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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
Poetry
Enemy
Poem

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It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown.
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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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Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.
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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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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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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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Live in the layers, not on the litter.
Stanley Kunitz
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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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Forward my mail to Mars.
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An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
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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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The supreme morality of art is to endure.
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The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.
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The ear writes my poems, not the mind.
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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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I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
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
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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.
Stanley Kunitz
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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.
Stanley Kunitz