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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.

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
Need
Suspects
Needs
Sinner
Work
Effective
Noted
Saint
Prescription
Perfection
Prescriptions
Worth
Disciplined
Vision
Visions
Talking
Suspect

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Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.
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The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.
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An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
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Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
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The poem comes in the form of a blessing, like rapture breaking on the mind.
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Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.
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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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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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The ear writes my poems, not the mind.
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A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
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Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
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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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I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.
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I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
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Forward my mail to Mars.
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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.
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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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In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.
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Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.
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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.
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