Do You Have to Be Crazy?
I’ve been a longtime fan of poet Galway Kinnell. In addition to finding his poems inspiring, I also treasure the book Walking Down the Stairs (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1978), a collection of interviews with Kinnell that he edited himself.
Inviting a writer to edit his own interviews is like asking a fox to baby-sit the henhouse. It can lead, at the very least, to all kinds of evasiveness and tergiversation (hey, haven’t used that word in a while), as Kinnell freely admits in his preface.
One of these interviews features this exchange between Margaret Edwards and Kinnell:
Edwards: Do you think a person has to be crazy or unbalanced in some way to be a writer?
Kinnell: I guess there has to be something wrong with you. If everything were satisfactory, you might sing, as do the dolphins, but you certainly wouldn’t sweat out long novels or involved poems. But crazy? No, not really. The people who are called crazy because they see through existence, those for whom there are no verities in this world, are surely the most gifted of us all, as far as poetry goes, but they are usually unable to write or perfect a poem. Rilke’s very elevated sensibility was grounded in the capacity for uninspired, plodding, hard work. Hard work concedes the reality of this world. Discipline, determination, and ambition—illusions for the people I’m calling crazy—are probably requirements for someone who wants to be a writer.
Then there’s what you might call “real” craziness. As readers, we can’t surrender to a work we feel has been written by someone controlled by paranoid suspicions and sick fantasies. The poems we love are those in which we believe we find the truest and most encompassing understandings. The poets we admire are the ones whose responses to experience we feel are reliable. In this sense the best poets are the sanest.
As one would expect, Kinnell takes the high road in his answer. Personally, I think that paranoid suspicions and sick fantasies can lead to some pretty compelling writing–but that is an exception, not a rule. And I agree that at least part of the writing life is grounded in “uninspired, plodding, hard work.” He forgot to add “for very little reward.” It is that dedication to work for work’s sake that separates the true writer from the rest of the crowd, and perhaps more than anything else may give him the reputation for being “crazy.”
A Report from Winter is a death-in-the-family story, a love story, and a meditation on the meaning of “winter”—as a season and as a metaphor for family relationships.