Blackberry Eating by Galway Kinnel

Black Berry Eating

Galway Kinnell's poem "Blackberry Eating" is a deeply metaphorical piece that can be taken on several levels. On the surface, it is obviously a poem about eating blackberries and the way in which blackberries are like words which cannot be spoken. However, the subtle subtext of a metaphor within a metaphor runs throughout this poem, which carries with it a sense of taboo and mystery attached to blackberry eating. This is because is also possible to read "Blackberry Eating" as a poem about an interracial (and possibly male-male) sexual experience.

The ways in which the poem compares eating blackberries with speaking of secret things are obvious. The metaphor extends throughout the poem. At the beginning the blackberry plants are referred to as "knowing the black art," which is latter repeated as the "black language." Traditionally black arts have referred to sinful or profane forbidden practices, such as magic. A black language, then, would be a language of forbidden, sinful things. Kinell continues as he describes the berries falling on his tongue (the organ of speech) "as words sometimes do." The structure of a blackberry he says are like the structure of a word. Their many little segments are like letters and syllable coming together in lumps. Eating a berry is like saying a magical forbidden word, it is startling and fills your mouth.

Explaining how this translates into the poem being about an interracial sexual relationship is not so obvious because it is not made explicit. However, one can clearly see it within the subtext of the lines. The first thing to consider is the choice of words used to describe blackberries "fat" and "overripe." By themselves, these are sensual but not explicitly sexual. However, then he begins speaking of the stalks, and standing among their secret black knowledge. One notices, here, that the narrator is "lifting the stalks to my mouth." This is not normal behavior for eating blackberries. One would not ordinarily lift prickly branches to the mouth, but rather pick the berries loose. Instead, the author chooses to invoke a graphic image of stalks approaching one's mouth and then dropping their burden "unbidden" on the tongue. This quietly creates a graphic sexual image of the phallus and the mouth which is heightened by the later use of words such as "squeeze, squinch open, and splurge." The last word is, of course, particularly sexual, and the fact that it is words such as strength and squeeze and splurge that are taught by the black arts of the berries creates a further sexual context. Of course, berries in their round plumpness may also be considered metaphorical for specific parts of the sexual anatomy.

So one can see how this poem could be taken not only as a story about the way in which eating blackberries is akin to speaking secret and dark words (though "strengths" and "splurge" and "squeeze" and such are not usually considered peculiar or secretive in a non-sexual context), but also a story about partaking in forbidden black sexuality which carried both pleasures and dangers. Galway Kinnell is known for writing extensively on the secret homosexual lives of authors such as Hemingway, and it makes sense that in his own poetry he would explore the way in which simple every day pleasures are tied in both to the literary endeavor and to a budding sexuality. The danger implicit in his discussion of blackberry eating ("very prickly, a penalty...") highlights the theme of such sexuality as inherently forbidden and peculiar and startling. The fact that the narrator is eating his words instead of saying them implies that this a secretive thing, "silent, startled, icy..." And that while blackberry eating (and interracial fellatio) is a "love" he has it is also something which, to quote a common phrase, that which dare not speak its name.