Interview with Stanley Kunitz, 24 April 2002

Have you lived here a long time?

Here since '77.

Mhm. Well, that's pretty long. For many years we lived on 11th street.

Yes, I remember when that happened. I was here. What year was that?

That was 1970.

I guess I wasn't here. We were in the other block.

Yeah, where were you?

Right toward, between 6th and 7th, yeah.

In any case, let's start with the poet's house, why you started the poet's house. This was back in the mid 80s?

That's a hard question.

You and Elizabeth Cray?

I would suppose it was in a way accidental. And the original impulse toward it came from Betty Cray.

Do you remember, did you know Betty?

I didn't know her but I...

Yes. And Betty, of course, lived for the poetry world and was, in a way, queen of all of it. She had an understanding of the need for poetry in our culture. And I've never met anyone like her in her efficiency about making that understanding public property. She could convince anyone to give a hundred thousand dollars the next day for the promotion of poetry as part of our American culture.

And I had been associated with Betty for a good many years in her various activities and she came down to see me with an idea. And her idea was very simple. She thought it was time for New York City to have a public library devoted solely to poetry. In other words, a poetry library. And it was amazing really to realize that New York didn't have one. It never occurred to me, actually.

There must have been poetry sections though in the various libraries.

There were poetry sections, but there wasn't a free-standing poetry library. And my response was of course we should have one, but it shouldn't be just an adjunct to any other organization or office. It should be a center of the life of poetry in our culture. And it should be a place, above all, that would be open to poets in particular and to the public in general. And a sort of communication center as well as a house of hospitality. That was my immediate response.

And she didn't have a name for it and I said it's not to be called a library. It should be called a, it should be called Poets House. And without an apostrophe because nobody owns poetry. It belongs to civilization. That was it.

Poetry, Poets as an adjective, not a possessive.

Yeah, nobody possesses poetry. Poetry posesses you, is another way of putting it. So that was the beginning.

And it started small.

Started small. It started with a meeting of all the available poets in the community in which we talked about it, what we hoped it would accomplish. And we had a money raising campaign. Got some pledges. Not a great fortune, but enough to start. And it's been rather fantastic since then in its operation and in its effectiveness. It has become really a national--I hate to think of it as an organization or an institution--but it is a communication center as far as...and a way to keep insisting that this country needs poetry and that it is an expression of our culture.

And that no country is great unless its poets agree that it is so. So in any sense that's pretty much what we started with.

Let me ask a silly question. Why do we need poetry?

Why do we need poetry? Because every great civilization has demonstrated the need for myth and poetry in the effectiveness of the state itself beyond power, beyond military strength, beyond commerce. What a great civilization needs to demonstrate is the power of what it stands for in terms of human dignity and freedom. And the word, the myth, is essential to the survival of civilization, and to the culmination of its powers. I think anyone who studies history would have to agree to that.

I mean, you say poetry you mean poetry. Not poetry in the sense of fiction being poetic, or anything else.

No, I mean poetry in the largest sense as a spiritual force. And I equate it with myth in that. Poetry and myth. The myth of a culture, the myth of a civilization, is what perpetuates the state as a state and as a power in the world.

It's right--at the same time, you said before that you don't think of yourself as a political poet in which politics hasn't been your territory.

Oh I'm intensely interested in politics, but I don't feel that I've been committed to writing political poetry if you define it narrowly. But I think my poems are political in the largest sense. In that they deal very much with the problems of the individual in relation to the state. And I have an essay, actually, on poet and state that I think expresses my feeling of how the poet is always, in a sense, an adversary of the state and yet absolutely essential to the survival of the state.

You've also said that the choice of being a poet was itself a political act.

Yes a political act. And I think it is also important to realize that one of the functions of the poet is as a citizen. And we tend to forget that.

It reminds me of Harold Pinter, who's a friend, who always says that he's a playwright but he's also a citizen.

I feel exactly the same way. I am very passionate about my politics. And it's not conservative. So.

Ok. I was interested that one purpose of the Poets House is to give poets a place to work and read. Can poets learn from other poets? And what do they learn?

Where else are they going to learn? It is largely from other poets that one begins to be a poet. You're not going to become a poet through learning prosody. That's certainly true. But through the energizing force of the word. That is essential to one's education. I think every poet begins by simply being enchanted by the sound of words. Like other poets, I remember walking, running rather, through the woods shouting new words that I had learned.

New words you may have learned from other poets.

I think that--so many poets have told me they did the same thing.

Aren't poets born? You were born a poet, weren't you?

