Alas

It's with great sadness that I report the death of Stanley Kunitz at age 100.  (This certainly tempers my elation over the Warren decision). 

Stanley was a very warm and giving man, whose generosity to younger poets was legendary.  He helped to establish Poet's House in NYC, and was a mentor to scores of young poets.  The obit above speaks about his pacificism, his growing up in Worcester, his education, and his deep spiritualism.  I'll reprise some things I've already written about him on the blog (during the 1L study poem series), include some of his prose, and repost his great poem "The Testing-Tree."  Those last 9 lines are amazing.

**

Stanley Kunitz was born in Worcester, Mass., in 1905. He won the National Book Award,the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Pulitzer Prize,the Bollingen Prize, a Ford Foundation grant, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, Harvard's Centennial Medal, the Levinson Prize, the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, a senior fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Medal of the Arts, and the Shelley Memorial Award. He served for two years as Consultant in Poetry (Poet Laureate) to the Library of Congress, was designated State Poet of New York, and is a Chancellor Emeritus of The Academy of American Poets. In 2000 he was named United States Poet Laureate. A founder of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass., and Poets House in New York City, he taught for many years in the graduate writing program at Columbia University. He lived in NYC and Provincetown. 

The joke is that he was a very good poet until his 70s, when he became a great one.

Before the poem itself - a prose bit from Stanley, from the introduction to his book, "Passing Through:"

And yet one finds to one's dismay that the poetic imagination resists being made the tool of causes, even the noblest of causes. The imagination lives by its contradictions and disdains any form of oppression, including the oppression of the mind by a single idea.

Poetry, I have insisted, is ultimately mythology, the telling of the stories of the soul. This would seem to be an introverted, even solipsistic, enterprise, if it were not that these stories recount the soul's passage through the valley of this life-that is to say, its adventure in time, in history.

If we want to know what it felt like to be alive at any given moment in the long odyssey of the race, it is to poetry we must turn. The moment is dear to us, precisely because it is so fugitive, and it is somewhat of a paradox that poets should spend a lifetime hunting for the magic that will make the moment stay. Art is that chalice into which we pour the wine of transcendence. What is imagination but a reflection of our yearning to belong to eternity as well as to time?

In an age defined by its modes of production, where everybody tends to be a specialist of sorts, the artist ideally is that rarity, a whole person making a whole thing. Poetry, it cannot be denied, requires a mastery of craft, but it is more than a playground for technicians. The craft that I admire most manifests itself not as an aggregate of linguistic or prosodic skills, but as a form of spiritual testimony, the sign of the inviolable self consolidated against the enemies within and without that would corrupt or destroy human pride and dignity. It disturbs me that twentieth century American poets seem largely reconciled to being relegated to the classroom-practically the only habitat in which most of us are conditioned to feel secure. It would be healthier if we could locate ourselves in the thick of life, at every intersection where values and meanings cross, caught in the dangerous traffic between self and universe.

Poets are always ready to talk about the difficulties of their art. I want to say something about its rewards and joys. 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.

S.K.
1995

The Testing-Tree

Often, the "big names" of poetry cause people to clench up - to think, "my god, I've got to analyze and be clever from the get-go." Relax.  There is no test here.  Read the poem aloud.  While normally I advocate multiple reads (as one would read a monologue in a play at least twice to become familiar with it), today I will give you a key: the poem, much like Galvin's, is in the voice of a mature speaker recalling his childhood.  The poem turns on a boy, somewhat alienated from society, making a bargain with the deity or with fate, tested and proven by throwing stones against a tree trunk (and it seems Stanley nailed all three in his own life).

Some of you might catch the parallels with Rousseau's "Confessions:"

One day, while musing upon this melancholy subject, I mechanically amused myself by throwing stones against the trunks of trees with my usual good aim, that is to say, without hardly hitting one. While engaged in this useful exercise, it occurred to me to draw a prognostic from it to calm my anxiety. I said to myself: "I will throw this stone at the tree opposite; if I hit it, I am saved; if I miss it, I am damned." While speaking, I threw my stone with a trembling hand and a terrible palpitation of the heart, but with so successful an aim that it hit the tree right in the middle, which, to tell the truth, was no very difficult feat, for I had been careful to choose a tree with a thick trunk close at hand. From that time I have never had any doubt about my salvation!

