STANLEY
KUNITZ OUR NEW POET LAUREATE
Last October 12 a new U. S. poet laureate took over from Robert Pinsky. He is Stanley Kunitz, winner of a Pulitzer, a National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize, and on and on. His awards are impressive, as are his carefully crafted, unique and personal poems, but equally impressive is Kunitz' age. . .he was 95 last July. Alas for Thomas Hardy, who took quiet pride in being the oldest poet to be published in English, for Kunitz has a new book, Collected Poems, out this year. Alas for Wordsworth, too, who wrote:
We poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness.
Stanley Kunitz has plenty of gladness still, for his Provincetown garden, for his wife (#3) of 42 years, for his daughter, and for each poem, which he says "comes in the form of a blessing, like rapture breaking on the mind."
Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, where his father was a dress manufacturer (The Persian Wrapper Co.) who was left bankrupt when an associate misappropriated some funds; he committed suicide before Stanley was born. The tragedy lives on in one of Kunitz' best known poems, "The Portrait:"
My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of along upped stranger
with a brave mustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty fourth year
I can feel my cheek
Still burning. (1969)
His mother supported her son and his two older sisters by opening a dry goods store. Kunitz graduated from Harvard in 1926, summa cum laude, and received his M.A. in 1927. Anti-Semitism at Harvard probably kept him from a faculty appointment. He has taught at Bennington, Brandeis and Columbia, among other schools. His first poetry was published in 1930, the year T.S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" came out. During WWII Kunitz was a pacifist and conscientious objector; he got drafted anyway, and ended up in N. Carolina digging latrines with troops who were largely black. Trying to explain to his fellows why the U.S. was at war, Kunitz started a magazine. Eventually he was assigned to an information and education post in D.C. He ended the war a staff sergeant.
His post as poet laureate has a salary of $35,000, plus an office, but the responsibilities are not heavy. He is expected to give an occasional lecture or reading. He would like to improve the teaching of poetry in the public schools and he wants to extend the poetry reading program at the Library of Congress.
Kunitz' favorite place appears to be his garden in Provincetown, 2000 square feet with tiers going upward; it can be seen in part from the street. His writing space there is a room so small he calls it his cell; he works there at night, often after midnight. He claims he looks first for the rhythm in writing a poem. The poet is freer than the novelist or playwright, he believes, because he does not have to entertain or even to communicate; poetry's roots are in magic, spell casting, incantation.
Stanley Kunitz has been writing for 70 years. He has known personally most of the great poets of the 20th century, and his life has spanned 13 presidents. What will he write about? "Even in my earliest poems I was really trying to find out who I am, where I am going, why I am here. I still ask the same questions."
His appointment as poet laureate is for one year.
Alice Racher
Here is a sampling of some of his poems. There is a list of his books and their publishers after the poems.
Touch Me
Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart thats late,
it is my song thats flown
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down.
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for dance
stirs the buried life.
one season only,
and its done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.
Stanley Kunitz
The Layers
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
Toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
in my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
Live in the layers,
not on the litter.
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
Stanley Kunitz
from Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected, by Stanley Kunitz
The library owns the following books on Stanley Kunitz::
The Collected Poems, by Stanley Kunitz: New York, Norton,
c2000. 811/KUN
A Kind Of Order, A Kind Of Folly: Essays and Conversations,
by Stanley Kunitz: Boston: Little, Brown, /KUN
Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected,
by Stanley Kunitz, NY, W.W. Norton, /KUN
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