Profile: Stanley Kunitz

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You said, actually, once, that you felt you were predestined to become a poet. What do you mean by that?

STANELY KUNITZ: My family, fortunately, had an extensive library, and that was a rare phenomenon in those days. One of the prized volumes in that library was an unabridged dictionary. And I used to sit in that green Morris chair and open the heavy dictionary on my lap, and find a new word every day. It was a big word, a word like "eleemosynary" or "phantasmagoria" -- some word that, on the tongue, sounded great to me, and I would go out into the fields and I would shout those words, because it was so important that they sounded so great to me. And then eventually I began incorporating them into verses, into poems. But certainly my thought in the ... in the beginning was that there was so much joy playing with language that I couldn't consider living without it. --from a PBS interview

My husband Shawn and I have been devotees of US poet laureate Stanley Kunitz ever since we found his moving work "The Layers" several years ago. We were saddened to hear of his death this past May, at the advanced age of 100. From all accounts, he was a devoted poet and a generous mentor and editor.

Paul Nemser remembers how Kunitz remade his world. A poet and translator who is a partner at the Boston law firm Goodwin Procter, he studied with Kunitz at Columbia in the early 1970s. "People always ask how I got to be a lawyer," Nemser said yesterday. The answer is: He trusted Stanley Kunitz.

As an eager but debt-burdened young poet supporting himself as a bookstore clerk, Nemser sought out his teacher one day, explained his situation and asked what he should do. Kunitz "looked up into the sky," Nemser recalled, then looked down and said, "the law." He added, "You love poetry so much that you will never give it up."

Three decades of law and poetry, for Nemser, have proved him correct. --from the Washington Post

For our tenth anniversary, Shawn recited "Touch Me" and had us both in tears. (If you go to The Writer's Almanac and scroll down to Friday, July 29, 2005, you can hear Garrison Keillor read "Touch Me" in honour of Kunitz's hundredth birthday.)

His great breakthrough as a writer, he thought, came when his mother and sisters had all died, and he said, "The disappearance of my family liberated me. It gave me a sense that I was the only survivor and if the experiences of my life ... were to be told, it was within my power to do so." --from the Writer's Almanac

You'll find a profile of Kunitz and links to more poems and interviews at the Academy of American Poets.

[Inspiration for this entry came from my recent discovery of Mary Oliver's poem called "Stanley Kunitz". How good to be assured that art comes, not by magic, but by patient work on one's knees.]