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Biography

Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, the youngest of three children, to Yetta Helen (née Jasspon) and Solomon Z. Kunitz,[2] both of Jewish Russian Lithuanian descent.[3]

His father, a dressmaker of Russian Jewish heritage,[3] committed suicide in a public park six weeks before Stanley was born.[4] After going bankrupt, he went to Elm Park in Worcester,[5] and drank carbolic acid.[6] His mother removed every trace of Kunitz's father from the household.[4] The death of his father would be a powerful influence of his life.[7]

Kunitz and his two older sisters, Sarah and Sophia, were raised by his mother, who had made her way from Yashwen, Kovno, Lithuania by herself in 1890,[8] and opened a dry goods store.[9] Yetta remarried to Mark Dine in 1912. Yetta and Mark filed for bankruptcy in 1912 and then were indicted by the U.S. District Court for concealing assets. They pled guilty and turned over USD$10,500 to the trustees.[10] Mark Dine died when Kunitz was fourteen,[2] when, while hanging curtains, he suffered a heart attack.[11]

At fifteen, Kunitz moved out of the house and became a butcher's assistant.[2] Later he got a job as a cub reporter on The Worcester Telegram, where he would continue working during his summer vacations from college.[2]

Kunitz graduated summa cum laude in 1926 from Harvard College with an English major and a philosophy minor,[2] and then earned a master's degree in English from Harvard the following year. He wanted to continue his studies for a doctorate degree, but was told by the university that the Anglo-Saxon students would not like to be taught by a Jew.[2]

After Harvard, he worked as a reporter for The Worcester Telegram, and as editor for the H. W. Wilson Company in New York City. He then founded and edited Wilson Library Bulletin and started the Author Biographical Studies.[2] Kunitz married Helen Pearce in 1930;[2] they divorced in 1937.[12] In 1935 he moved to New Hope, Pennsylvania and befriended Theodore Roethke.[12] He married Eleanor Evans in 1939; they had a daughter Gretchen in 1950.[12] Kunitz divorced Eleanor in 1958.[13]

At Wilson Company, Kunitz served as co-editor for Twentieth Century Authors, among other reference works. In 1931, as Dilly Tante, he edited Living Authors, a Book of Biographies. His poems began to appear in Poetry, Commonweal, The New Republic, The Nation, and The Dial.

During World War II, he was drafted into the Army in 1943 as a conscientious objector, and after undergoing basic training three times, served as a noncombatant at Gravely Point, Washington in the Air Transport Command in charge of information and education. He refused a commission and was discharged with the rank of staff sergeant.[12]

After the war, he began a teaching career at Bennington College (1946–1949; taking over from his friend Roethke[12]), New York State Teachers College in Potsdam, New York, New School for Social Research, University of Washington, Queens College, Vassar, Brandeis, Yale, Rutgers, and a 22-year stint at Columbia University.

After his divorce from Eleanor, he married the painter and poet Elise Asher (January 15, 1912 – March 8, 2004[14]) in 1958.[13] Elise had been previously married to artist Nanno de Groot. His marriage to Asher led to friendships with artists like Philip Guston and Mark Rothko.[13]

Kunitz's poetry won wide praise for its profoundity and quality. He was the New York State Poet Laureate from 1987 to 1989.[15] He continued to write and publish until his centenary year, as late as 2005. Many consider that his poetry's symbolism is influenced significantly by the work of Carl Jung. Kunitz influenced many 20th-century poets, including James Wright, Mark Doty, Louise Glück, and Carolyn Kizer.

His second wife, artist Elise Asher, died at the age of 92 at her home in Greenwich Village in 2004.[16]

For most of his life, Kunitz divided his time between New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts. He enjoyed gardening and maintained one of the most impressive seaside gardens in Provincetown. There he also founded Fine Arts Work Center, where he was a mainstay of the literary community, as he was of Poets House in Manhattan.

He was awarded the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience award in Sherborn, Massachusetts in October 1998 for his contribution to the liberation of the human spirit through his poetry.[17]

He died in 2006 at his home in Manhattan.[18] He had previously come close to death, and reflected on the experience in his last book, a collection of essays, The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden.

Poetry

Kunitz's first collection of poems, Intellectual Things, was published in 1930. His second volume of poems, Passport to the War, was published fourteen years later; the book went largely unnoticed, although it featured some of Kunitz's best-known poems, and soon fell out of print. Kunitz's confidence was not in the best of shape when, in 1959, he had trouble finding a publisher for his third book, Selected Poems: 1928-1958. Despite this unflattering experience, the book, eventually published by Little Brown, received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

The Testing-Tree - (partial excerpt)

In a murderous time

the heart breaks and breaks

and lives by breaking.

It is necessary to go

through dark and deeper dark

and not to turn.

~ Stanley Kunitz

His next volume of poems would not appear until 1971, but Kunitz remained busy through the 1960s editing reference books and translating Russian poets. When twelve years later The Testing Tree appeared, Kunitz's style was radically transformed from the highly intellectual and philosophical musings of his earlier work to more deeply personal yet disciplined narratives; moreover, his lines shifted from iambic pentameter to a freer prosody based on instinct and breath usually resulting in shorter stressed lines of three or four beats.

Throughout the 70s and 80s, he became one of the most treasured and distinctive voices in American poetry. His collection Passing Through: The Later Poems won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1995.[19] Kunitz received many other honors, including a National Medal of Arts, the Bollingen Prize for a lifetime achievement in poetry, the Robert Frost Medal, and Harvard's Centennial Medal. He served two terms as Consultant on Poetry for the Library of Congress (the precursor title to Poet Laureate), one term as Poet Laureate of the United States, and one term as the State Poet of New York. He founded the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Poets House in New York City. Kunitz also acted as a judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition.

Library Bill of Rights

Kunitz served as editor of the Wilson Library Bulletin from 1928 to 1943. An outspoken critic of censorship, in his capacity as editor, he targeted his criticism at librarians who did not actively oppose it. He published an article in 1938 by Bernard Berelson entitled "The Myth of Library Impartiality". This article led Forrest Spaulding and the Des Moines Public Library to draft the Library Bill of Rights, which was later adopted by the American Library Association and continues to serve as the cornerstone document on intellectual freedom in libraries.[20][21]

Awards and honors

2006 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award, The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden

Bibliography

Poetry

The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden (2005)

The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz (NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000)

Passing Through, The Later Poems, New and Selected (NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995) winner of the National Book Award[19]

Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays (1985)

The Wellfleet Whale and Companion Poems

The Terrible Threshold

The Coat without a Seam

The Poems of Stanley Kunitz (1928–1978) (1978)

The Testing-Tree (1971)

Selected Poems, 1928-1958 (1958)

Passport to the War (1944)

Intellectual Things (1930)

Other writing and interviews:

Conversations with Stanley Kunitz (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, Literary Conversations Series, 11/2013), Edited by Kent P. Ljungquist

A Kind of Order, A Kind of Folly: Essays and Conversations'

Interviews and Encounters with Stanley Kunitz (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: The Sheep Meadow Press, 1995), Edited by Stanley Moss

As editor, translator, or co-translator:

The Essential Blake

Orchard Lamps by Ivan Drach

Story under full sail by Andrei Voznesensky

Poems of John Keats

Poems of Akhmatova by Max Hayward

Passing Through

Nobody in the widow's household

ever celebrated anniversaries.

In the secrecy of my room

I would not admit I cared

that my friends were given parties.

Before I left town for school

my birthday went up in smoke

in a fire at City Hall that gutted

the Department of Vital Statistics.

If it weren't for a census report

of a five-year-old White Male

sharing my mother's address

at the Green Street tenement in Worcester

I'd have no documentary proof

that I exist.

You are the first,

my dear, to bully me

into these festive occasions.

Sometimes, you say, I wear

an abstracted look that drives you

up the wall, as though it signified

distress or disaffection.

Don't take it so to heart.

Maybe I enjoy not-being as much

as being who I am.

Maybe

it's time for me to practice

growing old.

The way I look

at it, I'm passing through a phase:

gradually I'm changing to a word.

