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Body Rags: Poems
Body Rags contains the bulk of Kinnell’s most praised and anthologized poems. Using animal experiences to explore human consciousness, Kinnell poems such as “The Bear” feature frank and often unlovely images. Kinnell’s embrace of the ugly is well-considered, though. "The bud stands for all things, even those things that don’t flower, for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;"....... Galway Kinnell is the author of ten books of poetry, including The Book of Nightmares, When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone, Imperfect Thirst, and most recently A New Selected Poems and Strong is Your Hold. He also published a novel, Black Light; a selection of interviews, Walking Down the Stairs; and a book for children, as well as translations of works by Yves Bonnefoy, Yvan Goll, Francois Villon and Rainer Maria Rilke.
- GenresPoetry
63 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1968
2 people are currently reading
123 people want to read
About the author
Galway Kinnell
119 books190 followersKinnell studied at Princeton University, graduating in 1948. He later obtained a Master's degree from the University of Rochester.
As a young man, Kinnell served in the US Navy and traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East. His first volume of poetry, What a Kingdom It Was, was published in 1960.
Kinnell became very involved in the U.S. civil rights movement upon his return, joining CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) as a field worker and participating in a number of marches and other civil actions.
Kinnell was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for Selected Poems (1980), a MacArthur Fellowship, a Rockefeller Grant, the 1974 Shelley Prize of the Poetry Society of America, and the 1975 Medal of Merit from National Institute of Arts and Letters. He served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007.
As a young man, Kinnell served in the US Navy and traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East. His first volume of poetry, What a Kingdom It Was, was published in 1960.
Kinnell became very involved in the U.S. civil rights movement upon his return, joining CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) as a field worker and participating in a number of marches and other civil actions.
Kinnell was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for Selected Poems (1980), a MacArthur Fellowship, a Rockefeller Grant, the 1974 Shelley Prize of the Poetry Society of America, and the 1975 Medal of Merit from National Institute of Arts and Letters. He served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
November 14, 2014
"The Bear" is my favorite poem in this volume by the recently departed Kinnell, whose work I am revisiting on this occasion, but there are other real gems in this collection, poems about nature, and about poetry: "The Poem," "The Last River," "The Porcupine, and as I am a teacher, I appreciated "The Correspondence School Instructor Says Goodbye to His Poetry Students".
October 11, 2020
Earthy and richly textured, almost overwhelming in the way that nature and the raw stuff of life can overwhelm if you choose to look closely enough, if you give yourself fully to the rugged strangeness that surrounds us. Body Rags is a book swimming with pungent scents, bizarre flights of imagination, the juxtaposition of urban retreat and rural renewal, and a lot more.
It's impossible to use feeble descriptive language to capture the depth of oddity and meaning in these pages, but as an example, there's a fairly famous poem called "The Bear" that closes the collection and is worth recounting. It starts out on stable ground: our poet-guide treks the wilderness, intent on tracking and trapping (with a sharpened wolf rib) the titular bear. In the process of pursuit, he nearly starves, ultimately proceeding to eat a bloody bear turd ("a turd sopped in blood"). Days later, he's "living by now on bear blood alone," and the pursuit continues until he finally spots the fallen bear, now a steaming carcass ripe for exploration. Naturally, our hero hacks "a ravine" in the bear's thigh, eats and drinks his fill, and climbs inside (Empire Strikes Back-style). After which... he is the bear, or the bear is him. He dreams of being tracked and killed in a way that ought to feel vaguely familiar by now. The poem, and collection, closes with this image:
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?
Good question.
It's impossible to use feeble descriptive language to capture the depth of oddity and meaning in these pages, but as an example, there's a fairly famous poem called "The Bear" that closes the collection and is worth recounting. It starts out on stable ground: our poet-guide treks the wilderness, intent on tracking and trapping (with a sharpened wolf rib) the titular bear. In the process of pursuit, he nearly starves, ultimately proceeding to eat a bloody bear turd ("a turd sopped in blood"). Days later, he's "living by now on bear blood alone," and the pursuit continues until he finally spots the fallen bear, now a steaming carcass ripe for exploration. Naturally, our hero hacks "a ravine" in the bear's thigh, eats and drinks his fill, and climbs inside (Empire Strikes Back-style). After which... he is the bear, or the bear is him. He dreams of being tracked and killed in a way that ought to feel vaguely familiar by now. The poem, and collection, closes with this image:
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?
