Galway Kinnell and Artist Colony Application Packet


I’ve been reading an old favorite poet of mine: Galway Kinnell. I’ve loved some of his poems since I was an undergraduate student. Among my favorite poems by Kinnell are: “Another Night in the Ruins,” “Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond,” and “The Bear.” Kinnell is a poet who is keenly aware of the transience of life. His best poems are often elemental in a Deep Image sense and have incantatory rhythms. There was a time when Kinnell was very influential on me, but my work is quite different now. Reading Kinnell again is like listening to a favorite song that you associate with a particular period in your life. Intuitively, I think I am returning to Kinnell to relearn something from him or use his work to juxtapose it against my current work to clarify differences.

I need to make some decisions this week about which poems to include in my writing sample for the artist colony that I want to attend in 2006. I need six to ten poems in the writing sample. I want to include my six-page poem “The Necessity of Color” for sure, so I need to balance out the sample with a mix of shorter poems. My work tends to be dark, so it would behoove me to include some lighter work. At least two of the poems should be poems that I have published. Overall, I want to include my strongest, most finished work.