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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
Live
Litter
Layers

More quotes by Stanley Kunitz

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I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.
Stanley Kunitz
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We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.
Stanley Kunitz
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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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Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
Stanley Kunitz
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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.
Stanley Kunitz
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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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In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.
Stanley Kunitz
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My mother never forgave my father
Stanley Kunitz
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An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
Stanley Kunitz
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End with an image and don't explain.
Stanley Kunitz
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Rhythm to me is essentially what Hopkins called the taste of self. I taste myself as rhythm.
Stanley Kunitz
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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
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A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.
Stanley Kunitz
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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.
Stanley Kunitz
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Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
Stanley Kunitz
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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.
Stanley Kunitz
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How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
Stanley Kunitz
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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.
Stanley Kunitz
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Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
Stanley Kunitz
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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.
Stanley Kunitz