Rosanna Warren and Galway Kinnell

An Evening of Poetry

Rosanna Warren (Boston University) and Galway Kinnell (New York University)
Introduction: Frank Bidart (Wellesley College)

Editor's note:

This Stated Meeting began with a performance by the Kim-Jacobsen-Aaron Trio, featuring pianist Albert Kim, violinist Colin Jacobsen, and cellist Edward Aaron. Commenting on these artists in its annual review, Chamber Music America notes that "having grown up making music together, they think, feel, and breathe as one." Since 1990 the Trio has played in New York on numerous occasions, as well as at the Salzburg Music Festival, the Colorado Music Festival, and the Banff Centre for the Arts. In 1997 the Trio took part in an all-Schubert program at Carnegie Hall, celebrating the 200th anniversary of the composer's birth. In their appearance at the Academy, the musicians offered their rendition of Smetana's Trio in G Minor, op. 15.

Frank Bidart:

Rosanna Warren has published three books of poems, edited and contributed to The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field, and translated (with Stephen Scully) The Suppliant Women by Euripides. She is completing a biography of Max Jacob. She set up and has directed the prison poetry seminars of the Boston University- Prison Program and published three anthologies of poetry by prisoners. At Boston University she is an associate professor in the University Professors Program, the Department of Modern Foreign Languages, and the Department of English. There she runs the translation seminar; she has amplified and shaped it into the local institution that it has become. She has won many awards, from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, as well as a Nation/ Discovery Award. Stained Glass, her most recent book of poems, won the Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets.

It is no exaggeration to say that Rosanna Warren is widely loved by the literary community of Boston and Cambridge. She couples an extraordinary generosity of spirit with distinction and severity of judgment. Her work in the prisons proceeds from passion and commitment. Her translation seminar at BU-widely attended on Friday afternoons by writers and teachers from the Boston area, in which one can hear the most distinguished poets and translators in the world speak-is a gift that she has given the whole community.

But tonight I want to speak of the great power of her poems. She combines rare sophistication and delicacy of surface with a ferocious, even tragic view of human life. Lines that are learned and beautifully shaped are shot through with statements like:

…butchery
is life, and life runs
in us as down this street.

(from "Le Ventre de Paris: A Marriage Poem")

and:

...as if one face unmarred
in Kodachrome rescued all others who have died

ugly, bruised, disqualified.

(from "Child Model")

and:

For this is
love: rigor

mortis in the
mortal grip
and never to let

go…

The living mangle the dead

after they mangle the living
It's formulaic
That's how we love…

(from "The Twelfth Day")

The fact that death is for art one of the great central subjects cannot obscure that it is also an opportunity for the artist; this is her poem entitled "Necrophiliac":

More marrow to suck, more elegies
to whistle through the digestive track.
So help me God to another dollop of death,

come on strong with the gravy and black-eyed peas,
slop it all in the transcendental stew
whose vapors rise and shine in the nostrils of heaven.
Distill the belches, preserve the drool as ink:
Death, since you
nourish me, I'll flatter you inordinately. Consumers both, with claws
cocked and molars prompt at the fresh-dug grave,
reaper and elegist, we collaborate
and batten in this strictest of intimacies,
my throat an open sepulchre, my tongue
forever groping grief forever young.

The poem that follows is a tender and piercing elegy for her father.

I have heard her read, and she has allowed me to see, the poems that she has written since her third book. Many are concerned with the final years and death of her mother, but like all fine elegies their true subject is the fate, the conditions allowed to the spirit inhabiting mortal flesh, the mortal world. Other poems, like the wonderful "Moment," are not explicitly concerned with this, but nonetheless are informed by it. I hope that she will read some of these poems tonight; they are among her finest work-which is to say, among the finest poems written by any member of her generation. I am honored to present Rosanna Warren.

Rosanna Warren:

In keeping with the elegiac theme of the evening, I will start with a poem stolen from the greatest elegiac poem of the West, the Iliad, Book 24.

