Galway Kinnell (born February 1, 1927, in Providence, Rhode Island – October 28, 2014) is one of the most influential American poets of the latter half of the 20th century.

Quotes

• A boy's hunched body loved out of a stalk
  The first song of his happiness, and the song woke
  His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.
  • First Song (1983).

• The appeal to heaven breaks off.
  The petals begin to fall, in self-forgiveness.
  It is a flower. On this mountainside it is dying.
  • Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1976).

• The sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
  from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
  the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
  • Saint Francis and the Sow (1986).

• I take a wolf's rib and whittle
  it sharp at both ends
  and coil it up
  and freeze it in blubber and place it out
  on the fairway of the bears.
  • The Bear (1974).

External links

• The loveliness of pigs: Galway Kinnell searches for the real beauty interview and poem “Daybreak” on the Christian Science Monitor
• Cortland Review interview and poem “The Fundamental Project of Technology”
• "Galway Kinnel reads 'Wait' " for the WGBH series, New Television Workshop
• " 'Since you asked..,' with Galway Kinnell for the WGBH series, New Television Workshop
• Academy of American Poets biography and links to interviews and poems
• Modern American Poetry short biography