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"Far Lamps at Night": The Poetry of J. V. Cunningham

In 1974, my senior year at Brandeis University, I studied poetry writing with Galway Kinnell and J. V. Cunningham. Kinnell was that year's poet in residence and taught the undergraduate writing class, which I took spring semester. Cunningham was of course a permanent member of the Brandeis English department, and, though he was on leave that spring, I would bring him poems now and then and he would criticize them. Studying poetry with Kinnell and Cunningham was like studying political science with Jerry Rubin (pre-Wall Street) and William F. Buckley. The political analogy is apt for these were political times (we had not yet pulled our troops from Vietnam), and even literary questions and choices became political. Kinnell, for instance, refused to let his students write anything but free verse on the grounds that rhyme and meter repress emotion and free verse liberates it. Oddly enough, his defense of free verse and liberated feeling was deterministic, based on a kind of literary evolutionary theory: