The Unstill Light: A Tribute to Poet Stanley Kunitz

Stanley Kunitz, The Unstill Light, illuminated language in his poetry like no other, yet never  stood still in his artistic evolution. A former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, Kunitz was a poet among poets. Though he started writing as a child, he received many awards later in his life. He won a Pulitzer Prize and twice served as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress (a role now known as U.S. poet laureate). He was born on July 29, 1905 in Worcester, Massachusetts and died May 14, 2006 in New York.

I first heard of Stanley Kunitz from a book entitled In The Palm of Your Hand by Steve Kowit. This book, known as “the poet’s portable workshop”, proved to be a valuable asset as I worked to enhance my skills as a poet. After researching Stanley Kunitz I decided to purchase one of his books, The Collected Poems. I must say that I have not been disappointed. Kunitz’s portfolio is vast and worthy of recognition among the greatest poets in history. You may order The Collected Poems and other books by Kunitz at The Collected Poems: Kunitz, Stanley: 9780393322941: Amazon.com: Books.   

Born in Worcester, Mass., in 1905, Kunitz was raised by his mother, an immigrant dressmaker from Lithuania. Kunitz’s father took his own life by drinking carbolic acid six weeks before Kunitz was born, and his mother, as Kunitz wrote in “The Portrait,” “locked his name /in her deepest cabinet/and would not let him out/though I could hear him thumping.” This poem is included at the end of this blog.

Kunitz began to write poetry in grade school, and was praised for it in those earlier days of his childhood. “My teachers were always saying things,” Kunitz recalled in a 2000 interview with The Associated Press. “They said, ’Stanley, you’re going to be a poet.’ I was told that a dozen times. And so I began to believe it.”

Kunitz and his two older sisters, Sarah and Sophia, were raised by his mother. She remarried in 1910 to Mark Dine. The couple filed for bankruptcy in 1912 and then were indicted for concealing assets. They pleaded guilty and turned over $10,500 to the trustees. Mark Dine died when Kunitz was fourteen; he had a heart attack while hanging curtains.

At fifteen, Kunitz moved out of the house and became a butcher's assistant. Later he got a job as a cub reporter on The Worcester Telegram, where he continued working during his summer vacations from college.

He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University and got his master’s degree there. He expected to be invited to stay on as an assistant, until a professor told him that the white Anglo-Saxon students there would resent being taught by a Jew. “That really almost broke my heart. And I think in the end it probably did me a great favor,” Kunitz said. “Because, it prevented me from becoming a completely preoccupied scholar.”

After leaving school, Kunitz worked as a newspaper reporter and editor in Worcester and continued writing verse. He was just 25 when “Intellectual Things” came out, but surviving remained a struggle. He supported himself by editing literary reference books and making unsuccessful attempts at farming.

Stanley Kunitz as a young man in deep thought.

Kunitz was a conscientious objector during World War II, but was drafted anyway. The Army didn’t know what to do with him. They switched him around a few times, and he landed at a largely black camp in North Carolina where he dug latrines most of the time and, since a lot of the men there didn’t understand what the war was all about, Kunitz started a magazine he hoped would explain why.

“It certainly affected my work in many ways to undergo that whole process and to be in a sense aware of the complications of one’s feelings,” recalled Kunitz, who would often write about his war experiences.

“My feeling was I would never kill another human being. How could I fight in this war? But I realized the war had to be fought, to end the horrible possibility of the fascists taking over. It was a tremendous dilemma.”

Though he taught at many schools over the years, including Bennington College, Brandeis College and Columbia University, he refused to accept tenure for fear it would make him a professor who wrote poetry instead of a poet who occasionally taught.

“Selected Poems: 1928-1958” won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1959. His collection of poems, “Passing Through,” won the National Book Award in 1995. Two years earlier, he was awarded the National Medal of the Arts. Find more at Stanley Kunitz | The Poetry Foundation

An older, wiser Stanley Kunitz.

Kunitz spent much of his latter years in Provincetown, Mass., where he bought a home in 1962 and lived with his third wife, Elise Asher, an artist and poet who died in 2004. Her work adorns the cover of several of Kunitz’s books.

In some ways, he maintained a quiet, contemplative life, working for hours at night on an old manual typewriter, and by day nurturing his beloved garden in Provincetown, Mass. But he also helped found two writing centers. Kunitz helped start the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and in New York, at age 80, he co-founded Poets House, an archive and literary center. Louise Gluck, Denis Johnson and Yusef Komunyakaa are among the writers he helped early in their careers. Learn more here at Stanley Kunitz - Wikipedia.

Shortly before his 100th birthday, “The Wild Braid” was published, featuring poems, photographs of Kunitz in his garden and his reflections on gardening, art and the end of life. “Death is absolutely essential for the survival of life itself on the planet,” he said, explaining his acceptance of mortality. “It would become full of old wrecks, dominating the population.”

“I think all artists, and especially poets, are forever in search of a community,” Kunitz said. “It’s a solitary act, and you need a community of like-minded souls to survive and to flourish. So the search for a community is really a lifetime engagement.

Over time, his verse simplified, crystalized, with Kunitz once observing that he had learned to “strip the water out of my poems.” Kunitz was a gifted writer by anyone’s standard, and his work lives on today and will forever as one of America’s most acclaimed poets. Please take a moment and read two of his most popular poems below.

The Portrait

My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave moustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.

End of Summer

An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.

I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.

Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was forever over.

Already the iron door of the North
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.