Interviews and Encounters with Stanley Kunitz [Paperback]

Stanley Kunitz (Author), Stanley Moss (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 1993

In these interviews, conducted for the most part by leading young poets, we are given the full range of his thinking, his passion and wisdom, his private and public concerns. This book will be kept close at hand by young poets as a survival kit. Others who care about poetry and the life of the imagination will read and re-read this book to clear the head. Publishers Weekly recently saluted this Pulitzer Prize-winning poet as "a man who is both great and modest, the epitome of all we would wish our poets to be.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This is a first-rate compilation of interviews with and essays about poet, editor, teacher, and translator Kunitz. The 1959 Pulitzer Prize winner believes that poetry should be "transparent," showing the interrelation of living and dying and the inseparability of the passions and intellect vs. the "objective" art of T. S. Eliot. Plato's ideal forms are "accumulative, circular, dialectical" in poetic meaning. The real world, specifically gardening, is for Kunitz "a ritual drama, in which the whole cycle of death and rebirth is enacted annually." His friendship with Theodore Roethke and passion for the later W. B. Yeats are noted. Some overlapping inevitably occurs, but this book is highly recommended for showing the essence of a great poet. With good notes and an appendix of poems.
- Kenneth Mintz, Hoboken P.L., N.J.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

Stanley Kunitz graduated Harvard summa cum laude and began a long, varied career as poet, editor, essayist, translator, gardener and teacher of poets. The honors for his poetry include the Pulitzer Prize, Bollingen Prize, National Endowment for the Arts Senior Fellowship, Brandeis Medal of Achievement, Harriet Monroe Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, Ford Foundation Award, and the Lenore Marshal Prize. He was designated the first State Poet of New York (1987-1989) and awarded the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit. In 1992 he received the Centennial Medal from Harvard University. He served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Interviews and Encounters with Stanley Kunitz will be kept close at hand by young poets as a kind of survival kit. Others who care about poetry and the life of the imagination will read and re-read this book to clear the head. In these interviews, conducted for the most part by leading young poets, we are given the full range of Kunitz's thinking, his passion and wisdom, his private and public concerns. Interviews and Encounters with Stanley Kunitz also includes the text of an interview by Bill Moyers with Kunitz on Public Television that was nominated for an Emmy award. -- Midwest Book Review --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 241 pages
• Publisher: Sheep Meadow; 1st edition (December 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0935296808
• ISBN-13: 978-0935296808
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,901,134 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Long lived poet, February 28, 2004

By 

Mary E. Sibley (Carneys Point, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Interviews and Encounters with Stanley Kunitz (Paperback)

None of Kunitz's contemporaries has lived as long. He finds the intellect and passions inseparable. Dante's influence in Stanely Kunitz's poetry is internal. Almost all his poems are devotional.

Kunitz taught hundreds of students. His students say he taught them to love their places of origin. Kunitz speaks of language changing into meaning. Language reaches the poet in a shapeless rush. Every artist is born into a style.

Kunitz's association with Theodore Roethke began when they were both young men. Kunitz first began to teach in the late forties at Bennington. He edited a periodical while in high school at the Classical High School in Worcester, MA. After college, Harvard, he worked for a newspaper in Worcester and then he worked for a publisher in New York City. He found an office existence intolerable and moved to a farm in Connecticut. Later he moved to Bucks County and then to Provincetown. He finds that New York City depletes him. He is happiest in Provincetown.

He was born in Worcester in 1905 to Russian immigrant parents. His father died just prior to his birth. His mother had a flourishing business based upon her own dress designs. His household had full sets of Dickens and Tolstoy and other writers. He did not return to Worcester until 1963 when Clark University granted him an honorary degree. Donne, Herbert, Blake and Wordsworth were poetic influences. The Wasteland" shook his world.

He believes a poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. Kunitz has been asked how does a poet garden. He writes at night, sometimes until dawn. Gardening is an aspect of his meditative life. Structure has always been enormously important to Kunitz. Kunitz claims he is enchanted with every step in the process of making things grow. Louise Gluck, Kunitz's student, reports he taught habits of thought. A sampling of poems appears in the appendix of the book.