SOURCE: An interview with Galway Kinnell, in The Ohio Review, Vol. XIV, No. 1, Fall 1972, pp. 25-38.

In the following interview conducted after the publication of The Book of Nightmares, Kinnell discusses this long poem, as well as the influence of Yeats and Rilke on his work in general

[OHIO REVIEW]: Public poetry readings enjoy an unusual popularity nowadays, and you seem to present your poetry very successfully at your own readings, judging from audience response. Also you seem to be giving a good many readings of late. I wonder, do you think that for your poetry, as you conceive it, the printed page is essential?

[KINNELL]: Yes, it is essential. We forget. But the printed page remembers. Gutenberg deprived us of verbal memory, but it's all right, perhaps even better, to have little memory but to have many books, since they can remember so much more than we...