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...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.

Stanley Kunitz

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Stanley Kunitz
Age: 100 †
Born: 1905
Born: July 29
Died: 2006
Died: May 14
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Worcester
Massachusetts
Stanley Jasspon Kunitz
Cold
Testing
Tell
Poems
Young
Poets
Writing
Page
Bed
Ears
Pages
Poet

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I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.
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Rhythm to me is essentially what Hopkins called the taste of self. I taste myself as rhythm.
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Live in the layers, not on the litter.
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The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.
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A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.
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Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call. We have need of them, for in their sum they epitomize the wisdom and experience of the race.
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End with an image and don't explain.
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I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
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The poem comes in the form of a blessing, like rapture breaking on the mind.
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The ear writes my poems, not the mind.
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Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.
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Some poems present themselves as cliffs that need to be climbed. Others are so defensive that when you approach their enclosure you half expect to be met by a snarling dog at the gate. Still others want to smother you with their sticky charms.
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How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
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Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
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The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking it is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn
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I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.
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I dropped my hoe and ran into the house and started to write this poem, 'End of Summer.’ It began as a celebration of wild geese. Eventually the geese flew out of the poem, but I like to think they left behind the sound of their beating wings.
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Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.
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Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
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A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest Africa, that part of yourself that will never be tamed.
Stanley Kunitz