Good question.
September 25, 2022
About half of this collection didn’t connect for me but boy when they’re good, they’re GOOD.
January 20, 2022
1
In the evening
haze darkening on the hills,
purple of the eternal,
a last bird crosses over,
‘flop flop,’ adoring
only the instant.
2
Nine years ago,
in a plane that rumbled all night
above the Atlantic,
I could see, lit up
by lightning bolts jumping out of it,
a thunderhead formed like the face
of my brother, looking down
on blue,
lightning-flashed moments of the Atlantic.
3
He used to tell me,
“What good is the day?
On some hill of despair
the bonfire
you kindle can light the great sky—
though it’s true, of course, to make it burn
you have to throw yourself in ...”
4
Wind tears itself hollow
in the eaves of these ruins, ghost-flute
of snowdrifts
that build out there in the dark:
upside-down ravines
into which night sweeps
our cast wings, our ink-spattered feathers.
5
I listen.
I hear nothing. Only
the cow, the cow of such
hollowness, mooing
down the bones.
6
Is that a
rooster? He
thrashes in the snow
for a grain. Finds
it. Rips
it into
flames. Flaps. Crows.
Flames
bursting out of his brow.
7
How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?
* * *
1
The old watch: their
thick eyes
puff and foreclose by the moon. The young, heads
trailed by the beginnings of necks,
shiver,
in the guarantee they shall be bodies.
In the frog pond
the vapor trail of a SAC bomber creeps,
I hear its drone, drifting, high up
in immaculate ozone.
2
And I hear,
coming over the hills, America singing,
her varied carols I hear:
crack of deputies' rifles practicing their aim on stray dogs at night,
sput of cattleprod,
TV going on about the smells of the human body,
curses of the soldier as he poisons, burns, grinds, and stabs
the rice of the world,
with open mouth, crying strong, hysterical curses.
3
And by paddies in Asia
bones
wearing a few shadows
walk down a dirt road, smashed
bloodsuckers on their heel, knowing
flesh thrown down in the sunshine
dogs shall eat
and flesh flung into the air
shall be seized by birds,
shoulder blades smooth, unmarked by old feather-holes,
hands rivered
by blue, erratic wanderings of the blood,
eyes crinkled shut at almost seeing
the drifting sun that gives us our lives.
* * *
1
In late winter
I sometimes glimpse bits of steam
coming up from
some fault in the old snow
and bend close and see it is lung-colored
and put down my nose
and know
the chilly, enduring odor of bear.
2
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.
And when it has vanished
I move out on the bear tracks,
roaming in circles
until I come to the first, tentative, dark
splash on the earth.
And I set out
running, following the splashes
of blood wandering over the world.
At the cut, gashed resting places
I stop and rest,
at the crawl-marks
where he lay out on his belly
to overpass some stretch of bauchy ice
I lie out
dragging myself forward with bear-knives in my fists.
3
On the third day I begin to starve,
at nightfall I bend down as I knew I would
at a turd sopped in blood,
and hesitate, and pick it up,
and thrust it in my mouth, and gnash it down,
and rise
and go on running.
4
On the seventh day,
living by now on bear blood alone,
I can see his upturned carcass far out ahead, a scraggled,
steamy hulk,
the heavy fur riffling in the wind.
I come up to him
and stare at the narrow-spaced, petty eyes,
the dismayed
face laid back on the shoulder, the nostrils
flared, catching
perhaps the first taint of me as he
died.
I hack
a ravine in his thigh, and eat and drink,
and tear him down his whole length
and open him and climb in
and close him up after me, against the wind,
and sleep.
5
And dream
of lumbering flatfooted
over the tundra,
stabbed twice from within,
splattering a trail behind me,
splattering it out no matter which way I lurch,
no matter which parabola of bear-transcendence,
which dance of solitude I attempt,
which gravity-clutched leap,
which trudge, which groan.
6
Until one day I totter and fall—
fall on this
stomach that has tried so hard to keep up,
to digest the blood as it leaked in,
to break up
and digest the bone itself: and now the breeze
blows over me, blows off
the hideous belches of ill-digested bear blood
and rotted stomach
and the ordinary, wretched odor of bear,
blows across
my sore, lolled tongue a song
or screech, until I think I must rise up
and dance. And I lie still.
7
I awaken I think. Marshlights
reappear, geese
come trailing again up the flyway.
