Arts Entertain
An Elegant Legacy
Finishing his tenure as Poet Laureate, nonagenarian
Stanley Kunitz continues to inspire generations of writers,
as a new collection of his poetry attests.
a
GEORGE ROBINSON
Special to the Jewish News
teat artists, as they grow
old, refine their tools, pare
down their technical
resources so that they can
concentrate on their great themes with
a sort of crystallized purity of method.
Beethoven, no longer able to express
his deepest feelings with the orchestra
alone, returned in his final symphony
to the human voice. Orson Welles dis-
carded the bravura style of his early
films to concentrate on the landscape
of the human face. Paul Cezanne
reduced his luscious still lifes and
landscapes to an abstract geometrical
music.
Reading Stanley Kunitz's recently
published The C011ected Poems (WW.
Norton; 285 pp; $27.95), one is
reminded of this process of reduction
and refinement.
The book's earliest poems, long out
of print, are flashy technical feats,
. loaded with complex rhyme schemes,
densely allusive imagery, echoes of
Keats and Blake (poets that Kunitz has
anthologized) and the metaphysical
poets.
But there is something detached,
unfelt about these poems. The title of
Kunitz's first collection, Intellectual
Things, published in 1930 when he
was only 25, is very telling. There is so
much form on display, so little feeling.
These early lyrics are accomplished,
often wittily anti-romantic, particular-
ly when Kunitz is animadverting to his
sexual longings. But they have the
somewhat arch, studied quality of the
apprentice work of a bright grad stu-
dent, riffling through classical allu-
sions and twisted syntax like a card
mechanic working a marked deck.
And it was all so long ago.
Poet Laureate
Bear in mind that Stanley Kunitz, now
George Robinson is a New York-based
freelance writer. A version of this article
originally appeared in Jbooks. corn.
Medal of the Arts in 1993.
A founder of the Fine Arts Work
Center in Provincetown, Mass., and
Poets House in New York City, he
taught for many years in the graduate
writing program at Columbia
University. He splits his time between
Provincetown and New York City.
His books of poetry include Passing
Through: The Later Poems, New and
Selected, which won the National
Book Award, and The Poems of Stanley
Kunitz, 1928-1978, which won the
Pulitzer Prize.
In other words, he's been there,
done that.
Honing His Craft
Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz: ""Everything affects poetry, including rap.
I don't doubt that the poetry of the future [will be] influenced by the rap
culture — just as in the 19th century poets who really initiated the
Romantic movement were influenced by the street ballads."
almost 96 years of age, published the
first of his 10 books of poetry during
the Hoover administration. He has
received every major award and honor
an American poet can acquire, includ-
ing his appointment as Poet Laureate
Consultant in Poetry to the Library of
Congress for 2000-2001. (Kunitz
served previously in the post from
1974-1976, when the position was
still called "Consultant in Poetry.")
Said Librarian of Congress James
Billington when appointing the 10th
poet laureate since 1985, and the old-
est individual to hold the post:
"Stanley Kunitz continues to be a
mentor and model for several genera-
tions of poets, and brings uniquely to
the office of Poet Laureate a full life-
time of commitment to poetry."
Kunitz succeeded another Jewish
poet laureate, Robert Pinsky, who
served three years. It was recently
announced that Billy Collins, 60, a
college professor at Lehman College in
the Bronx, where he has taught for 30
years, is to serve as the next poet laure-
ate of the United States beginning in
October.
Kunitz's accolades include a Ford
Foundation grant, a Guggenheim
Foundation fellowship, Harvard's
Centennial Medal, the Levinson Prize,
the Bollingen Prize, the Harriet
Monroe Poetry Award, a senior fellow-
ship from the National Endowment
for the Arts and the Shelley Memorial
Award. He was designated State Poet
of New York and is a Chancellor
Emeritus of The Academy of
American Poets. President Clinton
presented him with the National
But in the midst of being and doing,
Kunitz honed his craft through a
process of elimination. Reading The
Collected Poems, one watches as he
strips away the old tools one by one.
First the bent syntax, then the com-
plex rhyme schemes, eventually rhyme
itself, and finally the Latinate words
— reinventing himself as a leaner,
more easily expressive poet, all the
while exploring the themes that ani-
mated his work from the start.
Consider the opening stanza of the
early poem "I Dreamed That I Was
Old":
"I dreamed that I was old: in stale
declension/Fallen from my prime,
when company/Was mine, cat-nimble-
ness, and green invention,/Before time
took my leafy hours away"
Four decades later, pondering the
same theme in his late 60s, Kunitz
would write in "The Layers":
"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"
Kunitz has gone from being an oh-
so-clever young man to a genuinely
wise older one, and his choice of lan-
guage communicates that transforma-
tion instantly.
The poet described his transforma-
tion in an interview published in 1997
in American Poet. "Through the years
I've tried to simplify the surface of my
poems. I've tried to write more inti-
mately than I did, in a more conversa-
tional tone."
Many of the later poems, beginning
with the 1971 collection The Testing
Tree, are ample testimony to the right-
ness of that choice. Kunitz's love
poems have a buoyant sensuality, a
slightly distanced appreciation of the
physical side of love, and that appreci-
ation gains in depth as the means of