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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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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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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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The poem comes in the form of a blessing, like rapture breaking on the mind.
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An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
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The ear writes my poems, not the mind.
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Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.
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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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Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.
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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.
Stanley Kunitz
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My mother never forgave my father
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A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.
Stanley Kunitz
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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
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Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
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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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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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I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
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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...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