Stanley Kunitz Changed My Life

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.”

and these

“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

Once More The Round

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.

Kunitz Touches Me

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.

You can find many references to Kunitz on the web:
An Atlantic Monthly Article

The Academy of American Poets

A Seattle PI interview

Modern American Poetry articles

APoetry Magazine Interview

A P.B.S. interview and video, my personal favorite.

Kunitz’s Later Poems

Since I’ve already written about my favorite poem from the sections entitled “from The Layers” and “from Next to Last Things” in Kunitz’s Collected Poems, I chose to write about one of several poems that I also admire in this section, one that reminds why I continue to garden even though I’ve relocated to a much smaller home.

While I must admit that it’s vegetables, and not necessarily flowers, that I most love to tend, flowers have increasingly become an important part of my walking and hiking routine. For years now, Bill and I have timed our hikes to gain the best view of various flowers. Even here and Tacoma I’m anxiously awaiting spring so that I can see all of the rhododendrons in Pt Defiance come alive.

Strangely enough, the beautiful garden in front of my new house may well have been a deciding factor in choosing to buy my new house in Tacoma, that and the nearness to the park with its beautiful flora and fauna.

THE ROUND

Light splashed this morning
on the shell-pink anemones
swaying on their tall stems;
down blue-spiked veronica
light flowed in rivulets
over the humps of the honeybees;
this morning I saw light kiss
the silk of the roses
in their second flowering,
my late bloomers
flushed with their brandy.
A curious gladness shook me.

So I have shut the doors of my house,
so I have trudged downstairs to my cell,
so I am sitting in semi-dark
hunched over my desk
with nothing for a view
to tempt me
but a bloated compost heap,
steamy old stinkpile,
under my window;
and I pick my notebook up
and I start to read aloud
the still-wet words I scribbled
on the blotted page:
“Light splashed. .

I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
when a new life begins for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day.

Around here right now it’s more likely to be rain splashing on the firs and ferns than sunshine, but my walk in Pt Defiane Park’s old growth forest each day motivates me to get up each morning. Experiencing nature’s beauty is such an integral part of my life that it’s hard to imagine what my life would be like without such beauty.

My walk usually takes precedence over my reading or writing. Like Kunitz, I have to shut myself away in order to write anything. No reading or writing while sunbathing for me. Given my choices, I would always choose experiencing nature and life directly over reading about it.

A more subtle reason for choosing this poem is that it somehow reminded me of Roethke’s “Once More, the Round,” though there’s little more than title to link them together, but it was one of Roethke’s last poems and ends, “And everything comes to One, /As we dance on, dance on, dance on.” Furthermore, Roethke, like Kunitz, had a great love of flowers and nature.