[.ca] Interviews and Encounters with Stanley Kunitz (ISBN 0935296794)

Long lived poet:
None of Kunitz's contemporaries has lived as long. He finds the intellect and passions inseparable. Dante's influence in Stanely Kunitz's poetry is internal. Almost all his poems are devotional. Kunitz taught hundreds of students. His students say he taught them to love their places of origin. Kunitz speaks of language changing into meaning. Language reaches the poet in a shapeless rush. Every artist is born into a style. Kunitz's association with Theodore Roethke began when they were both young men. Kunitz first began to teach in the late forties at Bennington. He edited a periodical while in high school at the Classical High School in Worcester, MA. After college, Harvard, he worked for a newspaper in Worcester and then he worked for a publisher in New York City. He found an office existence intolerable and moved to a farm in Connecticut. Later he moved to Bucks County and then to Provincetown. He finds that New York City depletes him. He is happiest in Provincetown. He was born in Worcester in 1905 to Russian immigrant parents. His father died just prior to his birth. His mother had a flourishing business based upon her own dress designs. His household had full sets of Dickens and Tolstoy and other writers. He did not return to Worcester until 1963 when Clark University granted him an honorary degree. Donne, Herbert, Blake and Wordsworth were poetic influences. The Wasteland" shook his world. He believes a poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. Kunitz has been asked how does a poet garden. He writes at night, sometimes until dawn. Gardening is an aspect of his meditative life. Structure has always been enormously important to Kunitz. Kunitz claims he is enchanted with every step in the process of making things grow. Louise Gluck, Kunitz's student, reports he taught habits of thought. A sampling of poems appears in the appendix of the book.