The Twelfth Day
For Pam Cantor

It is the twelfth day
The hero will not take food
He refuses wine sleep women

How can the body not spoil?
Dragged by chariot
gashed smeared

in mud and horse droppings
Mutilate Mutilate
cries the hero's heart

as he lashes the horses
around and
around the tomb

If he can just
make his mark on this
corpse whose

beauty freshens
with each lunge
as though bathed

in balm Even the gods
in gentle feast are
shocked: Is there no

shame? The hero has
no other life
He has taken

to heart a body
whose face vaulting
through gravel and blood

blends strangely
with the features
of that other

one: the Beloved
For this is
love: rigor

mortis in the
mortal grip
and never to let

go Achilles hoards
and defiles the dead
So what if heaven

and earth reverberate
release So what
if Olympian

messages shoot through
cloudbanks sea
chambers ether

So what if everything
echoes the Father let go let
go This is Ancient

Poetry It's supposed
to repeat
The living mangle the dead

after they mangle the living
It's formulaic
That's how we love It's called

compulsion Poetry can't
help itself
And no one has ever

explained how
light stabbed
the hero how he saw

in dawn salt mist
his Mother's face (she who
Was before words she

who would lose him)
Saw her but heard
words Let him let

go Saw her and let
his fingers loosen
from that

suspended decay and
quietly
too quietly

turned away

I will read now one of the poems that Frank mentioned-not exactly an elegy for my mother but an imagination of her in her last year or so. It is a landscape that will be familiar to those of you who live in Boston and Cambridge.

Island in the Charles

"By being scholar first of that new night" (Crashaw)

Taking the well-worn path in the mind through dusk encroaches
upon the mind, taking back alleys careful step by step
past parked cars and trash containers, three blocks to the concrete ramp
of the footbridge spanning the highway with its rivering, four-lane
unstaunchable traffic, treading on shadow and slant broken light

my mother finds her way. By beer bottles, over smeared
Trojans, across leaf-muck, she follows the track, clutching her
jacket close. The footbridge lofts her over the flashing cars
and sets her down, gently, among trees, where she is a child
in the weave of boughs, and leafshapes plait the breeze.

She fingers silver-green blades of the crack willow, she tests dark grooves
of crack willow bark. The tree has a secret. Its branches pour
themselves back toward earth, and my mother pauses, dredging a breath
up out of her sluggish lungs. The blade leaves scratch
her fingertips, the corrugated bark

releases a privacy darker than cataract veils.
But slashed and ribboned, glimpsed through fronds,
the river hauls its cargo of argent light
and she advances, past basswood and crabapple clumps
along the tarmac where cyclists, joggers, rollerbladers

entranced in their varying orbits swoop
around her progress. With method, she reaches her bench,
she stations there. She sits columnular, fastened
to her difficult breath, and faces the river in late
afternoon. Behind her, voices. Before her, the current casts its glimmering

seine to a shore so distant no boundary scars
her retina, and only occasional sculls or sailboats flick
across her vision as quickened, condensing light.
There she sits, poised, while the fluent transitive Charles

draws off to the harbor and, farther, to the unseen sea
until evening settles, and takes her in its arms.

Two more poems for her:

Diversion

Go, I say to myself, tired of my notebooks and my reluctant pen,
go water the newly transplanted sorrel and dill,
spriggy yet in their new humus and larger clay pots;
water artemisia, salvia, centaurea
which are classical, perennial, and have promised to spread their nimbus
of violet and silver through our patchy backyard
for summers to come, from poor soil.
Then I'll return indoors to the words copied
on the yellow legal pad,

her words
which I cannot shape,
which sentence me:

"There are things I prefer
to forget-"
(what things?) "Just,

things—" "Darling, I can't
locate myself—" "Where
are you?'

And if she, in her compassion, forgets
or doesn't know, I will perennially remember,
how I erase these messages
I later transcribe: one punch
of one button on the answering machine—

and how, with cruel
helpfulness
I have asked: "Don't you remember?"

restoring to her a garden of incident
which she cannot keep, water, or tend,
and which will die, soon, from her ministrations.

