This week’s NYT T Magazine has a surprisingly interesting How to Be Cultured section that has personal picks in various categories like film, art, food, and so on. In the literature pages is The Poems You Should Know by Heart; the first, “Prayer” by Galway Kinnell, chosen by Major Jackson, was new to me, and I liked it enough to bring it here:
Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.
Jackson says:
I typically say Kinnell’s words at the start of my day, as I’m pedaling a traffic-laden path to my office. The poem encourages a calm acceptance of the day’s events but also wants us to embrace the misapprehension and oblivion of life, to avoid probing too deeply for answers to inscrutable questions. I admire what Kinnell does with only 14 words; the repetition of ‘what,’ ‘that’ and ‘is’ would seem to limit the poem’s sentiment but, paradoxically, the poem opens widely to contain all manner of human experience. The three ‘is’es in the middle line give it a symmetry that makes its message feel part of a natural order, and even more convincing. Thanks to the skillful punctuation, pauses and staccato rhythm, a tonal quality of interior reflection emerges. Much like a haiku, it continues after its last words, lingering like the last note played on a piano that slowly fades.
The three successive ises are indeed impressive.
Just adding that for me, it’s the confining in such a tight space and format of all three repetitions, and the particular words repeated – whatever, is and that – that combine to give it the sense of expressing something inchoate, something that precedes meaning because it’s exposing the grammar of living.
I don’t get the meaning of the last two words.
I read “But that” = “Only that”.
[I] only [want] that. But [I do want] that.
I saw this before I saw the OP and thought this must be an explanation of a Russian original…
(I agree, FWTW.)
Только этого. Но этого.
He wants nothing, but nothing, else.
Video of the poet reading his poem.
I still think that the way he reads it, “Only, that. But, that.” sounds like “but” is used as the archaic synonym of “only”.
Another possibility is that “But that” is the answer to any potential objection.
Anyway, I too like it a lot, so thank you, Hat!
I am with the “no more” “no less” contingent.
Archived, for what it’s worth.