|
 Kinnell's published work spanned five decades and dealt with
a wide spectrum of subjects, from the texture of urban life to
immortality.
His wife, Barbara Bristol, said on Wednesday that one of
Kinnell's greatest honors was being named the poet laureate of
Vermont in 1989, making him the successor to Robert Frost.
"He worked very hard at it ... It meant a lot that his poetry
was in the minds and heart of Vermonters," Bristol said in a
telephone interview from their home in the remote town of
Sheffield, in the state's Northeast Kingdom region.
Former Vermont governor Madeleine Kunin, who named Kinnell poet
laureate, told Vermont Public Radio in August that he resembled
Frost "in that he also appears accessible on the surface, yet
mysterious when we probe underneath."
Kinnell was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the son of a
Scottish immigrant father and an Irish immigrant mother.
For much of his life, Kinnell divided his time between Vermont
and New York City, where he was the director of the creative
writing program at New York University, according to an obituary
in the New York Times.
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Among his teaching posts was one that took him to Tehran and
inspired his only novel "Black Light," according to the Times.
The poem considered his breakthrough is his 1960 work "The Avenue
Bearing the Initial of Christ Into the New World," about Avenue C in
Manhattan's East Village.
His book "Selected Poems" won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983.
In addition to his wife, Kinnell is survived by a son, a daughter
and two grandchildren.
(Reporting by Ted Siefer in Lowell, Mass.; Editing by Barbara
Goldberg and Bill Trott)
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