Tag Archives: Galway Kinnell

Blackberry Eating

It’s blackberry season — my favorite variety of berry by far. And this is one of my favorite poems of all time. I think I first heard Galway Kinnell recite it on a PBS broadcast from the Dodge Poetry Festival when I was middle school. I love the imagery, of course, but I also love how the words Kinnell chooses evoke the mouthfeel of eating a big, fat, plump blackberry. Enjoy!

BLACKBERRY EATING
Galway Kinnell

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths and squinched,
many-lettered, on-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.

Alphabet Soup!

Autumn Giles of Autumn Makes & Does has started a new podcast called Alphabet Soup, a podcast about food and words. Autumn graciously asked to interview me for the third episode, and it was so much fun! We covered a lot of ground: Salt Salon, short stories, J.D. Salinger, neuroscience, Proust, blackberries, tea parties, etc, etc.

I really enjoyed our chat. Listening to the episode just now, I realized that I haven’t actually heard the poem Blackberry Eating read in a really long time (not counting the times I read it aloud). It’s a delightful-sounding poem.

Autumn writes a great summary of the episode here.

You can listen to the interview here: Alphabet Soup Podcast — OR  you can just subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. In fact, you should do just that.

a podcast about food & words

a podcast about food & words