Postscript

The one who jackhammered up the surface of the morning
and stacked it in chunks by the side of the road—
The one who yanked the bandage off the sky
so it bled again, there, in the cleft between the trees—
The smiling one who held the morphine vial and murmured
"There, there" (I think she was the angel of death)-

Over the black pond spreads a film of ice
like glaucoma, but water
wells out beyond
ice, beyond stones, beyond weed tufts: o new
season gleaming darkly from half-frozen mud
you reflect
nothing—

Underfoot,
oak leaves lie tender, bleached and damp,
palms upward—

overhead, cloud shreds
flutter on branch tips in
a tatterdemalion sky

*

Yes, he said, legs braced wide apart,
I can make words jump through hoops, stand on one paw,
spin their tails in the air

It's a matter of training

It's a profession
if not a faith

"I told the daughter it was
time to call in Hospice-"

"I am 'the daughter'—"

*

And in her room
the rented hospital bed, empty, half-
stripped (who will sleep now
in those sheets?); telephone
silent; toothbrush and dentures
a still life on the faux-marble washbasin;
her washcloth slowly stiffening on the towel rack;
shopping lists, buttons, passport, loose keys
lying in pharaonic darkness at the backs of drawers
are in for a
long wait:
as are the blank future day slots on her calendar
lying sidewise on her desk

*

My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle

So she floated in the red
armchair, so her tongue couldn't find
its lair in her mouth:

so her ankles swelled, so
each breath snarled and hauled
up a groan from its burrow of dark:

so she leaned forward, held my
hand, and said, "Your hands
are cold—" And: "Please—please—"

0 remember that my life is wind

We are Greek figures in a bas

relief, two women leaning toward
each other across a

void: not marble but
light draws us
together, cuts us apart, incises

out profiles against
this night that repeats
forever, will perish with each

breath: not marble
can hold in mind
the shape of vanishing


As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away

*

"Ma, is breathing hard for you?"
"No; thinking is."

And, shifting in her chair:

"Let me just see-if I can see—
how to ease things a little—if
anything can—

Time to break this off
I can't see—I can't see what to do—"

In the grove of white pines, by the granite ledge,
a ring of soot-black stones. Charred sticks. Ashes.
Broken glass glints like sequins in the tamped-down dirt.
Pine needles—faded russet—have drifted across the clearing
which is small, hidden away, high off the main trail.
We stand here, the dog and I, as if abashed
at having broken into someone's house.
Someone, however, who moved away long ago.
Silence absorbs us. Faintly, the breeze
fingers bare branches to which spring has not yet occurred.
Then a mourning dove gives a tentative call
trying out his voice upon our motionlessness
until he falters, releasing us from the spell,
and we make our way back through the woods, toward
the homeward path.

So have whole tribes
passed from the memory of earth.

I will end outside the family, with a poem about works of art. In this jagged, crazy poem, you will hear the voice of the German painter Max Beckmann and fragmentary translations from Guido Guinizelli, the great thirteenth-century Italian poet of highly spiritualized love who inspired Dante.

Departure

(from Max Beckmann and Guido Guinizelli)

"I can only speak to people who—"

Unspeaking, unspoken, the full-breasted woman
tied to a dead man upside down

stands center stage with a lamp in her hand,
sheds kerosene glow on the marching band.

That's Cupid, the dark dwarf who tightens her rope;
this is art, this is love, that's the classical shape

of proscenium arch. This is Germany, May '32.
"—can only speak to people who

already carry, consciously or unconsciously, within them—"
ou want to buy that center panel, Lilly, but
you can't have that alone

There will always be, on one side, a man bound to column
with both hands chopped off; there will always be
a still life with hand grenade grapes and a woman kneeling
before an executioner who swings a bag of iron fish

Love always shelters in the gentle heart

And you will always—won't you?—find yourself groping
in a dark stairwell ill-lit by that feeble, dangerous lamp
while you drag along, strapped to you, the corpse of all your errors,
and the drum throbs and shudders like a titanic heart

Love's fire is kindled in the gentle heart
as light kindles in a precious gem

And there's another romance, in which the woman
and man are strapped to each other alive, but head to feet, on a giant fish
and each holds in hand the ritual mask of the other
as they hurtle downwards towards a brilliant, engulfing ocean

as the star beam strikes the water
but the sky keeps the star and all its fire

which is generally known as love. No, you can't
buy the central panel lone, with the king and queen
joyous and powerful in their open boat, the baby bespeaking freedom
and the net full of fish flashing in blessed abundance

"—who already carry, consciously or unconsciously,
within them
a similar metaphysical code."

because the oarsman is blindfolded
because the crowned fisherman has his back to us
because that open boat
has not set sail
from our shores
nor will it, while we are alive.

