Visiting poet: Language to us is like water for fish

The latest writer in Gonzaga's Visiting Writer's Series, Richard Kenney, sees poetry as expanding beyond the common consideration that it is simply a form of creative entertainment.

 "The instruments of thought are linguistic, in every domain, including science, and especially including public policy and cultural affairs," he said. "I'd say poets are lucky ones who get to spend their lives at the sharpest edge of these considerations."

Kenney is currently a professor at the University of Washington in both the undergraduate program and the Masters of Fine Arts program. He has published four books of poetry, the first of which, "The Evolution of the Flightless Bird," won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, one of the oldest literary awards in the U.S.  He was also awarded the MacArthur Fellowship in 1987, or the so-called "genius award," which is given each year to U.S. citizens who are "talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction," according to the MacArthur Foundation Web site.

Kenney's work explores complex ideas, often with a larger, unifying purpose.  His second book, "Orrery," delves into scientific topics like the cosmos and physics, as well as memory and time. 

"Some of his poems do the very best that can be done with complex ideas as they work out in our lived experience, and they are gorgeous, exquisitely detailed and extravagantly smart," Dan Butterworth, chair of the English Department, said.

He goes on to describe the way in which "Orrery" works to connect the greater ideas of the poems with human experience.

"Orrery takes the image of a scale-model of the cosmos, applies it to the apples on a tree, then the trees in an orchard, and then to the poems in a book about what it is to be human in a world of apples and trees and hillsides and planets," he said.

Kenney sees poetry and language as being inherent parts of the human experience.
"What water is to fish, language is to us. We swim in it," he said. "Almost certainly, every person you can see from where you're sitting — every human you can think of right now — is doing what he or she is doing at this very moment because of a word-string. The forms of poetry are not decorative trappings of a quaint old hobby, though they may be that, too, the forms of poetry are the forms of thought."

Butterworth sees Kenney's work as important to contemporary literature as well as an understanding of contemporary culture.

 "What first drew me to Kenney's poetry was the fact that he wrote very long poems with sonnets for stanzas," Butterworth said. "He also has an incredibly rich, wide-ranging, and comprehensive vocabulary that easily incorporates the languages of the science, arts, and many specialized fields of human endeavor. Reading Kenney we feel alive to the beauty and complexity of the world and human culture."

Kenney will be reading Monday, March 1, at 7:30 p.m. in the Cataldo Globe Room.