poets, have to live their lives as people, rather
than as symbolic portents, nevertheless, the
absence of one of the earlier symbolic people
belonging to this story of lives becomes notice-
able. What happened to the memorable girl-
child detailed in ‘‘Little Sleep’s Head Sprouting
Hair in the Moonlight’’:
In a restaurant once, everyone
quietly eating, you clambered up
on my lap: to all
the mouthfuls rising toward
all the mouths, at the top of your voice
you cried your one word caca! caca! caca!
and each spoonful
stopped, a moment, in midair, in its
withering
steam.
Shame on Kinnell for forgetting this pun-
gent little critic of transcendence, echoing as she
does the earlier feelings of her father:
The great thing about Whitman is that he knew
allof our being must be loved, if we are to love
any of it. I have often thought there should be a
book calledShit,telling us that what comes out
of the body is no less a part of reality, no less
sacred, than what goes into it; only a little less
nourishing. It’s a matter of its moment in the
life cycle: food eaten is on the cross, at its
moment of sacrifice, while food eliminated is
at its moment of ascension. (Kinnell, ‘‘The
Poetics of the Physical World’’)
But while on the subject of problematic
exclusions in Kinnell’s American romanticism,
and his failure to avoid entrapment in some of its
aesthetic positions, I’d also like to point to suc-
cessful adaptations and continuities, especially
in the parts of Kinnell’s work that overlap Thor-
eau. In the necessarily revisionist strategy of our
late age, the best answer for difficulties that the
tradition offers may well not be to sink the
offending antecedent, as Kinnell tried to do
with Thoreau in ‘‘The Last River,’’ or to bury
him in your prose, but to keep a wary eye on him
up front. In ‘‘The Last River,’’ Kinnell dismissed
Thoreau and what Thoreau himself called the
‘‘excrementitious’’ truths of his gravel bank in a
Spring thaw, and which Kinnell relabeled the
failure of ‘‘Seeking love....’’;accusing Henry
David of ‘‘failing to know I only loved / my
purity.’’ Nonetheless, Kinnell has him come
back to inhabit the fisher child ofMortal Acts,
Mortal Words.In one of the most successful new
poems, ‘‘Fergus Falling,’’ Kinnell outlines in
fairly compact from what both the strengths
and dilemmas are of accepting the full flowering
of theisolato,to borrow another American writ-
er’s term for the revolutionary persona in
question.
In this poem, written with a deceptively cas-
ual music, Kinnell begins:
He climbed to the top
of one of those million white pines
set out across emptying pastures
of the fifties—some program to enrich the
rich
and rebuke the forefather
who cleared it all once with ox and axe—
climbed to the top, probably to get out
of the shadow
not of those forefathers but of this father,
and saw for the first time,
down in its valley, Bruce Pond, giving off
its little steam in the afternoon
After completing this magical climb out of
the order of the generations, in full Oedipal
revolt, the poem stalls the engine of ascent for a
moment to look at Bruce Pond. In effective,
rhythmically irregular strophes, Kinnell
describes the pond. In service to a belief in the
fusion of letter and literal within the real, and
with the intent of tracing the same intersection
between the real and the symbolic, Thoreau
drew Walden Pond for us in fidelity to its decep-
tive ordinariness, and then told us:
A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and
expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking
into which the beholder measures the depth of
his own nature.
Kinnell follows the same intention of reflect-
ing in language the order of language within the
order of nature:
pond where Clarence Akley came on Sun-
day mornings to cut down the cedars
around the shore, I’d sometimes hear
the slow spondees of his work, he’s
gone,
where Milton Norway came up behind me
while I was fishing and stood awhile
before I knew he was there, he’s the
one who put the cedar shingles on the
house, some have curled or split, a few
have blown off, he’s gone,
In banging home that refrain, ‘‘he’s gone,’’
Kinnell puts us in the book’s preoccupation,
mortality, but here, the mortality of a serenely
repeating human order, in a persuasive syntax of
continuity:Blackberry Eating