Most of you have probably never heard of Stanley Kunitz, although you should have. He lived the life of a demure poet although his poetry was everything but demure. Stanely just died on May 14th, 2006; he was 100 years old. He was not a hard-drinking poor me type of poet who spends years wallowing in their own self-dysfunction. Kunitz was a philosopher with a gift for prose and was a master of the line break (in my book, no poet is worth a flip if they haven’t mastered control of their line breaks–it means everything in written art).

Society has no more valuable golden eggs than great philospher poets who live to reach their centennial anniversary.

Kunitz was born in Massachussets back in 1905, when someone went around at dusk and lit the street lamps and the only noise heard after dark in small town America was the buzz of insects and the spoken words of human beings perched on a precipice of unimaginable change. They don’t make human beings today like they did back then, but philosophers of all ages have been saying this since Moses wore short pants.

His mother was a Lithuanian-Jewish immigrant and his father, a dress-maker by trade, committed suicide by swallowing carbonic acid in a public park six weeks before Kunitz was born. His mother remarried but the step-father died when Kunitz was 14. So, he entered puberty without a significant male role model in the home and I believe that this had to effect every word that Kunitz ever wrote.

In 1926, he graduated Summa Cum Laude from Harvard with a Master’s degree in English. He left the academic world to become a reporter and then an editor because a stone wall of anti-semiticism prevented him from becoming a professor. He was later quoted as saying, “I think it’s stultifying for young poets to leap immediately into the academic life.” It’s funny because I felt this very same stranglehold as I made the choice of whether to continue on for my MFA in Creative Writing or get out into the world. I personally saw no light at the end of the academic tunnel and chose life instead of the umbrella of university life with its obscure publishings in small presses that nobody reads anyway. Kunitz was uknown for most of life and semi-famous in literary circles for the rest of it and that seemed a-okay with him.

He was drafted in 1943 even though he was registered as a conscientous objector. He filled a position as non-combantant and was honorably discharged with the rank of staff sergeant. He began teaching and seriously publishing after the war. He continued to publish poems until 2005. Kunitz went on to win a litany of awards including the Nobel Prize for Poetry and he served as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress as well as its successor position of Poet Laureate (he held this title when I graduated from college in the year 2000). He also founded two artistic communities, one in New York and one in Massachussets.

Kunitz was a serious gardner, who once said of this craft:

It’s the way things are: death and life inextricably bound to each other. One of my feelings about working the land is that I am celebrating a ritual of death and resurrection. Every spring I feel that. I am never closer to the miraculous than when I am grubbing in the soil.

This demure poet lived his life as an everyman but approached his art with the fury of a latino rebel. He was once quoted as saying that, “One needs a revolution every few years;” as well as, “I must create a system myself or be enslaved by another man’s.” This was no soft-hearted man. He was a visionary and he possessed the greatest weapon ever known to man–patience. The best poets are always patient and understand that is far better to outlive one’s enemies than to beat them.

And Kunitz wasn’t silent on social issues. He was adamantly opposed to the Vietnam conflict and the more recent invasion of Iraq and he supported the Juntas in Central America. When asked about his political stances in light of his art, he replied, “The poet can’t change anything, but [they] can demonstrate the power of the solitary conscience.” This was a man who understood that true power and true freedom lies in the mind of the individual and has nothing to do with parades, speeches, or military coups.

But Kunitz reserved his deepest wisdom for the other craft he dedicated his life to–his poetry. Sometimes he wrote Arse Poeticas (poems dedicated to the craft of poetry) but he was at his best when asked outright in interviews. Consider these three statements;

  • 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.
  • The deepest thing I know is that I am living and dying at once, and my conviction is to report that dialogue. It is a rather terrifying thought that is at the root of much of my poetry.
  • A poet cannot concern himself with being fair to the reader. Time will tell. All poems contain a degree of mystery, as poetry is a discovery of one’s hidden self. . . . Poetry is not concerned with communication; it has roots in magic, incantation, and spell-casting.

Stanley Kuntiz was a great human being, a great American, and a great poet. I used the first line from one of his greatest poems, “The Wellfleet Whale,” as the inspiration for the only poem I ever wrote than won an award–it’s title is “Dogs in Pain.”

May all poets live to be a hundred and may all of their souls rest in peace.

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