Conversations with Stanley Kunitz

Kent P. Ljungquist

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781496809612
• eBook ISBN: 9781628468106
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

"He again tops the crowd—he surpasses himself, the old iron brought to the white heat of simplicity." That's what Robert Lowell said of the poetry of Stanley Kunitz (1905–2006) and his evolving artistry. The interviews and conversations contained in this volume derive from four decades of Kunitz's distinguished career. They touch on aesthetic motifs in his poetry, the roots of his work, his friendships in the sister arts of painting and sculpture, his interactions with Lowell and Theodore Roethke, and his comments on a host of poets: John Keats, Walt Whitman, Randall Jarrell, Wallace Stevens, and Anna Akhmatova. Kunitz emerged from a mid-sized industrial town in central Massachusetts, surviving family tragedy and a sense of personal isolation and loneliness, to become an eloquent spokesman for poetry and for the power of the human imagination. Kunitz has commented, "If we want to know what it felt like to be alive at any given moment in the long odyssey of the race, it is to poetry we must turn." His own odyssey from "metaphysical loneliness" to a sense of community with fellow writers and artists—by building institutions like Poets House and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts—is ever present in these interviews.

Index

Abinader, Elmas, 50

Abstract Expressionism, 183

Academy of American Poets, 116

Adams, J. Donald, 5

Advocate (Harvard), 172

Akhmatova, Anna, 29, 30, 88

“Cleopatra,” 88

“Skull Ballad,” 108

“Lament for Two Unborn Poems,” 108

American Caravan, The, 133

American Revolution, 196

Ames, Elizabeth, 134

Anderson, Sherwood, Winesburg, Ohio, 126

Andrews, Roland, 129

Apollo, 25

Aquinas, Thomas, 13

Aristotle, Poetics, 88

Ashberry, John, 62

Ashkenazim, 140

Atlantic Monthly, 58, 103

Auden, W. H., 8, 9, 31, 73, 182

Auschwitz, 157

Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 126, 141

Basire, James, 196

Baudelaire, Charles, 12, 60, 108

Beatrice, 160

Beckman, Madeleine, 115

Behrman, S. N., 4, 5

Bell, Marvin, 57–72

Benchley, Robert, 4

Berrigan, Ted, 61

Berryman, John, 29

Bible, the, 186

Black Mountain Poets, 111

Blake, Patricia, 182

Blake, Robert, 201

Blake, William, 14, 34, 93, 94, 100, 101, 145, 165, 167, 175, 178, 183, 187, 192, 193, 194–216

“The Argument,” 211

“Auguries of Innocence,” 210, 211

The Book of Thel, 195

“And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time,” 210

“A Divine Image,” 202, 208

“The French Revolution,” 195

“The Garden of Love,” 204

“Introduction” (Songs of Experience), 197, 203

Jerusalem, 208, 209, 216

“The Lamb,” 198

“London,” 194, 197

“The Little Black Boy,” 199, 200

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 195, 211, 212

Milton, 210

Poeti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chronology
• Pulitzer Prize Poet Stanley Kunitz Started Career in Worcester
• Communication and Communion: A Dialogue between Stanley Kunitz and Allen Tate
• The Poet in the Classroom
• Presenting the Poet: Stanley Kunitz
• An Interview with Stanley Kunitz
• Stanley Kunitz on “The Science of the Night”
• Interview with Stanley Kunitz
• Poetry in the Classroom: A Symposium with Marvin Bell, Donald Hall, and Stanley Kunitz
• Stanley Kunitz: Action and Incantation
• An Interview with Stanley Kunitz
• Stanley Kunitz on the Labyrinth of Forms and the Turning of Worms
• A Dialogue with Stanley Kunitz
• Interview: Stanley Kunitz
• An Interview with Stanley Kunitz
• Stanley Kunitz: An Interview
• Stanley Kunitz: “The Gifts of the Heart Are Always Added to Our Store”
• An Interview with Stanley Kunitz
• An Interview with Stanley Kunitz
• Openhearted: Stanley Kunitz and Mark Wunderlich in Conversation
• The Productions of Time: Kunitz on Blake
• Index