Galway Kinnell’s Air Conditioning
Claire Millikin on Galway Kinnell
That summer three decades ago was record-breaking heat (a theme we’ve all gotten sadly accustomed to by now) and, as I didn’t have A/C in my one-room rental, I’d stay out as late as possible in any air-conditioned venue with anyone who would hang out with me. So it was partly from the blur of sleep deprivation and partly from fascination but mostly because of air conditioning that I agreed to water his plants and handle his mail when poet Galway Kinnell left the city for his summer home in rural Vermont. When he showed me his apartment, the air conditioning felt like being blessed. Galway was my poetry professor at NYU, a school which had given me funding (paltry, but I didn’t realize that I was so thankful for it) to study poetry. I’d only just decided to “become” a poet and had written the twelve (or was it ten?) poems for their application with a self-confidence I’ve never had again.
Kinnell at his desk
In the graduate workshops I was miserably shy, could barely speak. Galway said, “You are our program’s Emily Dickinson; bring your poems to me during my office hours.” I hadn’t read her work (I have read it now), but I appreciated his avuncular offer. We’d silently sit in his office with stacks of my poems and Galway would assess them—giving me smiley faces or faces with x’s in the eyes like old fashioned comic strips for poems that succeeded and poems that failed. He said, “You’re a poet who is either brilliant or failed, depending on the poem, so write unstoppingly and throw most of it away.” I have thrown most of it away. He also said, “Don’t try to publish, you’re pure and too fragile.” After a lengthy detour into academia (a PhD, teaching, and scholarship), my first poetry book came out ten years ago, the year that Galway passed away, so it seems that, lacking real purity, I eventually wanted to be published like anyone else.
Galway was notorious for sleeping with his female students, but he never tried that with me. He treated me as a child, though I wasn’t a child. He was kind. In those days, I had a habit of cutting my face with razors and so I often looked worse for wear (I’d coat the wounds with Neosporin against infection and now only one, very faint, scar persists). When he said he needed someone to keep an eye on his apartment, and when I realized that apartment was air-conditioned, it was an obvious yes. He left for Vermont. The next day, I walked to the apartment around noon, gathered the mail, watered the plants, lay down on the sofa and, without intending to do so, fell asleep for the day.
That July and August, for as long as he was away, I kept up the pattern—awake most of the night in the unsleepable heat, get coffee in the morning, go to Galway’s apartment, bring in the mail, water the plants, lie down on the sofa in the gorgeous air conditioning and sleep. I’d like to say I dreamed poetry from inhabiting his apartment, through a kind of osmosis. If you haven’t read his work, you should. The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World; The Bear; Another Night in the Ruins. His are extraordinary poems. I remember seeing sheathes of poem drafts scattered all over his apartment, worked and reworked with edits, typed on a typewriter, never a computer. He said, “A good poem should be edited at least fifty or a hundred times.” Probably true. I also remember seeing—on his desk hand-written in his writing and not framed but set apart for continued visibility—“I think I shall be among the English poets after my death—John Keats.” I was then the age of Keats when he died. What I learned from Galway’s air conditioning was what everyone learns from air conditioning during heat waves. We are all animals seeking shade when the sun is too much for us. I learned that purity prefers a comfortable room in an indifferent city; I learned waking up to plants living and green, letters stacked ready to be opened by someone else, walking into the city dusk with the idea of Vermont’s green mountains hovering. I learned that feeling safe, no matter how unlikely, could be real and that this safety was somehow, mysteriously, mystically entwined with writing poems. And will we—Galway and even I, the troubled charge—be and stay among the English language poets? I don’t think that was the point of the quote on his desk. I think the point was, this matters, this writing of poems. Give it everything.
Claire Millikin is the author of ten collections of poetry, including Magicicada (Unicorn Press 2024), winner of the Foreword Indie Award for Poetry and an Independent Press Award Distinguished Favorite. Millikin is the recipient of a 2021 Maine Literary Award for Enough! Poems of Protest and Resistance (Littoral Books, 2020). Claire teaches for the University of Maine system.
