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Live in the layers, not on the litter.

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
Litter
Layers
Live

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I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
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The supreme morality of art is to endure.
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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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We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.
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I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.
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A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
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End with an image and don't explain.
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Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
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In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.
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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 longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.
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How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
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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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To conquer a piece of earth and make it as beautiful as one can dream of it being: That is art, too. A man cannot be separated from the earth. I come out of the garden every day feeling, oh, inspired in a way that one needs in order to convert the daily-ness of the life into something greater than that little life itself.
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Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.
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Forward my mail to Mars.
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Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
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An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
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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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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.
Stanley Kunitz