I read a jarring, mystical poem by Galway Kinnell called “The Bear” this week. (You may recognize that name from my essay on “reteaching a thing its loveliness.“) It is a fever dream in seven unsteady parts about a man hunting a dying bear, crawling inside of it, and then waking and seeing a still-living bear in the ravine. At least I think that’s the sequence, but it is a poem of borderlessness, violence, and evolution in which we ask: what is real; what is dream? What is nature; what is man? What does it mean to hunt and trap and injure, and then crawl inside the wound? And then wake up and see the suffering from the outside?
I love a poem that asks and does not answer. Most good poetry does this, I think. (I’m thinking of Oliver now: “Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.“)
My challenge to you is to sit down and read this poem and just live inside it for a minute, not forcing meaning. Like the speaker of the poem: “open him and climb in / and close him up after, against the wind, / and sleep.”
Then write down the first ten words that come to mind.
I think you’ll be surprised at how much you have to say about the splattered paint — how easily the vision-words float from your mind’s eye to the page. In turn, you will see your own extraordinary depth and imaginativeness. To read is to create. Think of everything you just brought to the poem. Think of all the things you carry with you — your memories, your preferences, your scars, your wonderful ways of being.
As a writer, I “write to find out what’s inside” (Kurt Vonnegut), but reading isn’t too different after all. When you read that poem, what echoed in the well? What dormant part of you arrived on the page, snuck out of the stanza, curled up on the comma?
P.S. You can hear the poet read the poem here. What struck me about his reading was the fluidity between stanzas, especially stanzas four and five. I wanted to sit with that “and sleep” at the end of stanza four for awhile. I wanted a gaping, long pause. He didn’t give it to us! But I think his reading is a better fit for the thematic blurred lines of the poem. I also noticed, thanks to his reading, the repetition of certain words and movements — “ravine,” “blood,” the sensation of crawling in and out, looking from the outside. You get a lot from the auditory performance of a poem. Where does the breath want to naturally fall? When are we gasping for air versus slowing down? What sounds and rhythms recur?
P.P.S. Kinnell’s two children are named Fergus and Maud — both references to Yeats.
P.P.P.S. I absolutely loved (!) the phrase “the fairway of the bears” from this poem. I wrote it down in several places this week. It feels like a perfect title for something ominous.
Sunday Shopping Poetry.
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P.S. More poetry I love.
P.P.S. Lilacs and poetics.
P.P.P.S. The salt from his hand.