Quote

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.

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
Write
Wild
Geese
House
Began
Flew
Left
Wings
Dropped
Ends
Summer
Beating
Writing
Behinds
Celebration
Think
Behind
Ran
Thinking
Started
Poem
Like
Sound
Eventually
Hoe

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We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.
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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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...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.
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Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
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I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.
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I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.
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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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It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown.
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The supreme morality of art is to endure.
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Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.
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A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.
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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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How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
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Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.
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Not that you need to be a saint to have visions worth talking about. The most effective prescription, I suspect, is to be a disciplined sinner. Perfection, as Valery noted, is work.
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Forward my mail to Mars.
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