Annotations for Speakers: Stanley Kunitz

Here since '77.

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

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

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

That's a hard question.

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?

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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."

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.

Yes.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Mhm. Yes.

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

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

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's very willful. Unpredictable.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Oh, yes. Mhm.

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.

Pardon me?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Oh, I wish you'd been there.

I didn't quite catch that.

Oh, April, Poetry Month.

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

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

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

I think so. One of the few I ask.

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.

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.

Yes, I read that. So did I.

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

I didn't quite understand that.

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.

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.

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.

Pardon?

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Probably with Gussoff. And it's 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.

And look at the Times to find the date.

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

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

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