Stanley Kunitz

“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.”

“Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died.They are only sleeping at the bottom of your mind,waiting for our call. We have need for them.They represent the wisdom of our race.”

“There's grammar in my bones!”

“TransformationsAll night he ran, his body air, But that was in another year. Lately the answered shape of his laughter, The shape of his smallest word, is fire. He who is a fierce young crier Of poems will be as tranquil as water, Keeping, in sunset glow, the pure Image of limitless desire; Then enter earth and come to be, Inch by inch, geography.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I have walked through many lives,some of them my own,and I am not who I was,though some principle of beingabides, from which I strugglenot to stray.”

“The LayersI have walked through many lives,some of them my own,and I am not who I was,though some principle of beingabides, from which I strugglenot to stray.When I look behind,as I am compelled to lookbefore I can gather strengthto proceed on my journey,I see the milestones dwindlingtoward the horizonand the slow fires trailingfrom the abandoned camp-sites,over which scavenger angelswheel on heavy wings.Oh, I have made myself a tribeout of my true affections,and my tribe is scattered!How shall the heart be reconciledto its feast of losses?In a rising windthe manic dust of my friends,those who fell along the way,bitterly stings my face.Yet I turn, I turn,exulting somewhat,with my will intact to gowherever I need to go,and every stone on the roadprecious to me.In my darkest night,when the moon was coveredand I roamed through wreckage,a nimbus-clouded voicedirected me:“Live in the layers,not on the litter.”Though I lack the artto decipher it,no doubt the next chapterin my book of transformationsis already written.I am not done with my changes.”

“The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.”

“Forward my mail to Mars.”

“When, on your dangerous mission gone,You underrate our foes as dunces,Be wary, not of sudden gun,But of your partner at the dances.”

“When they shall paint our sockets grayAnd light us like a stinking fuse,Remember that we once could say,Yesterday we had a world to lose.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Toward dawn we shared with youyour hour of desolation,the huge lingering passionof your unearthly out cry,as you swung your blind headtowards us and laboriously openeda bloodshot, glistening eye,in which we swam with terror and recognition.”

“Darling, do you rememberthe man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.”

“Miss Murphy in first gradewrote its name in chalkacross the board and told usit was roaring down the storm tracksof the milky way at frightful speedand if it wandered off its courseand smashed into the earththere'd be no school tomorrow.”

“...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.”

“You must be careful not to deprive the poem of its wild origin.”

“Be what you are. Give What is yours to give. Have Style. Dare.”

“I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.”

“I refuse to turn to theology to justify the life or redeem it. There is a question always of the connection to the eternal. I say to myself above all, keep alive your conviction that there are sacred elements in the life in the practice of the life that must be respected. But the conviction in the existence of the sacred does not necessarily imply that you need to believe in a creator, because we are the ones that made the sacred.”

“End with an image and don't explain.”

“In my darkest night,when the moon was coveredand I roamed through wreckage,a nimbus-clouded voicedirected me:“Live in the layers,not on the litter.”Though I lack the artto decipher it,no doubt the next chapterin my book of transformationsis already written.I am not done with my changes.”

“What makes the engine go?Desire, desire, desire.”

“When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself... That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitiude for the gift of life.”

“the heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking.It is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn.from “The Testing Tree”