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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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I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
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A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
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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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An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
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End with an image and don't explain.
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Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.
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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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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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Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits they do not come to coo.
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Forward my mail to Mars.
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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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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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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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We have all been expelled from the Garden, but the ones who suffer most in exile are those who are still permitted to dream of perfection.
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Live in the layers, not on the litter.
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In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: Live in the layers, not on the litter. Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes.
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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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