Nothing intervened between the song and its expression. The singer managed many difficult things, but the result was to focus attention on the song, not on the performance or on the quality of the voice.
—Thomas Kinsella, on hearing the old-style Irish singer Jerry Flaherty in 1959

The first day I met Thomas Kinsella, in the fall of 1969, he was questioning what a poem was. The focus was D. H. Lawrence’s “Autumn at Taos” and I remember a tremendous sense of confusion about the situation.

On the one hand, here was the forty-one-year-old Irish poet I’d come from New York to southern Illinois to study with. In his dressy clothes and trimmed beard, he was as neat and formal as I imagined him to be from his poems. He marched in on time and announced I’m Kinsella, with the accent on Kin. I was glad he looked like a sonnet, though surprised he didn’t pronounce his name right. It seemed likely that working with him would proceed in an orderly enough manner—an Irish Catholic and a New York Jew deep in the part of Illinois they call “Little Egypt.”

On the other hand, here was this rollicking chant of a poem by Lawrence, this teeming, excessive paean to a state of mind, and Kinsella seemed to love it. He’d entered it fully, reading aloud in his clipped voice, highlighting the repetitions and echoes, sounding oddly urgent as he passed through the poem. Clearly, this