We Insomniacs
Like the way Galway Kinnell fell asleep in 1968 in Athens, Ohio,reading from a wadded-up new poem pulled from his pocket,started too late at night the night before—the occasion, exactly, the Ohio Poetry Circuit,calling for, often, two readings a day, a hundred or so miles apartThis was an afternoon event, four o’clock,Body Rags just out, which he also read from.The new piece was probably from The Book of Nightmares,possibly “Maud Moon,” more likely “The Hen Flower,”which, in the original, begins, “We insomniacs, /Sprawled/on our faces in the spring / nights…”but later revised—Kinnell was an inveterate reviser—by dropping the poem’s first line,perhaps a mistake he was now paying for.
I don’t remember for sure what the crumpled part of a poem was.I remember it was a beautiful late October afternoon,by now…
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The American Poetry Review (Digital) - 1 Issue, May/June 2019