In her ravine under old snow the dam-bear
lies, licking
lumps of smeared fur
and drizzly eyes into shapes
with her tongue. And one
hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me,
the next groaned out,
the next,
the next,
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?
In the evening
haze darkening on the hills,
purple of the eternal,
a last bird crosses over,
‘flop flop,’ adoring
only the instant.
2
Nine years ago,
in a plane that rumbled all night
above the Atlantic,
I could see, lit up
by lightning bolts jumping out of it,
a thunderhead formed like the face
of my brother, looking down
on blue,
lightning-flashed moments of the Atlantic.
3
He used to tell me,
“What good is the day?
On some hill of despair
the bonfire
you kindle can light the great sky—
though it’s true, of course, to make it burn
you have to throw yourself in ...”
4
Wind tears itself hollow
in the eaves of these ruins, ghost-flute
of snowdrifts
that build out there in the dark:
upside-down ravines
into which night sweeps
our cast wings, our ink-spattered feathers.
5
I listen.
I hear nothing. Only
the cow, the cow of such
hollowness, mooing
down the bones.
6
Is that a
rooster? He
thrashes in the snow
for a grain. Finds
it. Rips
it into
flames. Flaps. Crows.
Flames
bursting out of his brow.
7
How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?
- Another Night in the Ruins, pg.
* * *
1
The old watch: their
thick eyes
puff and foreclose by the moon. The young, heads
trailed by the beginnings of necks,
shiver,
in the guarantee they shall be bodies.
In the frog pond
the vapor trail of a SAC bomber creeps,
I hear its drone, drifting, high up
in immaculate ozone.
2
And I hear,
coming over the hills, America singing,
her varied carols I hear:
crack of deputies' rifles practicing their aim on stray dogs at night,
sput of cattleprod,
TV going on about the smells of the human body,
curses of the soldier as he poisons, burns, grinds, and stabs
the rice of the world,
with open mouth, crying strong, hysterical curses.
3
And by paddies in Asia
bones
wearing a few shadows
walk down a dirt road, smashed
bloodsuckers on their heel, knowing
flesh thrown down in the sunshine
dogs shall eat
and flesh flung into the air
shall be seized by birds,
shoulder blades smooth, unmarked by old feather-holes,
hands rivered
by blue, erratic wanderings of the blood,
eyes crinkled shut at almost seeing
the drifting sun that gives us our lives.
- Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond, pg.
* * *
1
In late winter
I sometimes glimpse bits of steam
coming up from
some fault in the old snow
and bend close and see it is lung-colored
and put down my nose
and know
the chilly, enduring odor of bear.
2
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.
And when it has vanished
I move out on the bear tracks,
roaming in circles
until I come to the first, tentative, dark
splash on the earth.
And I set out
running, following the splashes
of blood wandering over the world.
At the cut, gashed resting places
I stop and rest,
at the crawl-marks
where he lay out on his belly
to overpass some stretch of bauchy ice
I lie out
dragging myself forward with bear-knives in my fists.
3
On the third day I begin to starve,
at nightfall I bend down as I knew I would
at a turd sopped in blood,
and hesitate, and pick it up,
and thrust it in my mouth, and gnash it down,
and rise
and go on running.
4
On the seventh day,
living by now on bear blood alone,
I can see his upturned carcass far out ahead, a scraggled,
steamy hulk,
the heavy fur riffling in the wind.
I come up to him
and stare at the narrow-spaced, petty eyes,
the dismayed
face laid back on the shoulder, the nostrils
flared, catching
perhaps the first taint of me as he
died.
I hack
a ravine in his thigh, and eat and drink,
and tear him down his whole length
and open him and climb in
and close him up after me, against the wind,
and sleep.
5
And dream
of lumbering flatfooted
over the tundra,
stabbed twice from within,
splattering a trail behind me,
splattering it out no matter which way I lurch,
no matter which parabola of bear-transcendence,
which dance of solitude I attempt,
which gravity-clutched leap,
which trudge, which groan.
6
Until one day I totter and fall—
fall on this
stomach that has tried so hard to keep up,
to digest the blood as it leaked in,
to break up
and digest the bone itself: and now the breeze
blows over me, blows off
the hideous belches of ill-digested bear blood
and rotted stomach
and the ordinary, wretched odor of bear,
blows across
my sore, lolled tongue a song
or screech, until I think I must rise up
and dance. And I lie still.
