More Berries: Galway Kinnell and Seamus Heaney

Here is Galway Kinnell's "Blackberry Eating," which I offer as a comparison to Heaney's "Blackberry-Picking" last time:
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/blackberry-eating/

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/blackberry-picking-3/

Today I'm going to be wild as a berry and declare that Kinnell's poem engages me more than Heaney's, though I like both. I'm leery of competition in poetry and the other arts, but it's just a reality that we see most things in comparative terms, which is to say competitive terms. The awards that Heaney received are the same awards that other good poets failed to receive, though they might be just as deserving. How many times have I heard: Who is your favorite poet? What is your favorite poem? Whom shall we put in the canon today? If the poetry gods and Main Street alike get to rank poems and poets, why can't I?

The main strength of Kinnell's poem is the central comparison of blackberries to words--sumptuous, wild words, the juicy words of poetry, to be rolled around in the mouth, savored. By implication, there's a similar process in the mind, heart, soul. I think the berry-as-words metaphor is a viable comparison and adds a dimension, a figure, and a surprise that are a bit richer than Heaney's offering, which is musical and delicious, but not very . . . daring or dangerous. Intellectually, the boy's tears about the unfairness of mortality might amount to the only idea in the poem.

Daring? Dangerous?

Reaching for Berries?

After a first line that’s about as pleasantly plain as a line can be, Kinnell loads four adjectives onto the blackberry wheelbarrow, even though he surely knows we're supposed to limit ourselves to one or none. He scoffs at such laws. He's an outlaw. He'll do what it takes, legal or not. 

Moreover, one of those modifiers is a repetition of the “black” in “blackberries.”  This is exacerbated or enriched, depending on your point of view, by Kinnell’s indulging in the word “blackberry” three times in the first six lines. What an abundance! What a saturation! It may seem simplistic, but what better way to make us absorb the power of the berry than repeating the word, with its rich, slow b sounds.

If we’re to love the blackberry, why add that it’s a “prickly . . . penalty” and part of a “black art”?  Besides, how is it a black art? Probably because it brings sensual pleasure, and we know what religions think of sensuality. These berries are so brazen, such hussies, that they “fall almost unbidden to my tongue.” These word-berries have a will of their own, and like some words, they feel “peculiar,” or special, calling attention to their own flavor and uniqueness. Some words are something like a pucker or a squeeze:  “strengths or squinched.” Berry-words may be simple, but they are thick: “one-syllabled lumps,” which are to be squinched open so they will “splurge well.” When does the sensual pleasure of biting into a berry start to become sexual in connotation?

Heaney’s poem finds plenty of physical beauty and pleasure in the berries, but aside from his rat, I don’t find anything as intriguing as Kinnell's “black art” that bumps up against the libidinous. 

Too Many Berries

Like so many opinions, this might amount to personal preference. We can’t usually measure what’s good and bad in poetry as if it were a math quiz. This time, for me, Kinnell wins the Irish berry war. But notice that both poets rely on rich imagery and the sounds of words to capture the sensuous beauty of the berry. Heaney's "big dark blobs" stand beside Kinnell's "one-syllabled lumps" that "splurge." Who's to say one is better than the other? Also, we could argue that Heaney’s emphasis on rat-faced mortality has more philosophical heft and danger than Kinnell’s conceit of berry words that can squinch. 

So, reader opinions are especially welcome on this issue. Is one poem's shotgun filled with more buckshot and chocolate than the other? Why?

By the way, I find blackberry flavor . . .  okay. But all this ecstasy about the fruit? And aren't those seeds annoying? So what is it with the Irish and their blackberries?



http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/blackberry-eating/

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/blackberry-picking-3/

Seamus Heaney, "Blackberry-Picking": the Language of Sensuous, Mortal Beauty

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/blackberry-picking-3/

Here’s a response to the request for a poem from Seamus Heaney, who died August 30, 2013 and won the 1995 Nobel Prize, among many achievements. I haven't read much Heaney, but I’ve seen “Blackberry-Picking” before, so maybe it’s one of Heaney’s better-known works.

Sorry, no blackberries today

My first thought is that the poem is of a kind with Hopkins in its extravagant language and play with sounds. It also reminds me of Frost as it draws on homey, agrarian material. In both the linguistic richness and the emphasis on nature, I also hear echoes of Dylan Thomas. Of course, I don’t mean that Heaney is a plagiarist, but it’s interesting to consider how each of those poets was similar to and different from the other three. Jean Toomer's rich, early 20th Century, Georgia poems in Cane might also fit into the discussion. 

Cedar Waxwing, Berry Lover

The main strength of “Blackberry-Picking” is the way its language sometimes grows as saturated as the berries, especially in the sounds of words. The following ought to sate anyone’s need for words made thick and juicy by back vowels and hard consonants:

                                     glossy purple clot
       Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

      Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it

                          on top big dark blobs burned
      Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
      With thorn pricks, our palms sticky

       A rat-grey fungus, glutting . . . 

Go ahead and try to hurry through “on top big dark blobs burned.” Each syllable is a word, and each syllable is stressed. The three p  sounds, along with b three times (bilabial monosyllables if you really care), the short o three times, and the guttural g and k simply cannot be rushed. If we try, we’ll gag. Heaney demands that we wallow in the juice of the berries, and he follows that with the shocking change in “a plate of eyes.” I hear fish eyes there, but whatever eyes those are, they undercut the sumptuous sounds that led up to them. Appetite and the fullness of physical beauty have a discomfiting flip side; the berries look back at us as we're about to gorge on them. 

Cooper's Hawk--Waxwing Eater?

Several times here I’ve pushed for the notion that, if a piece of writing is calling itself a poem, it should offer gifts along the way—images and sounds, pictures, music and ideas, that startle us out of laziness or complacency. These of course might be pungent or murderous as well as sensuous or gorgeous; but they are not indifferent, casual, generic. The poet has been moved into writing about something, and he should want his readers startled into a similar new awareness.

I’m not sure a boy’s tears about the “unfair” rotting of sensuous blackberries delivers a mind-altering shock, but it might. It’s an introduction to the death of mortal beauty.  I suspect I’ll never see that fruit again without thinking of this poem with its clot, knot, summer’s blood, dark blob, plate of eyes, and the killing fungus that’s not some namby-pamby, boring, non-comittal off-white, mushroom entity; no, it's an aggressive, hideous, “rat-grey” thing, eating up the beauty of what an Irish child beheld and loved.

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/blackberry-picking-3/