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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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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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How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
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Live in the layers, not on the litter.
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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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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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The ear writes my poems, not the mind.
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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.
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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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Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits they do not come to coo.
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An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
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I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
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Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.
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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.
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A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
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Forward my mail to Mars.
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Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.
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My mother never forgave my father
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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.
Stanley Kunitz