could he give birth and safe passage to his name? Or was he to be stillborn mother to a hellish child? Why did his stomach hurt so? He excused himself at the end. Alison sought out her hero backstage; Arnold took the elevator back to his room.