They are born in the sense of what they are born with the capacity for becoming poets. But what fortune deals to them in their early days, their early years, is I think an important factor. Maybe more important than your genes. I think the sense of the natural world, for example, the delight in being alive, and the knowledge of one's mortality, are all involved in the making of the poet.

I believe above all, I suppose, in the web of creation. The sense that everything alive is interconnected and that the so-called natural world is ours. Now we belong to nature just as much as the bears and the locusts and the elephants and the horses. One doesn't learn that by being taught it. It's part of the, maybe the accident of fortune.

You've written, so I gather, often about mortality and I wonder if I can ask you a somewhat personal question. How much does the fact of your father's death, how much of that makes you a poet or made you a poet?

I think that was central to my sense of loss, my sense of yearning. You know Henry James' wonderful phrase in one of his letters when he says, "the port from which I set out was the port of my loneliness."

I was curious, going through your collected poems, I found a number of poems about suicides. It did strike me. And it was Rothko and Levy and...

In a way, that seemed perfectly natural to me. I had been with him just a few days before and there was an aura already about him that I felt.

Rothko's?

Yes.

We're getting far away from Poets House but can you understand suicide? What provokes people to--

Oh yes, yes. It's perfecty intelligible to me. It's not anything I would be inclined to do, maybe I'm speaking to early, but I love life too much.

I would say in your own life you've been the perfect antithesis to that, with a long life still going on.

But I could imagine why one would do it, and I don't consider it by any means to be a criminal act or a immoral act.

Well , except, would you agree these suicide bombers...

That's something else again. To kill others. And I'm a pacifist by conviction.

Right. But in terms of killing yourself, that's your own decision.

Yeah. Mhm. If you have to kill anybody, it should be yourself.

That's a good point. But from early on you decided to be a poet.

Very early, yes. And I was lucky in a way, aside from the misfortune of my talk of suicide, in that I had teachers who told me I was going to be a poet from the fourth grade on.

And you believed them.

Yeah. And I believed them. Yeah, I really did.

Well, teachers are important.

I have written about my fourth grade teacher who assigned a composition on the father of our country. And I worked very hard at it. And the next day, after turning it in, she appeared in class and she was glowing and she had one of the composition papers in her hand, and she said, "I'm going to read you something, starkly. It's like a poem." And she read my piece. And, and--the first sentence of which was, "George Washington was a tall, petite, handsome man."

Same block?

Tall, petite?

Tall, petite. You know, I just loved the sound of that word. And to her it was beautiful. And who knows why, but she thought so.

Have then you felt in your life that it's necessary to pass on such encouragement to others?

Mhm. Yes.

Stir the old pot, I guess.

And then I had a succession of teachers who told me that through the years, even in college.

I would have thought that, with the possible exception of being an actor, that being a poet was the most difficult occupation to sustain. To be a poet and to not--

Unless it's inseparable from your nature. And then there's no way of getting rid of it.

But obviously even people like Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams who had other occupations, presumably to sustain and survive their poetry. That would seem to be built into it just as actors go do something else, but you've been a poet all your life. Teaching, but yes.

Same block, between 5th and 6th, until our house blew up.

Yeah. Well, it is not always, say, in your permanent posession. You cannot count on being a poet every time you sit down at your desk with a pen in hand, or a pencil more likely.

Sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn't.

Sometimes it's very willful. Unpredictable.

Did you write a poem today? You did write a poem today?

No, I don't write a poem every day.

How often do you write a poem?

I have long intervals. I seem to work in cycles. I have a creative cycle and then I can be silent for days, for weeks, months, years even, during my lifetime. A lot has to do with circumstance.

What provokes you to write a poem?

I wish I knew.

It's usually a phrase, an image. It's a rhythm more than anything else. And I've always felt that poetry begins with sounds rather than with sense. And you ride on that rhythm until your own being takes possession of it. And really, the sound and the sense combine and then you have some sense of where you're going, aside from riding on that rhythm. But, to a large degree, I think the poem is more interested in perpetuating a flow of sound than it is of producing a meaning.

Sound comes first, meaning can come later. Do you still, when you write a poem, you speak it, you say it?

I say it, I say it, yeah. And I'm likely to use, use up fifty or seventy-five sheets of paper before I have a feeling that I'm really on my way to producing a poem.

Writing is rewriting.

You know, Cal Lowell used to say, "I don't write poems, I rewrite them. I revise them." And he actually did.

Do you go back and revise older poems too?

Not after I have determined that it's the best I can do. And I never publish a poem unless I believe that. You know, I have written ten times as many poems as I have published. I'm a very hard critic of my own work.

Do you keep those poems or do you dispose of them?

