Stanley Kunitz on my fridge, in the garden, and the joy of surviving.

Another poet you should know and/or take off your bookshelf

“My dismay at the clutter on my desk is offset by my zest for the hunt among my papers.  At an age when I should be putting my house in order, I keep accumulating bits of information, not for any particular reason and in spite of the absurdity, because I was born curious and don’t know how to stop.”

Stanley Kunitz, “Seed, Corn and Windfall” from Next to Last Things: New Poems and Essays (1985)

Jewish poet Stanley Kunitz was not a poet I learned about in my childhood when Robert Frost and e.e. cummings were all the rage. No one ever taught me that Kunitz wrote poetry of the domestic life (his mother, his father, his childhood) long before Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath. In fact, this Worcester, Massachusetts poet was all but invisible to me until I left Massachusetts and arrived in Seattle, WA.

In 2000, friends of mine saw Kunitz read at the Dodge Festival. They both witnessed him helped to the stage and from their seats, they could see nothing but the crown on his balding head. But then something incredible happened. As Kunitz began to read, he became taller, his face appearing above the podium. It was as if poetry (they said) had restored his youth. Reading his poetry to a receptive audience brought him more fully to life. I have never forgotten that…

Here is a stellar interview I discovered today between Gregory Orr and Stanley Kunitz taped when Kunitz was 88 years old. He reads “Father and Son,” a poem written when Kunitz was a young man, giving a hard and uncompromising vision of his dad. Orr offers that Kunitz is the first poet to write of his father in this way. Kunitz shakes that accolade off but he has lots of important things to say about poetry. He also reads, “The Portrait,” a kind of self-portrait, perhaps one of the first pieces that has led to our preponderance of self-portrait poems today.

GO: What purpose does poetry serve?

SK: Poetry is most deeply concerned with telling us what it feels like be alive. To be alive at any given moment….Before the poets we had no idea what it meant to be a human person on this earth.

Wow. Kunitz lived to be 100. He won the Pulitzer prize when he was 63, became Poet Laureate at 95. He is an incredible example of poetry being a life long pursuit. When it was an incredibly unpopular thing to do, Kunitz consciously chose to elevate domestic experience in poetry. This was before Roethke, before Lowell, before Plath.

But what I am most thankful for is his poem that lives on my fridge.

The Layers

Stanley Kunitz 1905 –2006

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.

So did I know Stanley Kunitz? Do I have a sweet story about meeting him? Yes, he was a Massachusetts poet. Yes, we were both alive and in Massachusetts during the late 20th century. I certainly walked by his home in Provincetown and admired his garden, looked for a glimpse of him. No, I never got to meet him, except most importantly, on the page. He lives with me still.

And here he is (in his 90’s) reading the transformational, “Touch Me.”