Last night I drove to Gettysburg College to attend a reading by Galway Kinnell. I wouldn't have known about this event had I not seen a brief notice in the Arts Calendar section of the newspaper last Sunday.

Galway Kinnell is a poet of some stature on the contemporary literary scene. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983, and his name can be found on the marquees of all the big literary festivals and writing conferences. When he's not on the lecture circuit, he divides his time between Vermont, where he lives as a gentleman poet/farmer, and New York, where he teaches at NYU. Last year I read an article by him in The New Yorker that was a meditation on the increasing noise level due to development in his once-rural patch of Vermont. 

Gettysburg College is a highly respected private liberal arts school whose history is inevitably intertwined with that of the Civil War. It lies adjacent to the battlefield, and a building belonging to its Lutheran seminary served as a lookout point during the Battle of Gettysburg. Gettysburg itself is a funny mixture of college town and tourist trap, with "Battlefield" and "Lincoln" figuring in a lot of business names.

Last night was a quiet one in Gettysburg. The college's web site is difficult to navigate, and I'd had trouble finding a campus map. The exact location of Kinnell's appearance was hard to discover. The newspaper gave one building, while the announcement on the web page gave another. When I called the school's information number, my call was transferred several times until I reached someone in the English department who knew what was up.

It always surprises me when I come to an event like this that there aren't hordes of people streaming toward a particular building, so that there is no question about where the event is taking place. I guess in my mind a poet, especially one with the reputation and following (among poetry devotees, of course) of Galway Kinnell, is rather like the Rolling Stones or Bruce Springsteen. In recent years I've been to college campuses to hear Julia Alvarez, Donald Hall, John Updike, and Elizabeth Spires, and each time I've been surprised at the small turnout, and then chagrined at myself that I'm surprised. These people aren't the Rolling Stones, after all.

It turned out that Galway Kinnell was appearing not in one of the lovely recital halls in the theater building but in a dingy lecture auditorium in the science building. A freshman anatomy lab was underway across the hall, and if you stood at the book table you could see earnest youngsters (Lynn three years from now, I thought) bent over their fetal pigs which were splayed on pins in a tray, their pale underbellies sliced open to expose their organs. "Feel for the liver and the gall bladder," I heard the instructor say.

The lecture hall was one of those stadium-type rooms that you enter at the top and then descend through banked rows of seats. I chose a place in the third row directly across from the lectern. The room, which holds about 150, was less than half full. 

Galway Kinnell was introduced by Peter Stitt, an English professor at the college and the editor of The Gettysburg Review, the school's well-known literary journal. Stitt used ironic humor to welcome those who had come. He indicated the "wonderful spread" of refreshments for afterward -- a folding table which held a picnic cooler full of "five-fruit punch," a bag of pretzel sticks, a package of cookies, and some cups and napkins.

Kinnell himself was as tweedy and professorial as you could ask for in a senior poet. He recently turned 75, but he looks a good deal younger. He has a quiet charm, and gave a brief introduction to each poem he read. One came from his stay at an artist's colony, another sprang from the nights he spent caring for his son Fergus, then a toddler, who had trouble sleeping the year they lived in a drafty cottage on Majorca.

He is known as a translator of German poet Rainier Maria Rilke. He had a student of German read some of Rilke's work in its original rendering, so that we would hear the words as the poet intended them before we heard then English. And a palpable rush of emotion swept over the audience when he read a poem about a devoted daughter caring for her father who is in the advanced stages of Parkinson's disease.

Finally, he read from what he called an "advanced draft" of some work he's done in response to September 11. He held a sheaf of papers, and I could see both the typescript and the handwritten notations, some of which he said he'd made on the train from New York that very day. As I had when I heard Donald Hall read in October of 2000, I took note that there is nothing retired or retiring about this poet who in advanced years is still producing, and still growing as a writer.

I am twenty years younger than Galway Kinnell. I don't have a canon of work built over fifty years. But tonight I saw another figure who inspired me to keep on trying to figure it out.