Oh, they're lying around or in my manuscript collection at Princeton, which, Princeton Public Library, who took over everything in my desk.

Cleaned up your desk? Put it in order?

Well, they brought, they sent a truck, and they had room and they wanted to fill the room. I gave them everthing I had.

Now, did you ever go down there and look up something? Would you ever go down there to look up something?

I've never been there, no. Never been to look at my own.

It's probably so neat and orderly.

I wouldn't want to, I don't want to. It's like looking at one's grave.

That's all the past. You're focusing on today. That makes sense. Do you go to Poets House, then?

Oh, yes. Mhm.

What do you do when you go to Poets House?

Oh, usually I'm there because there are important issues and they want to talk to me about it. So, I'm still very much concerned with what goes on at Poets House and feel very much a part of its day to day activities.

How do you feel about young poets today?

Pardon me?

How do you feel about young poets today?

I am pleasantly surprised. I think that poetry in this country today is amazingly active and good, much to my surprise. And if I compare it, as I have done in the past, with the poetry, let's say, in this country in the 19th century, there are extant anthologies, of course, from that period. And, except for a handful of poets, including great ones like Whitman and Dickinson, the work that was being published generally throughout, let's say, the whole 19th century, was mediocre beyond words at a general level.

Was it imitative of the English, then?

English, yes. We inherited our culture, we inherited our mythology. And we had nothing comparable to offer it its place.

Where as today it's alive and well-known.

Well, I often think, despite the academic system, the academic control of poetry, but there's no question in my mind that it's superior. And it may be superior in numbers to that of any other culture. Although I'm beginning to think that Poland is now the great country for poetry. There are so many really superb Polish poets. You know, it's accident in a way.

But if you spend enough years...One thing I was surprised at Poets House was so many small printings, privately printed things, people using their computers to print their poems. I mean, there's so much, really, proliferation of small publications of poetry, which I was not aware of before, and perhaps computers are the root of some of it.

Well, not for me. I'm not even computer savvy and I don't want to be.

Longhand. Not even a typewriter?

Mhm. I feel very old fashioned in that respect. Not in the poems, but in the technological aspect. I like the physical sense of--I worked with a pencil, first, on paper and, as I've already indicated to you, I produced sheet after sheet of paper and then whittled it down finally.

Do you go from pencil to pen? Is that the nature of transition, or...

Well, I go from pencil to pen and then to my old, battered Hermes. How many thousand? It's called Hermes 2000, yeah. Mhm.

Hard to get it repaired, probably.

Very. I've learned how to repair it myself. I do. I manage small repairs pretty well.

The moment I stopped using my electric typewriter was when I couldn't get it repaired anymore. I decided to use the computer.

I didn't realize that you couldn't repair.

Well, probably some place. I used to go to the one in the flat iron building and they closed. They decided to repair printers, instead.

I have acquired two electric typewriters in my life, and I never managed to become efficient with either one of them.

Do you write mostly here or in your summer place? Or is there no difference there.

Oh, there's no difference. I write both. Both places, yeah. And even when I'm not writing, I'm thinking about writing, so it doesn't make much difference.

Do you still have your garden up there?

I still have my garden up to me. Uh-huh. And to me it's a part of my creative life just as much as language is.

Part of your alliance with the natural world.

Yeah. Mhm. May I ask, what sort of piece are you thinking about, I mean, in terms of its direction or content?

Well, I want to do some sort of piece about Poets House and I missed most of the, sort of, celebrations in April, which is Poetry Month.

Oh, I wish you'd been there.

But I can reflect on that and then the idea that you talk about. You as the house poet. Would be really interesting. Why is April Poetry Month? It's the cruelest month as we know. Why is April Poetry Month? Do you know? Where did that choice ever come from?

I didn't quite catch that.

Why is April Poetry Month.

Oh, April, Poetry Month.

We know it's the cruelest month.

Well, so is poetry. Maybe that---I hadn't thought of that affinity. But obviously the springtime association is essential to understanding that.

What are the things they were looking forward to again at the Poetry House? Was there a walk across the bridge?

Yes. I think that's an imagative and beautiful ritual. I think of it as ritual.

Do you still go on that?

Oh yeah, I go. But I don't walk across the bridge. I'm in a car.

Well, that's the privileges of age.

I think so. One of the few I ask.

No other privileges of age?

Privileges of age are, I think that one has earned a certain degree of independence that one can do what one pleases. Even with one's work. And one isn't likely to be challenged in the way you are in your youth when you first publish your poems and get a response that is usually called diffidence.

You suffered from diffidence at one point. You outlived diffidence.

