I’ve been reading Stanley Kunitz’s poetry almost as long as I’ve been reading poetry, yet his poems always seem fresh to me. Every time I come back to them I find something new that allows me to feel life more vividly. It’s hard to ask much more than that from a poet.

Although he seemed old when I first heard him read his poems in the early “60’s (perhaps because I was only twenty and he was in his fifties), he seems much younger when I read him now. Time has a funny way of doing that to us, doesn’t it?

His poetry has changed since then, perhaps losing a little of the passion of the earlier poems, but, then, I’m afraid I’ve lost some of that passion in my own life. The first time I read Kunitz, my favorite poem was “She Wept, She Railed” but for years my favorite poem has been “The Testing Tree,” whose lines “In a murderous time/ the heart breaks and breaks/ and lives by breaking./ It is necessary to go/ through dark and deeper dark/ and not to turn” come as close to summarizing my personal philosophy as anything I’ve read. These two poems alone more than justify buying and reading his Collected Poems, or at least checking it out at your local library.

His Collected Poems ends with:

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 that’s late,
it is my song that’s 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 the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s 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.

Hopefully these poems I’ve looked at have touched you as much as they have touched me. As we grow older it’s too easy to lose touch with those things that touch the heart, to lose touch with those passions that make life worthwhile. It’s hard to read his poems and not feel that “longing for the dance” that is life itself.

Once again, the Northwest is being hit by high winds and rain and I had a hard time sleeping because the battered old pine tree kept thrashing against the bedroom wall, but I’m about to head out on another walk. I doubt I’ll hear crickets, but at the very least I’ll hear that old heart of mine beating against my chest wall as I try once again to lose myself in nature’s beauty.

A favorite poet, Stanley Kunitz died Sunday.

One of the highlights of my college years was hearing Kunitz read at the University of Washington the year Roethke died. The next day I went to the UW bookstore and bought his book of poetry. I’ve been buying them ever since.

I’ve discussed this poem before when I discussed his collected poems, as it ends the collection. Somehow is seems even more appropriate today:

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 that’s late,
it is my song that’s 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 the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s 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.

Though I never met him, Stanley Kunitz changed my life.

As a tenderfoot in Ted Roethke’s verse writing class, I heard him mention Kunitz as a fine poet and trusted friend.

At that stage I barely knew Ogden Nash from a Nash Rambler.

Later, Roethke used a line from Kunitz to teach us the concept of the list, or catalog, a rhetoricall device that sets up a rhythmic pattern you can play against in next line. Whitman used lists. Kunitz was tighter in his use.

“He runs before the wise men. He
is moving on the hills like snow.
No gifts, no tears, no company he brings
but wind rise and waterflow.”
(from He, 1930)

After that lesson, I knew enough to look him up, and found these memorable lines (from Father and Son) :

“The silence unrolling before me as I came,
The night nailed like an orange to my brow.”

“Among the turtles and the lilies he turned to me
The white ignorant hollow of his face. ”

I won’t say I understood those poems. But something transferred instantly: riveting image, mastery of metrics, emotional power.

Time passed, and I memorized his sweet ironic poem “The Waltzer in the House” (linked on this site). More gentle and witty than most of the poems he wrote before 1980, it kept me aware that he had that playful side, too.

I went back for more, and over the years, found myself turning to him whenever I needed to read some words served on a spear and cooked over an open fire. I was never disappointed. He set a standard impossible to ignore, in his fierceness and his music and his willingness to experiment with form. He rewards any effort given him, and gave us this motto:

He was also a remarkable gardener who honored the earth. But he would be worth remembering if he only gave us these words:

“The poem comes in the form of a blessing—‘like rapture breaking on the mind,’ as I tried to phrase it in my youth. Through the years I have found this gift of poetry to be life-sustaining, life-enhancing, and absolutely unpredictable. Does one live, therefore, for the sake of poetry? No, the reverse is true: poetry is for the sake of the life.â€?

For more of his best: see The Layers; King of the River; Science of the Night, or his little book of essays, “Next-to-Last Things.”

guest article by Mike Robinson