Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/galway-kinnell-on-the-pleasures-of-ordinary-things Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Poet Galway Kinnell reads "Why Regret?" a poem from his new book about "engaging ourselves with the common acts, the ordinary things, the other creatures." Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. GALWAY KINNELL, Poet: I'm Galway Kinnell and I have here a poem called "Why Regret?" that I'd like to read.The poem took me a very long time to write, perhaps two or three years, stopping to add things that came to me in the meantime.I had in mind that the poem is addressed to all readers, including myself, reading it over to tell us to remember the pleasures and the confidence we gain from engaging ourselves with the common acts, the ordinary things, the other creatures, and to remind us in this holiday season, when we get reports everyday of the most horrible killings, that nevertheless we have very much to be thankful for.Didn't you like the way the ants helpthe peony globes open by eating the glue off?Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkerssitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybebaloney on white with fluorescent mustard?Wasn't it a revelation to wagglefrom the estuary all the way up the river,the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?Didn't you almost shiver, hearing book liceclicking their sexual dissonance inside an oldWebster's New International, perhaps having justeaten of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wrenand how little flesh is needed to make a song.Didn't it seem somehow familiar when the nymphsplit open and the mayfly struggled freeand flew and perched and then its own backbroke open and the imago, the true adult,somersaulted out and took flight, seekingthe swarm, mouth-parts vestigial,alimentary canal come to a stop,a day or hour left to find the desired one?Or when Casanova took up the platterof linguine in squid's ink and slid the stuffout the window, telling his startled companion,"The perfected lover does not eat."Didn't you glimpse in the monarchswhat seemed your own inner blazonryflapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?Weren't you reassured to think these flimsyhinged beings, and then their offspring,and then their offspring's offspring, couldnavigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestorswho fell in this same migration a year ago?Doesn't it outdo the pleasure of the brilliant concertto wake in the night and find ourselvesholding hands in our sleep?