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Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.

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
Poetry
Language
Surprised
Changing
Meaning

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Forward my mail to Mars.
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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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Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.
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The supreme morality of art is to endure.
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In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.
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Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
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End with an image and don't explain.
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I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
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Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.
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I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.
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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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Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.
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A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
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Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits they do not come to coo.
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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.
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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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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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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.
Stanley Kunitz