"Necrophiliac" and "The Twelfth Day" from Stained Glass by Rosanna Warren. Copyright ©1993 by Rosanna Warren. Used by permission of W. W. Norton and Company, Inc.

Frank Bidart

Galway Kinnell has published eight books of poetry, a novel, a book of interviews, a children's book, and done numerous translations. His Selected Poems won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1983, and he has been a MacArthur Fellow. He is the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University.

Kinnell is a poet who makes discoveries, who changes, and it is wonderful to watch the progress of his work—from his earliest formal poetry, to the free verse Whitmanian amplitude and catalogues of the poem "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World," to the union of this Whitmanian suppleness and directness with an almost Dylan-Thomas-like phantasmagoria and high rhetoric in The Book ofNightmares. In terms of a wide American audience, The Book of Nightmares was, I think, Kinnell's breakthrough book. Let me give a brief example of its diction:

The foregoing scribed down
in March, of the year Seventy,
on my sixteen-thousandth night of war and madness,
in the Hotel of Lost Light, under the freeway

which roams out into the dark
of the moon, in the absolute spell
of departure, and by the light
from the joined hemispheres of the spider's eyes.

It is this diction—mercurial, yet weighted and loamlike, by turns resonant with the great past of high English rhetoric, then leavened with an extraordinary feel for the eloquencc of American street demotic, an Edward-Hopper-like loneliness and pathos lying beneath phrases such as "the Hotel of Lost Light"—it is this diction that has been a powerful and fertile resource in contemporary American poetry.

Many of Kinnell's poems are indelible; they tell of journeys in which he must face the worst. They are psychic narratives-journeys of the psyche that at times are tied together by something like fictional narrative, at others not-that embody the nearly intolerable meshing of death and life, spirit and flesh. In The Book of Nightmares, life is a charnel house. Perhaps no American writer has ever confronted so frontally this insight. It is as if the writer is saying, "Whatever your view of life, you must construct it looking full into the face of this." In his fresh and disarming book of interviews, Walking Down the Stairs, he says of The Book of Nightmares, I thought of that poem as one in which I could say everything that I knew or felt. Now that it's finished, now that some time has passed since it's been finished, I see that it wasn't everything. But still I don't know quite what I shall write. "

This desire to find a single container for "everything that I knew or felt" (a recurrent desire throughout his career) testifies to Kinnell's liberating ambition and seriousness. Since The Book of Nightmares, he has continued not to repeat himself. In his most recent book, Imperfect Thirst (which is, I think, somewhat underappreciated, and which contains poems that are among my favorites) there is extraordinarily luminous and plainspoken work like "Hitchhiker" and "Neverland," in which the model seems not Whitman or Thomas but the like of "Washing the Corpse" or "Requiem." As throughout the body of Kinnell's work, there is the almost intolerable but necessary linking of opposites. In "Driving West," he writes:

This happened to your father and to you, Galway—
sick to stay, longing to come up against the ends of
the earth, and climb over.

It is my honor to present Galway Kinnell.

Galway Kinnell:

And it is my honor to be introduced by Frank Bidart and to read in the company of Rosanna Warren, and to read in this institution, which goes back to the beginning of the republic.

I will begin with something from "olden time." Of course, this institution was already flourishing well before Emily Dickinson was born, but I will let a poem by her stand for the long ago. It is a poem everyone knows. Though in it Emily Dickinson takes on the persona of a dying woman and sympathetically dies with her, it is not so much about death as about the supreme value of the least thing in life.