7
I awaken I think. Marshlights
reappear, geese
come trailing again up the flyway.
In her ravine under old snow the dam-bear
lies, licking
lumps of smeared fur
and drizzly eyes into shapes
with her tongue. And one
hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me,
the next groaned out,
the next,
the next,
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?
- The Bear, pg.
May 4, 2013
In my opinion, this is Kinnell's best work. It also contains one of my favorite poems, The Bear.
I highly recommend it.
I highly recommend it.
September 9, 2016
I didn't love Body Rags as much as I loved The Book of Nightmares, which I think is more a matter of personal taste than poetic quality. Enjoyable, but I didn't finish it feeling gut-punched.
October 29, 2019
The poetry of Galway Kinnell is gritty, vibrant, and raw. This collection is no exception.
As one of his earlier works, Body Rags exemplifies some of the themes which stretch throughout his work--the beauty of nature and disgust with humanity. "Nobody would write poetry if the world seemed perfect," and to Kinnell, the world, at least the human world, is horribly imperfect. Much of this collection juxtaposes the terrifying mortality of man with the immortal splendor of creation.
If you are looking for a poetry collection that makes you stand in awe of the world while being a little nauseous about the human condition, then this is the one for you.
As one of his earlier works, Body Rags exemplifies some of the themes which stretch throughout his work--the beauty of nature and disgust with humanity. "Nobody would write poetry if the world seemed perfect," and to Kinnell, the world, at least the human world, is horribly imperfect. Much of this collection juxtaposes the terrifying mortality of man with the immortal splendor of creation.
If you are looking for a poetry collection that makes you stand in awe of the world while being a little nauseous about the human condition, then this is the one for you.
September 9, 2024
i didn't love this as much as "the book of nightmares," though that's honestly more a matter of personal taste than the quality of the poetry. enjoyable enough, but this didn't take me out back and sucker punch me like "the book of nightmares."
September 20, 2022
"We wander slowly homeward, lost / in the history of every step."
April 29, 2025
Poems of the 1960s; some great moments and images. However (and I don't mean to be cruel), the more I read Kinnell, the less I am enraptured by him.
April 11, 2020
I.
I was first introduced to Galway Kinnell in graduate school nearly 30 years ago, and for some time, he was my favorite poet. I recall coming home for spring break and I was asked to say a blessing before dinner. I recited Kinnell's "Prayer":
My stepmother's wide-eyed gaze was my answer to that prayer.
II.
I had not read Body Rags for some time; it has been collecting dust along with all of the rest of my Kinnell collection. I found my way back to Body Rags while reading Delia Owens' Where the Crawdads Sing . On page 116, Owens cites snippets of "this one by Galway Kinnell"--a poem that is otherwise untitled.
I recognized this poem as part of "The Correspondence School Instructor Says Goodbye To His Poetry Students," and I could not recall the volume from which it came. I ultimately found it in Body Rags. (As an aside, this snippet was in a chapter in Crawdads titled "Crossing the Threshold: 1960." That date seemed early to me for this poem; I confirmed that Body Rags was first published in 1965. But I digress.)
So I dusted off the cover and began to read, again. I'd always liked "Instructor" for both its humor and commentary on the poet's work and craftsmanship. Ironically, it is this same poem that clarifies my own apostatizing from Kinnell, the poet laureate, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award Winner. From the second stanza:
III.
"The Porcupine" has long been one of my favorite Kinnell poems. I repeat its first stanza here:
The language ("bast", "phloem", "catkins", "larch") is as unique as the title, and flows with mellifluous "l"s ("swollen", "phloem", "ballooned", "willow flowers", "larch") whose playfulness with alliterative bouncy "b"s ("herbs", "crabapples", "bast", "ballooned", "bounces") creates an image of a porcupine waddling along. No doubt it is "poetic" language. But is it poetry? How is this stanza different from Kinnell's own "chopped prose" reassembled below?
IV.
Poetry requires structure and meter. Free verse is art; it can be beautiful language; but it is not poetry. It is, as Kinnell himself allows, "chopped prose". On that basis, Body Rags is a strong collection of chopped prose.
I was first introduced to Galway Kinnell in graduate school nearly 30 years ago, and for some time, he was my favorite poet. I recall coming home for spring break and I was asked to say a blessing before dinner. I recited Kinnell's "Prayer":
Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.
My stepmother's wide-eyed gaze was my answer to that prayer.