I tend to resist exegesis to a certain extent, but I believe the question the poem ultimately asks is were these the right things to bargain for, after a dreamlike sequence that mobilizes some dark themes.  The poem was written during the Vietnam war, if that helps any of you. I was hoping the poem might suggest our current testing is perhaps not the most important thing we are facing, nor should we think that the satiation of our individual selves are the appropriate end to the formation of our wishes.

The Testing-Tree        

                                                   1

       

                     On my way home from school
                                     up tribal Providence Hill
                                              past the Academy ballpark
                              where I could never hope to play
                                     I scuffed in the drainage ditch
                                              among the sodden seethe of leaves
                              hunting for perfect stones
                                     rolled out of glacial time
                                              into my pitcher's hand;
                              then sprinted lickety-
                                     split on my magic Keds
                                             from a crouching start,
                              scarcely touching the ground
                                     with my flying skin
                                             as I poured it on
                              for the prize of the mastery
                                     over that stretch of road,
                                             with no one no where to deny
                              when I flung myself down
                                     that on the given course
                                             I was the world's fastest human.
         

       

                                          2

       

                     Around the bend
                                    that tried to loop me home
                                             dawdling came natural
                              across a nettled field
                                    riddled with rabbit-life
                                           where the bees sank sugar-wells
                              in the trunks of the maples
                                    and a stringy old lilac
                                           more than two stories tall
                              blazing with mildew
                                    remembered a door in the
                                           long teeth of the woods.
                              All of it happened slow:
                                     brushing the stickseed off,
                                           wading through jewelweed
                              strangled by angel's hair,
                                     spotting the print of the deer
                                           and the red fox's scats.

       

         

                       Once I owned the key
                                         to an umbrageous trail
                                               thickened with mosses
                                 where flickering presences
                                         gave me right of passage
                                               as I followed in the steps
                                 of straight-backed Massassoit
                                         soundlessly heel-and-toe
                                               practicing my Indian walk.
          

       

       

                                       3

       

                     Past the abandoned quarry
                                    where the pale sun bobbed
                                           in the sump of the granite,
                              past copperhead ledge,
                                    where the ferns gave foothold,
                                           I walked, deliberate,
                              on to the clearing,
                                    with the stones in my pocket
                                           changing to oracles
                              and my coiled ear tuned
                                     to the slightest leaf-stir.
                                           I had kept my appointment.
                              There I stood in the shadow,
                                     at fifty measured paces,
                                           of the inexhaustible oak,
                              tyrant and target,
                                     Jehovah of acorns,
                                          watchtower of the thunders,
                              that locked King Philip's War
                                     in its annulated core
                                          under the cut of my name.
                              Father wherever you are
                                     I have only three throws
                                          bless my good right arm.
                              In the haze of afternoon,
                                    while the air flowed saffron,
                                          I played my game for keeps --
                              for love, for poetry,
                                    and for eternal life --
                                          after the trials of summer.
         

       

                                     4

       

                     In the recurring dream
                                    my mother stands
                                          in her bridal gown
                              under the burning lilac,
                                    with Bernard Shaw and Bertie
                                          Russell kissing her hands;
                              the house behind her is in ruins;
                                    she is wearing an owl's face
                                          and makes barking noises.
                              Her minatory finger points.
                                    I pass through the cardboard doorway
                                          askew in the field
                              and peer down a well
                                    where an albino walrus huffs.
                                          He has the gentlest eyes.
                              If the dirt keeps sifting in,
                                    staining the water yellow,
                                          why should I be blamed?
                              Never try to explain.
                                    That single Model A
                                          sputtering up the grade
                              unfurled a highway behind
                                    where the tanks maneuver,
                                          revolving their turrets.
                              In a murderous time
                                    the heart breaks and breaks
                                          and lives by breaking.
                              It is necessary to go
                                    through dark and deeper dark
                                          and not to turn.
                              I am looking for the trail.
                                    Where is my testing-tree?
                                          Give me back my stones!

       

         

Stanley Kunitz

Comments

[Jim Matthews]

Losing Mr. Kunitz is a big blow for the poetry community. I'm deeply saddened to think there will be no new poems from him.

On a lighter note, I'm glad to have found your blog. I've been reading your poems for over a year, having first heard about them from an old friend of yours in Athens. I'm also happy to hear you've got a new book coming out. Congratulations.

[jrt]

amen on the kunitz rant. he is a brother, nay a father who has passed. imagining poetry as war is, at best, a sad way to think.