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I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.

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
Survival
Road
Dance
Joy
Surviving
Edge
Edges

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Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.
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Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
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A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.
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I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
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Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.
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Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
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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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Live in the layers, not on the litter.
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Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
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Forward my mail to Mars.
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It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown.
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How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
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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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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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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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Rhythm to me is essentially what Hopkins called the taste of self. I taste myself as rhythm.
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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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Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits they do not come to coo.
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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