Blackberry Eating

“Blackberry Eating” is a poem by American poet Galway Kinnell, first published in his 1980 collection Mortal Acts, Mortal Words. It is a lyric poem structured as an unrhymed sonnet with heavy repetition and alliteration.

The poem focuses on Kinnell’s connection with nature in his native New England. It is an autumnal poem written as a meditation at the midpoint of his life. The poem applies the metaphor of eating blackberries to the formation of language and the particular words chosen by the poet when writing a poem. It considers the sounds created when reading a poem aloud and expertly applies poetic devices like alliteration to capture the feel and sound of eating blackberries.

Mortal Acts, Mortal Words came out a few years before Kinnell’s Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the National Book Award in 1983.

Poet Biography

Galway Kinnell was born in 1927 in Providence, Rhode Island. His parents were immigrants to the United States: his father from Scotland and his mother from Ireland. He grew up in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Kinnell was a self-described reclusive, introverted, and silent child and preferred the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson.

He attended Princeton University, where he roomed with future US poet laureate W. S. Merwin. While still in college, he enlisted in the Navy and served in WWII. After graduation from Princeton in 1948, he completed an MA at the University of Rochester in 1949.

Kinnell then left the United States and traveled through Europe and the Middle East for several years. He won Fulbright Scholarships to work on translations in France (1955) and teach in Iran (1959). His time in Iran inspired his only novel, Black Light (1966).

Upon his return to the US in the early 1960s, Kinnell became deeply involved in the political movements of the time. He joined CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) and actively registered African American voters in Louisiana. Kinnell also openly protested the Vietnam War as an activist and poet. His collection Body Rags (1968) and the book-length poem The Book of Nightmares (1971) draw deeply on these experiences.

In 1965, he married his first wife, Spanish translator Inés Delgado de Torres. They have two children together: Fergus and Maud, who feature in Kinnell’s poetry (for example, “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps”). Kinnell and Inés divorced in 1985.

Mortal Acts, Mortal Words appeared at a juncture in Galway Kinnell’s career. The poems in this collection focused more on introspective, personal topics than in his previous books. This departure from the more grandiose poetic ideals had mixed critical success. However, the poems in this volume are part of his Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning Selected Poems (1983).

In the latter half of his career, Kinnell focused on editing collections of acclaimed 19th-century poets and translations. He edited The Essential Whitman (1987) and worked with Hannah Liebmann on The Essential Rilke (1999).

Kinnell served as Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at NYU for many years and was a visiting poetry professor at colleges throughout the United States. From 2001 to 2007, he served as the Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Other accolades include a MacArthur Fellowship and National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship.

Kinnell published his final collection of poetry, Strong Is Your Hold, in 2006. He retired in 2011 to live quietly with his second wife, Barbara Kammar Bristol, at their house in Vermont. In late 2014, he passed away from leukemia.

Poem Text

Kinnell, Galway. “Blackberry Eating.” 1980. Mortal Acts, Mortal Words.

Summary

The poem is set in early autumn in the United States. Blackberries are still on the bramble patch in late September and the speaker goes out in the morning to eat them for breakfast. The speaker gathers the frosted berries from the branch directly into his mouth. However, he must work around the thorns to eat the berries.

The poem implies that speaker has done this before and has become expert at collecting the berries without getting pricked by the thorns, as the berries fall into his mouth “almost unbidden” (Line 8) or without much conscious effort.

Like the blackberries, the speaker’s words drop freely, and blackberry-eating becomes a metaphor for creating poetry. As the blackberries drop into his mouth, words flow from the speaker’s mouth and onto the page. The words that the speaker chooses to describe the act of eating and of creating poems are short, but highly alliterative and tongue-twisting. By choosing these words, the speaker invites the reader to both hear the sound of blackberry-eating and envision the poetic description of the blackberries that the words evoke.