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This interview took place during the winter of 1977 in Stanley Kunitz' brownstone in New York City's Greenwich Village. The apartment's ceilings are high. A number of modern paintings cover the height of the walls, fitted together in a great mosaic. Many are inscribed from artists of the New York School, the so-called Irascibles—Kline, Motherwell, Rothko, among them. Kunitz' wife is the distinguished painter, Elise Asher. Included in the collection are works which the poet confesses are his own—assemblages in the manner of Joseph Cornell composed of American folk-art items.

Kunitz, slightly stooped from a bout of arthritis, is now in his seventies. The summer before, at his Provincetown home on Cape Cod, he had been obliged to hire a gardener to help him with his weeding. He had been equally depressed at having to give up tennis: he could no longer play fiercely, and therefore it was not so much fun to play. But once, as he likes to recall, he could justly claim the tennis championship of the poetry world.

Certainly as regards his own craft Kunitz is in the first rank. “A reassurance as to what poetry can be in these times,” Richard Wilbur wrote of The Testing-Tree in 1971. The works which confirm this include Intellectual ThingsPassport to the WarSelected Poems (which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1959), The Testing-Tree, and this year's collection, The Poems of Stanley Kunitz (1928-78).

In recent years Kunitz has edited The Yale Series of Younger Poets, served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, and taught at a number of universities, including Bennington, Brandeis, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia. He is currently senior professor in the graduate writing program at Columbia.

He is the recipient of many honors—a member of the American Academy of Art and Letters and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Much of the year he spends in Cape Cod, where he works with the The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a resident community of young artists and writers. As is suggested in the interview which follows, he thinks highly of the farming profession.

The interview consolidates two long afternoons of taping. Late on the second day, after hours of talking with occasional sips of akvavit (the glasses were a gift from e.e. cummings), there came the voices of children echoing in the neighboring school courtyard. The poet switched on a light at his desk. Something that had been said induced him to search through a wilderness of papers for his copy of Hopkins. Instantly the book was opened to the proper page, and with a deep resonance, he began reading one of the Terrible Sonnets. This was the privileged moment for the interviewer. There is unfortunately no way to reproduce how Kunitz made the lines ring with emotion. But subsequently, when the tapes were played, the transcriber's dog, customarily indifferent to mechanical sounds, pricked up his ears at the harrowing hiss of the sonnet's last words: “The lost are like this, and their scourge to be / As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.”

 

INTERVIEWER

Is it an actual fact, as you indicate in “The Portrait,” that your father killed himself in a public park some months before you were born?

KUNITZ

I really didn't know too much about it. It floated in the air during my childhood. I never had any specific information. I didn't know the exact details until I happened to be in Worcester, reading. I went over to the city hall and asked for my father's death certificate and there it was. Age 39. Death by suicide. Carbolic acid. It would have torn his guts out. Strong stuff. I'm not sure how I learned he did it in a park. Maybe my older sister told me. That scene has always haunted me. There's a reference to it in a poem called “The Hemorrhage.” He becomes the fallen king, a Christ figure. My original title was “The Man in the Park.”

INTERVIEWER

Your father has always figured strongly in your poetry, and he continues to do so in The Testing-Tree. But I noticed here, for the first time, that your mother asserts a prominence.

KUNITZ

That's true. My mother has become closer to me in recent years. I understand her more than I did in the beginning. There were two strong wills in that household, hers and mine, so that our natural tensions were magnified. We held each other at a distance. She was the most competent woman I have ever known—I respected that. But it took years—after her death at eighty-six—for me to be touched by the beauty and bravery of her spirit.

INTERVIEWER

In The Testing-Tree, though, there isn't quite that portrait of her. She seems a woman of unforgiveness. She is “a grey eye peeping.” She guards you joylessly. In “The Portrait” she refuses to forgive your father for killing himself.

KUNITZ

Well, she was unconcessive in many ways. And it's true that she refused ever to speak to me about my father. She obliterated every trace of him. In her very last years, at my request, she began writing her memoirs. It's a remarkable document, which I will someday use in one form or other. She is fresh and vital writing about her childhood in Russia. And her emigration to this country. And her work as an operator in the sweatshops of New York's lower East Side. About everything until she moved to Worcester. Until she met my father. Then she froze, and wrote no more.

INTERVIEWER

Where in Russia did she come from?

KUNITZ

Lithuania.

INTERVIEWER

Did she speak Lithuanian or Russian at home?

KUNITZ

No. She spoke English, though she was twenty-three when she came here in 1890, with no knowledge of the language. She went to night school, read a good deal, educated herself.

INTERVIEWER

Was there much discussion of Russian writers in your house, as a boy?

KUNITZ

Not a great deal. But there was a good library. For that period and for that middle-class world, rather exceptional. There was a complete set of Tolstoy, complete Dickens, complete Shakespeare. An unabridged dictionary. A big illustrated Bible—both Testaments. A lot of history, history of all nations. The classic books. Gibbon. Goethe. Dante's Inferno illustrated by Gustave Doré. There was a sense of civilization there.

INTERVIEWER

You say very directly in “An Old Cracked Tune” that “my mother's breast was thorny, /and father I had none.” Is this comfortless situation based simply on her attitude toward your father or did it arrive out of your relationship with her?

KUNITZ

My mother was a working woman, absent all day—in that era a rare phenomenon. She was one of the pioneer business women, a dress designer and manufacturer. I was always left in the care of others and didn't have an intimate day-to-day contact with her. When she came home in the evening, she was tired and easily vexed, impatient with my moodiness. She was not one to demonstrate affection physically—in fact, I don't recall ever being kissed by her during my childhood. Yet I never doubted her fierce love for me. And pride in me for my little scholastic triumphs and early literary productions.

INTERVIEWER

My favorite poem of yours is “King of the River,” and I believe my reason is that the salmon, ostensibly the subject of the poem, is half-fish, half-Kunitz. Could we talk a little about how the poem came into being?

KUNITZ

What triggered “King of the River,” I recall, was a brief report in Time of some new research on the aging process of the Pacific salmon. I wrote the poem in Provincetown one fall—my favorite writing season. The very first lines came to me with their conditional syntax and suspended clauses, a winding and falling movement. The rest seemed to flow, maybe because I'm never very far from the creature world. Some of my deepest feelings have to do with plants and animals. In my bad times they've sustained me. It may be pertinent that I experienced a curious elation while confronting the unpleasant reality of being mortal, the inexorable process of my own decay. Perhaps I had managed to “distance” my fate—the salmon was doing my dying for me.

A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of. It takes on a life and a will of its own. It might have proceeded differently—towards catastrophe, resignation, terror, despair—and I still would have to claim it. Valéry said that poetry is a language within a language. It is also a language beyond language, a meta-medium—that is, metabolic, metaphoric, metamorphic. A poet's collected work is his book of changes. The great meditations on death have a curious exaltation. I suppose it comes from the realization, even on the threshold, that one isn't done with one's changes.