17 pages • 34 minutes read
Galway KinnellBlackberry Eating
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1980A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Creative Process of Making a Poem
Poetry is an artform that many people enjoy reading or hearing. “Blackberry Eating” is a primer for how words form through association and also how the poet/speaker speaks those words out loud and then places them on the page. Kinnell applies a ritual he performs at a specific time of year to his poetic process. Because the poet was at a mid-point in his life and in his career when he wrote “Blackberry Eating,” his metaphor for writing is placid. In earlier works, like “The Porcupine” and “The Bear,” the speaker must struggle with the animal side of human nature to compose his poetry. “Blackberry Eating” is a poem written by someone more at ease with his poetic process. Instead of confronting a wild animal like a bear or a porcupine for sustenance, the speaker easily finds nourishment foraging blackberries. As he forages for blackberries, they “fall almost unbidden to my tongue” (Line 8) and require little effort to eat.
By eating these blackberries, the speaker gathers words to describe the feeling of finding the right word, processing it in his mind and in his mouth, then forming these words into a poem. In doing so, the speaker invites the reader into his creative process: testing the strengths of each verb, squinching words together to create new meaning, squeezing multiple meanings out of each noun, and splurging on adjectives. He also applies alliterative sounds to mimic the experience of eating blackberries. This poem must be read aloud to get the full experience; it is a prime example of how a poetic image can come to life through sound and movement. “Blackberry Eating” completes the poetic process on the page as a loose sonnet: multiple parts contained in one solid whole stanza, like the composition of a single blackberry.
Connection of the Human to Nature
“Blackberry Eating” can be read as an ecocritical text. Kinnell’s connection to nature, however, is not sacred or privileged. He encounters the natural world around him on equal footing; he does not try to tame or take too much from the earth. The speaker simply appreciates the ritual of foraging for his breakfast instead of buying the food from a shop. By foraging, the speaker finds himself “among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries” (Line 2) and encounters them where they grow on the briar. The act of eating connects him with other non-human animals who also eat wild blackberries and grow fat on them for winter.
Moreover, the thorns on the blackberry plant are not a penalty to the plant itself. This plant grows the thick thorns to protect its fruit; only careful, skilled animals can pry the fruit from its stalks without a scratch. The plant “earns” (Line 4) a penalty against animals in the game of survival; the blackberry seeds are eaten and disseminated by only the most discerning creatures. The speaker earns the right to gather berries without this penalty, since he puts the thorny stalk right up to his mouth without injury.
By forming words from the blackberries, the speaker starts to break down the human/nature binary. His words come from eating the berries and the physical sensations they inspire in his mouth; he must mimic the feeling of eating in the words he chooses to compose the poem. Yet writing poetry is a singularly human act that can have specific rules. The speaker therefore chooses to convey his relationship to the natural world by focusing on the sounds in the poem instead of meter and rhyme.
“Black Art,” “Black Language,” and Subversion
In “Blackberry Eating,” the speaker pays homage to blackberries in several ways. He admires them in season, eats them and delights in the sensation, and compares blackberries to language learning. His actions underscore the “black art” (Line 5) of not only growing blackberries but of eating them. The word “black” in the poem is associated with natural beauty, sustenance, and the sweet taste of words. The poem therefore upends negative associations with the term “black,” suggesting instead that “black” is generative, powerful, and beautiful. Both literally and figuratively, these associations crop up in Kinnell’s life and work and provide a deeper lens for associative poems such as “Blackberry Eating.”
Kinnell’s involvement in racial justice during the civil rights era provides a backdrop from which to explore the subtle but powerful association of terms in “Blackberry Eating.” While helping to register Black voters in the South, Kinnell engaged in acts that ultimately sought to subvert the racist status quo of the civil rights era by providing equal footing for Black people, an equality that would also facilitate space for Black art and Black language. His actions were viewed as subversion by irate Southerners, but they were seen as a generative process and a step toward healing America by Kinnell and others.
Another connection to Kinnell and “black art” (Line 5) is with the terms voodoo and witchcraft—two terms known derisively as the black arts or black magic. Kinnell’s home region of New England has a history of witchcraft associated with Black and Indigenous people of color. For example, the first person accused in the Salem witch trials was Tituba, a Black enslaved woman from Barbados. Nathaniel Hawthorne, while somewhat subverting the idea of what it means to be civilized, still associated the Indigenous people of New England with witchcraft and “devilry” in his story “Young Goodman Brown.” Furthermore, Kinnell spent years living in Louisiana, an area with its own voodoo created from syncretism between West African religion, Roman Catholicism, and Haitian Voodoo.
Kinnell connects his own creative process to the “black art” (Line 5) and “black language” he gains from eating blackberries. The speaker’s exposure to this art and language enhances his own creative abilities. While the speaker in this poem does not explicitly mention a racial political message in the poem or refer to any specific influence, it’s interesting to note the associations and to see how Kinnell actively engaged in spaces of subversion before even writing a poem that subverts the term black. In “Blackberry Eating, “black art” and “black language” bring pure magic into a poem that celebrates language, a fact that showcases “black” as a positive rather than a negative.
