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The Correspondence-School Instructor Says Goodbye to His Poetry Students

By Galway Kinnell b. 1927 Galway Kinnell

Goodbye, lady in Bangor, who sent me

snapshots of yourself, after definitely hinting

you were beautiful; goodbye,

Miami Beach urologist, who enclosed plain

brown envelopes for the return of your very

“Clinical Sonnets”; goodbye, manufacturer

of brassieres on the Coast, whose eclogues

give the fullest treatment in literature yet

to the sagging breast motif; goodbye, you in San Quentin,

who wrote, “Being German my hero is Hitler,”

instead of “Sincerely yours,” at the end of long,

neat-scripted letters extolling the Pre-Raphaelites:

I swear to you, it was just my way

of cheering myself up, as I licked

the stamped, self-addressed envelopes,

the game I had of trying to guess

which one of you, this time,

had poisoned his glue. I did care.

I did read each poem entire.

I did say everything I thought

in the mildest words I knew. And now,

in this poem, or chopped prose, no better,

I realize, than those troubled lines

I kept sending back to you,

I have to say I am relieved it is over:

at the end I could feel only pity

for that urge toward more life

your poems kept smothering in words, the smell

of which, days later, tingled in your nostrils

as new, God-given impulses

to write.

Goodbye,

you who are, for me, the postmarks again

of imaginary towns—Xenia, Burnt Cabins, Hornell—

their solitude given away in poems, only their loneliness kept.

Galway Kinnell, “The Correspondence School Instructor Says Goodbye to His Poetry Students” from Three Books. Copyright © 2002 by Galway Kinnell. Reprinted with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved, www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.

Source: Poetry (July 1966).

Biography

Galway Kinnell is an award-winning poet best known for poetry that connects the experiences of daily life to much larger poetic, spiritual, and cultural forces. Often focusing on the claims of nature and society on the individual, Kinnell’s poems explore psychological states in precise and sonorous free verse. The New York Times Book Review essayist Morris Dickstein called Kinnell "one of the true master poets of his . . .

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