Stanley Kunitz

Stanley Jasspon Kunitz (July 29, 1905 – May 14, 2006) was an American poet who served two years (1974–1976) as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (a precursor to the modern Poet Laureate program), and served another year as United States Poet Laureate in 2000.

Stanley Kunitz

Quotes

Poems

The Layers

• 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 campsites
  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.
  • "The Layers" by Stanley Kunitz

[Click here for video version on YouTube as read by the author ]

Unsourced

• In the best painting as in authentic poetry one is aware of moral pressures exerted... choices are important, moral pressure exists to make right and wrong choices.

Quotes about Stanley Kunitz

• I love what the poet Stanley Kunitz said about dreaming of “an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.” That pretty much sums up what I most admire in a work of literature.
  • Julia Alvarez, interview (2019)

• I remember something Stanley Kunitz once told me. He said, "Poetry explores depths of thought and feeling that civilization requires for its survival."
  • Lorna Dee Cervantes interview in Fooling with Words: A Celebration of Poets and Their Craft by Bill Moyers (1999)

• Things come to me, they speak to me. Stanley Kunitz has had an enormous impact on my life. He once said that poetry is only half language, the other half is a quality of perception, a function of the imagination, a particular form of paying attention. For me, it's a stilling of the self, waiting for this language to speak to me before I utter it.
  • Lorna Dee Cervantes interview in Fooling with Words: A Celebration of Poets and Their Craft by Bill Moyers (1999)