Quotes from Galway Kinnell

To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment

Let our scars fall in love.

Prose is walking; poetry is flying

the rest of my days I spend wandering: wondering what, anyway, was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?

Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what's to come.

It is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.

That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous.

maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion's tatters.

Kiss the mouth which tells you, here, here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

Is there a mechanism of death, that so mutilates existence no one, gets over it not even the dead?

Love is the religion that bereaves the bereft.

When the man touches through to the exact center of the woman, he lies motionless, in equilibrium, in absolute desire, at the threshold of the world to which the Creator Spirit knows the pass-whisper, and whispers it, and his loving friend becomes his divinity.

Computers can deliver nuclear explosions to precisely anywhere on earth. A lightning bolt is made entirely of error.

and one knows, after a long time of solitude, after the many steps taken away from one's kind, toward the kingdom of strangers, the hard prayer inside one's own singing is to come back, if one can, to one's own, a world almost lost, in the exile that deepens, when one has lived a long time alone.

And yet perhaps this is the reason you cry, this the nightmare you wake screaming from: being forever in the pre-trembling of a house that falls.

When the lover goes, the vow though broken remains, that trace of eternity love brings down among us stays, to give dignity to the suffering and to intensify it.

The Lord turned away washing His hands without soap and water Like a common housefly.

Now is when the point of the story changes.

My tongue goes to the Secretary of the Dead to tell the corpses, I'm sorry, fellows, the killing was just one of those things difficult to pre-visualize - like a cow, say, getting hit by lightning.

And Paris! All afternoon in someone's attic We raised our glasses And drank to the asses Who ran the world and turned neurotic.

The last memory I have Is of a flower which cannot be touched, Through the bloom of which, all day, Fly crazed, missing bees. from "Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock

Never mind. The self is the least of it. Let our scars fall in love.

The first step... shall be to lose the way.

this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making, sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake, this blessing love gives again into our arms.