Whatever you choose to claim

of me is always yours:

nothing is truly mine

except my name.

I only

borrowed this dust.

Written by Stanley Kunitz

The Science Of The Night

I touch you in the night, whose gift was you,

My careless sprawler,

And I touch you cold, unstirring, star-bemused,

That have become the land of your self-strangeness.

What long seduction of the bone has led you

Down the imploring roads I cannot take

Into the arms of ghosts I never knew,

Leaving my manhood on a rumpled field

To guard you where you lie so deep

In absent-mindedness,

Caught in the calcium snows of sleep?

And even should I track you to your birth

Through all the cities of your mortal trial,

As in my jealous thought I try to do,

You would escape me--from the brink of earth

Take off to where the lawless auroras run,

You with your wild and metaphysic heart.

My touch is on you, who are light-years gone.

We are not souls but systems, and we move

In clouds of our unknowing

like great nebulae.

Our very motives swirl and have their start

With father lion and with mother crab.

Dreamer, my own lost rib,

Whose planetary dust is blowing

Past archipelagoes of myth and light

What far Magellans are you mistress of

To whom you speed the pleasure of your art?

As through a glass that magnifies my loss

I see the lines of your spectrum shifting red,

The universe expanding, thinning out,

Our worlds flying, oh flying, fast apart.

From hooded powers and from abstract flight

I summon you, your person and your pride.

Fall to me now from outer space,

Still fastened desperately to my side;

Through gulfs of streaming air

Bring me the mornings of the milky ways

Down to my threshold in your drowsy eyes;

And by the virtue of your honeyed word

Restore the liquid language of the moon,

That in gold mines of secrecy you delve.

Awake!

My whirling hands stay at the noon,

Each cell within my body holds a heart

And all my hearts in unison strike twelve.

Written by Stanley Kunitz

King of the River

If the water were clear enough,

if the water were still,

but the water is not clear,

the water is not still,

you would see yourself,

slipped out of your skin,

nosing upstream,

slapping, thrashing,

tumbling

over the rocks

till you paint them

with your belly's blood:

Finned Ego,

yard of muscle that coils,

uncoils.

If the knowledge were given you,

but it is not given,

for the membrane is clouded

with self-deceptions

and the iridescent image swims

through a mirror that flows,

you would surprise yourself

in that other flesh

heavy with milt,

bruised, battering toward the dam

that lips the orgiastic pool.

Come.

Bathe in these waters.

Increase and die.

If the power were granted you

to break out of your cells,

but the imagination fails

and the doors of the senses close

on the child within,

you would dare to be changed,

as you are changing now,

into the shape you dread

beyond the merely human.

A dry fire eats you.

Fat drips from your bones.

The flutes of your gills discolor.

You have become a ship for parasites.

The great clock of your life

is slowing down,

and the small clocks run wild.

For this you were born.

You have cried to the wind

and heard the wind's reply:

"I did not choose the way,

the way chose me.

"

You have tasted the fire on your tongue

till it is swollen black

with a prophetic joy:

"Burn with me!

The only music is time,

the only dance is love.

"

If the heart were pure enough,

but it is not pure,

you would admit

that nothing compels you

any more, nothing

at all abides,

but nostalgia and desire,

the two-way ladder

between heaven and hell.

On the threshold

of the last mystery,

at the brute absolute hour,

you have looked into the eyes

of your creature self,

which are glazed with madness,

and you say

he is not broken but endures,

limber and firm

in the state of his shining,

forever inheriting his salt kingdom,

from which he is banished

forever.

Written by Stanley Kunitz

First Love

At his incipient sun

The ice of twenty winters broke,

Crackling, in her eyes.

Her mirroring, still mind,

That held the world (made double) calm,

Went fluid, and it ran.

There was a stir of music,

Mixed with flowers, in her blood;

A swift impulsive balm

From obscure roots;

Gold bees of clinging light

Swarmed in her brow.

Her throat is full of songs,

She hums, she is sensible of wings

Growing on her heart.

She is a tree in spring

Trembling with the hope of leaves,

Of which the leaves are tongues.

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