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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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I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.
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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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Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.
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It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown.
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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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How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
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Forward my mail to Mars.
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Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
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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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Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.
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My mother never forgave my father
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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 can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.
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In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.
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Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.
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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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A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
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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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A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.
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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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