SOURCE: An interview with Galway Kinnell, in The American Poetry Review, Vol. 5, No. 4, January 1976, pp. 6-7.

In the following interview, Kinnell discusses The Book of Nightmares as well as the earlier What A Kingdom It Was.

[INTERVIEWER]: "First Song" is the first poem in your first book, What a Kingdom It Was. It elicits an obvious first question. What kinds of impulses originally necessitated your writing poetry and under what kinds of circumstances did you start writing?

[KINNELL]: I remember wanting to write poetry long long before I had even attempted to write a poem. I suppose from the age of twelve on I knew that was all I wanted to do. It was a kind of funny situation, because I didn't have any idea if I could do it at all. It wasn't until I was around eighteen that I began to write what you might call...