SOURCE: "Poetry Roundup: Imperfect Thirst" in The Castle of Indolence, New York: Picado, 1995, pp. 208-21.

In the following excerpt, Disch calls Imperfect Thirst Kinnell's "comfy" poetry.

Readers with only a casual, or dutiful, interest in poetry seek out poets they can be comfortable with. Shades of the schoolhouse begin to close round such readers when poems require too much deciphering. So, according to their temperaments, they will gravitate to poets of amiability or moral earnestness, whose work they will reward with a knowing chuckle or an approving nod.

Among contemporary poets few can rival Galway Kinnell for sheer amiability. The press kit accompanying his twelfth collection, Imperfect Thirst, declares, "One of the foremost performers on the poetry circuit, Kinnell inevitably draws enormous crowds with his readings." He is a Pulitzer winner, a MacArthur fellow, and the poet laureate of Vermont, where Hugh Schultz, who owns the Wheelock Village...