I think so. Not necessarily dislike of a poem. There are critics who are essentially negative for almost any poet or any poem that is not in a familiar track. And I think they have that privilege, too.

Did you have to read the cover review in the Times Book Review last Sunday of a book of poetry by, what's his name, Maria Ponsa. Is that her name? I thought that was a very strange review.

Yes, I read that. So did I.

It was very patronizing.

It somewhat surprised me in many, many ways. But after all, that's what a review is privileged to. And an editorial privilege.

But the rare time they would put a book of poetry on the front page, I would have expected they would have had a real poet or a student of poetry review it.

I didn't quite understand that.

This was like patronizing such a thing. Well, you folks out there might not understand what poetry is about, but you know, instead of roll up your sleeves, and...

I think it was the editorial handling of the poem that surprised me more than anything else. Not so much that the review was strange. It wasn't. It was obviously a very positive review.

Yes. Well, that's also the issue, that poets would suffer from not being reviewed by major institutions like the Times and the New York Review of Books and so on, and they'd be sliding in there. But that's always been--

Of course most poets, I think, feel that the Times is not as supportive of poetry as it should be. And I tend to agree with that.

Okay, I won't keep you too long.

I'm glad you're doing this piece, and I know that it means a great deal to Poets House and therefore to the perpetuaton of poetry in New York, which after all is the capital of poetry in the United States. And there are so many fine poets living in this city. I'm really amazing whenever I'm part of a gathering of poets, how superior they are to any comparable group that might have gathered here in any other period in our history. And I think nearly all poets feel that New York is the capital of the poetry world.

Are there many poets downtown here?

Pardon?

Are there many poets around here? Downtown here?

Yes. I don't know all of them but many of them meet me in the street and invent themselves or present themselves. Who knows what. But it's an extraordinary experience to be walking in the village here these days and the number of persons who greet you. And I don't think of myself as a public person but obviously poetry is part of the life in this village, as I guess it always has been, and it's the reason I came here in 1928, which is a long time ago.

Did you come to the village?

I came to the village immediately. And in fact I found a basement apartment on 9th street between 5th and 6th. I was paying $25 a month because I was in the back room with the basement and there was a noisy tenant in the front. The noise lasted all night, and one day I pounded on the door and, much to my amazement, the door opened and there was a bartender in his white jacket and he said, "Buddy, what's the trouble?" And I said, "I'm trying to sleep, that's the trouble." And I was working, and I had an office job. And he said, "Well, I don't know what I can do about the noise, but I tell you what: anytime you want a drink,"--this is a speakeasy, of course--"just come in. I'll be glad to give you anything you like." That was our agreement, and it worked out very well. And I slept better ever after.

And so I remember Marianne Moore used to live on 9th Street. Didn't she? And E.E. Cummings and Patchenplace and other poets.

Both of whom I got to know eventually. Both of them.

In our house on 10th Street, at one point, Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles both lived there.

Oh, that must have been interesting. What year was that?

This was in the late 40s, about '48, '49. They both lived there and Dashell Hammet lived in our apartment at that point. Did you know them at all?

The Bowles? No. No, I didn't. I'm sorry, I didn't.

But you did know Marianne Moore and E.E. Cummings.

Cummings I knew very well. He was a good friend. And Marianne Moore was one of the first to publish me in The Dial. I've ever been grateful for her. I'll tell you another story about her.

When I was in the Army, World War II, my last year in the army, '45, I received a communication from the Guggenheim Foundation that they were giving me a grant. And I couldn't imagine, because I'd never applied for it, why I was getting a grant. Eventually, I plucked up my nerve and did inquire. It turned out that Marianna Moore had, on her own initiative, applied for me, while I was in the service. That was a dear gift.

Very good.

Well, I think you've explored whatever you need to explore.

Would you mind signing here?

Yes. I wouldn't mind at all. Let me see. Do you have a pen?

Yes, right here.

Now, how do you like to be identified? Shall I? You're Mel Gussow.

Gussow. Yes.

I've often wondered how you pronounce your name. It is Gussow. U-S-S-O-W.

Right. And it's basically Russian derivation.

Probably with Gussoff. And it's one L.

M-E-L. One L.

I have to get my glasses. I think I'll go over to that table there where I'll be able to put it.

Okay.

...

And look at the Times to find the date.

I don't know what it is.

Thank you so much.

Oh, be sure to return your pen! I'm always acquiring pens.

Tell me, do you--Thank you so much--Do you shop at Jefferson market?

Yes, I do. Jefferson Market, Food Emporium. And the garden.

Well, thank you so much.

Well, thank you. Such a prime day. Bye now. Where do you live? You still live...

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