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Poetry is the enemy of the poem.

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
Poem
Poetry
Enemy

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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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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.
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Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.
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Live in the layers, not on the litter.
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I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
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I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.
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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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The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.
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Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
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My mother never forgave my father
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The ear writes my poems, not the mind.
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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 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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Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.
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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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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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It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown.
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A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
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