I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air—
Between the Heaves of Storm—

The Eyes around—had wrung them dry—
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset—-when the King
Be witnessed—in the Room—

I willed my Keepsakes—Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable—and then it was
There interposed a Fly—

With Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz—
Between the light—and me—
And then the Windows failed—and then
I could not see to see—

On this occasion, which joins poetry and music, I want to read a poem of mine called "The Music of Poetry." I know that some few of you in other fields may not know a great deal about poetry, so this will be my lecture to you on poetry as well. You must imagine that the speaker of this poem, after having lectured on "The Music of Poetry," is now bringing his talk to a close.

"The Music of Poetry"

And now—after putting forward a "unified theory":
that the music resulting from any of the methods
of organizing English into rhythmic surges
can sound like the music resulting from any other,
being the music not of a method but of the language;
and after proposing that free verse is a variant
of formal verse, using unpredictably the acoustic
repetitions which formal verse employs regularly;
and after playing recordings of the gopher frog's
long line of glottal stops, sounding like rumblings
in an empty stomach, and the notes the hermit thrush
pipes one after another, then twangles together,
and the humpback whale's gasp-cries as it passes
out of the range of human perception of ecstasy,
and the wolf's howls, one, and then several,
and then all the pack joining in a polyphony
to whatever in the sunlit midnight sky
remains keeper of the axle the earth and
its clasped lovers turn upon and cry to;
and after playing recordings of an angakoq
chanting in Inuktitut of his trance-life as a nanuk,
a songman of Arnhem Land, Rahmani of Iran,
Neruda of Chile, Yeats, Thomas, Rukeyser,
to let the audience hear that our poems
are of the same order as those of the other animals
and are composed, like theirs, when we find ourselves
synchronized with the rhythms of the earth,
no matter where, in the city of Brno, which cried
its vowel too deep into the night to get it back,
or at Ma'aJaea on Maui in Hawaii, still plumping
itself on the actual matter of pleasure there,
or here in St. Paul, Minnesota, where I lean
at a podium trying to draw my talk to a close,
or on Bleecker Street a time zone away in New York,
where only minutes ago my beloved may have
put down her book and drawn up her eiderdown
around herself and turned out the light—
now, causing me to garble a few words
and tangle my syntax, I imagine I can hear
her say my name into the slow waves
of the night and, faintly, being alone, sing.

I have spent much of the last year translating the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, and I wanted to read you one of these translations. I did not think I should do so unless the poem could also be read in the original language; and fortunately, Sir Hans Kornberg has agreed to read the German. [Mr. Kornberg stepped forward and read the poem in its original language for the audience.]

Reading a translation of Rilke after one has just heard the original is like being required to read one's poems right after Rosanna Warren has read hers.

Death

There death stands, a bluish residue
in a cup without a saucer.
Odd place for a cup:

standing on the back of a hand. It's easy
to make out where the handle broke off
on the glazed roundness. Dusty. With: "Hope"
on its hull in lettering all but worn off.

The person the drink was intended for
read it off at some long-ago breakfast.

What kind of beings are these anyway,
who in the end have to be scared away with poison?

Would they never leave, otherwise Can they be that
besotted by this meat full of obstacles?
The hard present has to be taken out
of them like a set of false teeth.
Then they start slurring. Mumble, mumble…
…………………………………………………..

0 falling star
seen once from a bridge—:
Never to forget you. Stay standing!

The next poem is one I wrote a long time ago in circumstances very different from those of today. It is a poem about war and madness, anger and suffering. It is a poem I had "put away." I haven't read it for twenty years. Now I find myself dragging it out again.

The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible

1

A piece of flesh gives off
smoke in the field—

carrion,
caput mortuum,
orts,
pelf,
fenks,
sordes,
gurry dumped from hospital trashcans

Lieutenant!

This corpse will not stop burning!

2

"That you Captain? Sure,
sure I remember—I still hear you
lecturing at me on the intercom, Keep your guns up, Burnsie!
and then screaming, Stop shooting, for crissake, Burnsie,
those are friendlies! But crissake, Captain,
I'd already started, burst after burst,
little black pajamas jumping
and falling ... and remember that pilot
who'd bailed out over the North,
how I shredded him down to catgut on his strings?
one of his slant eyes, a piece
of his smile, sail past me
every night right after the sleeping pill ...