II.
I had not read Body Rags for some time; it has been collecting dust along with all of the rest of my Kinnell collection. I found my way back to Body Rags while reading Delia Owens' Where the Crawdads Sing . On page 116, Owens cites snippets of "this one by Galway Kinnell"--a poem that is otherwise untitled.
I did care...
I did say everything I thought
In het mildest words I knew. And now,...
I have to say I am relieved I tis over:
At the end I could feel only pity
For that urge toward more life.
...Goodbye.
I recognized this poem as part of "The Correspondence School Instructor Says Goodbye To His Poetry Students," and I could not recall the volume from which it came. I ultimately found it in Body Rags. (As an aside, this snippet was in a chapter in Crawdads titled "Crossing the Threshold: 1960." That date seemed early to me for this poem; I confirmed that Body Rags was first published in 1965. But I digress.)
So I dusted off the cover and began to read, again. I'd always liked "Instructor" for both its humor and commentary on the poet's work and craftsmanship. Ironically, it is this same poem that clarifies my own apostatizing from Kinnell, the poet laureate, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award Winner. From the second stanza:
...And now,
in this poem, or chopped prose, not any better,
I realize, than those troubled lines...
III.
"The Porcupine" has long been one of my favorite Kinnell poems. I repeat its first stanza here:
Fatted
on herbs, swollen on crabapples,
puffed up on bast and phloem, ballooned
on willow flowers, poplar catkins, first
leafs of aspen and larch,
the porcupine
drags and bounces his last meal through ice,
mud, roses and goldenrod, not the stubbly high fields.
The language ("bast", "phloem", "catkins", "larch") is as unique as the title, and flows with mellifluous "l"s ("swollen", "phloem", "ballooned", "willow flowers", "larch") whose playfulness with alliterative bouncy "b"s ("herbs", "crabapples", "bast", "ballooned", "bounces") creates an image of a porcupine waddling along. No doubt it is "poetic" language. But is it poetry? How is this stanza different from Kinnell's own "chopped prose" reassembled below?
Fatted on herbs, swollen on crabapples, puffed up on bast and phloem, ballooned on willow flowers, poplar catkins, first leafs of aspen and larch, the porcupine drags and bounces his last meal through ice, mud, roses and goldenrod, not the stubbly high fields.
IV.
Poetry requires structure and meter. Free verse is art; it can be beautiful language; but it is not poetry. It is, as Kinnell himself allows, "chopped prose". On that basis, Body Rags is a strong collection of chopped prose.
May 28, 2014
Every once in a while, for years, one of my poetry pals would recommend this book to me, so when I saw it in a "Buck-A-Book" bin, I picked it up. It was light. It was thin. It was unmarked, perhaps having stood on someone's shelf for thirty-five years untouched and unread. When I finished it, I was disappointed. I have read a lot of poetry in my life, enough to build a bunker out of all the volumes, but this one is just not of the high quality I expected. For one thing, Galway seems too much enamored of the stereotypes of what a poet is and does, tossing around French (which he may actually speak, but what about his readers?) and more new vocabulary than I've seen in any book ever, even one by Dean Koontz (who loves to toss in a dictionary-prompting word every once in a while himself). I think some of them were even English words. I began to think that I might see him in a black turtleneck and a beret in a coffee shop puffing away on a clove cigarette. Some of the poems were about something, but it was hard to tell what, and others were not about anything, and it was hard to tell why Galway wrote them down or why I was reading them. Unfortunately, I came across my favorite phrase early in the book: "the cow of nothingness, mooing down the bones." Having been knocked sprawling by the sheer bulk of a cow myself, I found the phrase amusing, and I found it even funnier when I heard an echo of Natalie Goldberg's title Writing Down the Bones. It's a charming bit of language, but don't ask me or Galway (or Natalie, for that matter) what it means. None of us has the least idea. Skip this one, and look for J.D. Whitney, Robinson Jeffers, Naomi Shihab Nye, or Lew Welch.
November 22, 2011
Last year I came up with the idea of giving my students a list of 100 books of contemporary poetry they should have read before going to grad school. This book (as well as Kinnell's The Book of Nightmares) is in that list: masterful in its use of tone, shocking in its use of image, compelling in its use of fragmented narrative. Kinnell takes on nature and history, writes short and long. This is a book in which a future master finds his voice.
June 17, 2007
My ma and I used to take turns memorizing these poems.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews