I have long made staying at the Algonquin one of the highlights of my visits to Manhattan. Last week, Galway Kinnell's visit with Lee Quinn embellished my experience. Among many clever things, he said that "to tell the truth, I was getting sick of rhymes and meter, just plain sick of it, and I quit writing rhyme and meter forever." He is a memorizer and recited Yeats' Innisfree poem; later he recited Dylan Thomas' work. To answer another of Lee's questions he said he was influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, and that he felt, as a young man, that no one had written poetry after Poe. Then, and this one went over most people's heads, that he "fell upon Emily Dickinson with great joy." Upon saying that, he looked out into the audience with a grin, a mischevious grin that prompted people to laugh. He told about the time he was asked to teach a year of Walt Whitman's work. The book they sent him lay "around the house for a while and then picked it up and read it and realized why he [Whitman] was so unpopular. His poems were awful." But the sixteenth poem he read was beautiful." He added that "Whitman is appealing because of the music in his poetry" and "Whitman had shown himself to be an adventurer close to Dickinson" an observation that echoes remarks I've heard my dear professor of poetry say during lecture. Lee asked him if there was a poet he considered risky. I do not know what she meant by "risky," but Kinnell thought for a moment and began to say Dylan Thomas, but folks in the audience had to remind him of the name. He said Thomas's work was so beautiful that he read him only once per week to give himself time to forget his style. Hold on and don't follow someone else's music, he implied. It was at this point that he began to recite one of Dylan's poems. Afterwards, he said he "felt thrilled when one of my students wrote a great poem . . . and properly morose when they did not." What is something to tell an emerging poet asked Lee: Keep your senses alert; maintain sense power and facilities, the alertness that you were born with.
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