"Forget about apples and oranges nothing rhymes with orange anyway. Never mind those plums that William Carlos Williams sneaked from the icebox. The most poetic fruit of all is the blackberry. Not the mushy sugar bombs packed into plastic clamshells at the supermarket. Those are insipid, bland, prosaic. I mean the ragged, spicy volunteers that grow untended at the edge of a meadow or the side of a road. The kind you go out and pick in late summer or early fall. You'd be amazed at how many of those end up in poems."
"Blackberry Eating by Galway Kinnell I love to go out in late September among the fat , overripe , icy , black blackberries to eat blackberries for breakfast , the stalks very prickly , a penalty they earn for knowing the black art of blackberry making ; and as I stand among them lifting the stalks to my mouth , the ripest berries fall almost unbidden to my tongue , as words sometimes do , certain peculiar words like strengths or squinched , many - lettered , one - syllabed lumps , which I squeeze , squinch open , and splurge well in the silent, startled , icy , black language of blackberry eating in late September ."
Blackberries, especially wild, ragged varieties, attract intense poetic attention for their texture, flavor, and evocative presence. Cultivated, mushy supermarket berries register as bland and prosaic compared with prickly, overripe volunteers picked at hedgerows or roadsides. Many English-language poets since the mid-twentieth century show a pronounced fascination with blackberries, using them in titles, as celebrated words, and as symbols tied to mortality and lost innocence. Galway Kinnell exemplifies this ardor by portraying blackberry eating as a sensual, greedy, almost linguistic experience, where ripe berries fall to the tongue and words and taste intertwine in late September.
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