pond where an old fisherman in a rowboat sits,
drowning hookedworms, when he’s gone he’s
replaced and is never gone
And then we get to the moment of recogni-
tion preceding the fall which gives the poem its
title:
when Fergus... saw its oldness down there
in its old place in the valley, he became
heavier suddenly
in his bones
the way fledglings do just before they fly,
and the soft pine cracked....
Fergus falls into his own mortality, antici-
pating what his adult body will do later. But the
pond remains for the transfixed child an
exchange of gazes with the eye of earth. The
pond also remains an emblem in the tradition
of Emerson and Thoreau as a fusion, or cross-
ing-place of self and world, where through
nature’s mediation, both become known, even
though in the ending, emphasis shifts from the
optimism of having achieved knowledge, or spi-
rit-food, to the more phlegmatic angling and
waiting for it:
Yes—a pond
that lets off its mist
on clear afternoons of August, in that valley
to which many have come, for their reasons,
from which many have gone, a few for their
reasons, most not,
where even now an old fisherman only the
pinetops can see
sits in the dry gray wood of his rowboat,
waiting for pickerel.
In this poem, which takes the child protag-
onist into the romantic struggle to know self
through nature, Kinnell only briefly touches on
the intersection of that task with the style of self-
knowledge gained through contrasting one’s
knowledge of identity through family order. In
this poem, the father generations are the muted
backdrop. As he evades an open treatment of the
family themes that have met with such partial
success elsewhere, Kinnell in this poem converts
avoidance into advantage: ‘‘Fergus Falling’’
comes into its own by freshly acknowledging an
aspect of harmony which has more to do with
our place in the non-human, physical world, and
much less to do with our relations to each other.
Source: Lorrie Goldensohn, ‘‘Approaching Home
Ground: Galway Kinnell’sMortal Acts, Mortal Words,’’
inMassachusetts Review, Vol. 25, No. 2, Summer 1984,
pp. 303–21.
Galway Kinnell, Michael Molloy,
and Thomas Hilgers
In the following interview, Kinnell discusses being
a poet, poetic inspiration, and writing poetry.
[Hilgers:] I’d like to begin by talking not
about poetry, but about poets. Does a poet ever
stop being a poet?
[Kinnell:]It’s hard to stop. Many poets
should. Wordsworth, for example who did all
his best work as a young man, continued crank-
ing out verses during his long life; and none of
the late verses were of any use. But poetry is not a
profession in the ordinary sense. It’s so much a
part of what you are. Nothing else takes its place.
Being a poet is in part a state of mind. Many
people are in such a state; probably everybody is
a poet to some degree or another. It’s part of
being itself. That’s why it’s so hard to stop.
How is ‘‘everybody’’ a poet? What is there
about that state of mind, or what is there in every
man’s state of mind, that’s poetic?
Well, we all use language; and at those
moments when we’re really deeply affected by
something, we often express our response in
words. When these come directly out of our feel-
ings, whether we write them down and work
them up into a poem that can have a public life
or not, in some way we’ve uttered poetry.
Do you at any time in your own life feel
yourself in a super-poetic frame of mind? When
you’re actually in the process of writing poetry,
are you in a different state from what you are right
now when we’re talking prose?
Yes, I think when one writes well, there does
come upon one a kind of heightened state of
aliveness, a surge of energy and exhilaration. It
may come before you start writing, but it’s a sign
that you should start.
[Molloy:] Does that surge come often after
you’ve decided to start writing rather than before?
No, I think the surge actually comes when
writing is the farthest thing from your mind and
something in the world or in your memory of the
world or fantasy of it engages your attention
very intensely. In the interaction between your-
self and whatever it is that you’ve been excited by
comes some kind of strange psychological chem-
ical infusion of energy and then you want to
express that relationship.
It must happen often that you have such a
feeling, such a surge, and the poem never emerges.
Are there many unspoken poems in you?Blackberry Eating