"It was only
that I loved the sound
of them, I guess I just loved
the feel of them sparkin' off my hands…"

3

On the television screen:

Do you have a body that sweats?
Sweat that has odor?
False teeth clanging into your breakfast?
Case of the dread?
Headache so perpetual it may outlive you?
Armpits sprouting hair?
Piles so huge you don't need a chair to sit at a table?

We shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed...

In the Twentieth Century of my trespass on earth,
having exterminated one billion heathens,
heretics, Jews, Moslems, witches, mystical seekers,
black men, Asians, and Christian brothers,
every one of them for his own good,

a whole continent of red men for living in unnatural community
and at the same time having relations with the land,
one billion species of animals for being sub-human,
and ready to take on the bloodthirsty creatures from the other planets,
I, Christian man, groan out this testament of my last will.

I give my blood fifty parts polystyrene,
Twenty-five parts benzene, twenty-five parts good old gasoline,
to the last bomber pilot aloft, that there shall be one acre
in the dull world where the kissing flower may bloom,
which kisses you so long your bones explode under its lips.

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 blown up by lightning."

My stomach, which has digested
four hundred treaties giving the Indians
eternal right to their land, I give to the Indians.
I throw in my lungs which have spent four hundred years
sucking in good faith on peace pipes.

My soul I leave to the bee
that she may sting it and die, my brain
to the fly, her back the hysterical green color of slime,
that she may suck on it and die, my flesh to the advertising man,
the anti-prostitute, who loathes human flesh for money.

I assign my crooked backbone
to the dice maker, to chop up into dice,
for casting lots as to who shall see his own blood
on his shirt front and who his brother's,
for the race isn't to the swift but to the crooked.

To the last man surviving on earth
I give my eyelids worn out by fear, to wear
in his long nights of radiation and silence,
so that his eyes can't close, for regret
is like tears seeping through closed eyelids.

I give the emptiness my hand: the pinkie picks no more
slag clings to the black stick of the ring finger,
a bit of flame jets from the tip of the fuck-you finger,
the first finger accuses the heart, which has vanished,
on the thumb stump wisps of smoke ask a ride into the emptiness.

In the Twentieth Century of my nightmare
on earth, I swear on my chromium testicles
to this testament
and last will
of my iron will, my fear of love, my itch for money,
and my madness.

5

In the ditch
snakes crawl cool paths
over the rotted thigh, the toe bones
twitch in the smell of burnt rubber,
the belly
opens like a poison nightflower,
the tongue has evaporated,
the nostril
hairs sprinkle themselves with yellowish-white dust,
the five flames at the end
of each hand have gone out, a mosquito
sips a last meal from this plate of serenity.

And the fly, the last nightmare, hatches himself.

6

I ran
my neck broken I ran
holding my head up with both hands I ran
thinking the flames
the flames may burn the oboe
but listen buddy boy they can't touch the notes!

7

A few bones
lie about in the smoke of bones.

Membranes,
effigies pressed into grass,
mummy windings,
desquamations,
sags incinerated mattresses gave back to the world,
memories left in mirrors on whorehouse ceilings,
angel's wings
flagged down into the snows of yesteryear,

kneel
on the scorched earth
in the shapes of men and animals:

do not let this last hour pass,
do not remove this last, poison cup from our lips.

And a wind holding
the cries of love-making from all our nights and days
moves among the stones, hunting
for two twined skeletons to blow its last crv across.

Lieutenant! This corpse will not stop burning!

---

Introductions of speakers © 1999 by Frank Bidart. Communications © 1999 by Rosanna Warren and Galway Kinnell, respectively. Acknowledgment is made to the publications in which the specified poems by Rosanna Warren originally appeared: "Island in the Charles," New Yorker, "Diversion," New Republic; "PostScript," Orion; "Departure," New Republic. "I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—" reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Ralph W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © (1951, 1955, 1979) by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

"The Music of Poetry" from Imperfect Thirst. Copyright © 1994 by Galway Kinnell. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Galway Kinnell's English translation of the Rilke poem "Death" from The Essential Rilke, translated by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann (HarperCollins/Ecco). 9 1999 by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. "The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible" from The Book of Nightmares. Copyright ©1971 by Galway Kinnell. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.