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Photo Sue Harrison
Poet Stanley Kunitz in his famous garden in 1999.
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Farewell, Stanley
Former Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz dies at 100
By Sue Harrison
Banner Staff
When the flowers of spring are full abloom there will be a barren spot in the West End left by the passing of former U.S. Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz, the gentle gardener and fierce poet whose words have touched so many. Kunitz, 100, died Sunday at his home in New York.
Though he leaves behind an impressive list of accomplishments and honors, most Outer Cape residents will remember the man himself, frail and slow-moving of late but imbued with brilliantly clear and sparkling eyes and a warming smile. Stanley liked his martini in the evening and wrote almost every poem he ever put to paper somewhere in the hours between midnight and dawn on an old manual typewriter.
“I love the quietude of night, the isolation,” Kunitz told the Banner almost six years ago when he was named Poet Laureate at the age of 95. In an interview with the Cape Cod Times around the same time, he added to that thought, “I love the sense of being absolutely alone in the world, without any distraction. You can have complete concentration.”
The day, he often said, was meant for living while the night belonged to the muse. He didn’t write every night but he almost always retired to his office and spent time ruminating and letting feelings and thoughts make their slow progress toward an arrangement of words he was willing to call one of his poems. He wouldn’t rush the process and claimed that that may have added to his longevity as a poet. How many poets, or other authors, signed three-book contracts in their 90s?
He was elfin and his voice had come to hold a slight quaver, but Stanley never failed to bring a large room to utter silence when he rose to read from his works.
Born in Worcester on July 29, 1905, Kunitz was the son of immigrants, Yetta Jasspon and Soloman Kunitz. His parents ran a dress manufacturing business and had two daughters, Sarah and Sophia. Just before Stanley was born, his father committed suicide in a public and harrowing manner, an event that remained like a cloud over the Kunitz household. Soloman was not to be spoken of in the house and his death created a powerful influence on Stanley’s life — it was a subject he was unable to write about until his mid-60s.
Despite the difficulties of his childhood, he attended and graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1926 but was not offered a lecture position due to his Jewish heritage. He took other paths, moving to rural Connecticut, marrying fellow poet Helen Pearce in 1930 and publishing the first of his 10 books, “Intellectual Things.” He married Eleanor Evans in 1939 and in 1958 married the artist Elise Asher. They remained a vibrant force of two until Asher died two years ago. The two were a delight and an education for all who had the pleasure of knowing them.
He taught at Bennington College, Columbia, Yale, Princeton, Rutgers and the University of Washington. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1958 for “Selected Poems” and a National Book Award for his 1995 book “Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected.” His other books include “The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz,” “Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays,” “The Poems of Stanley Kunitz,” “Passport to War,” “The Testing-Tree” and “Intellectual Things.” His final book, “The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden,” published last year, is a collection of essays put together with his literary assistant Genine Lentine and accompanied by photos by Marnie Crawford Samuelson.
Stanley was instrumental in the founding and nurturing of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. FAWC, whose primary mission is to give 20 writers and artists a place to work and a stipend to support doing that work from October through May each year, has gone on to become one of the foremost fellowship programs in the world. And Stanley remained active in the organization until his death. He was also a founder of The Poets House in New York City.
Hunter O’Hanian, director of the Work Center, issued a statement that said in part, “Today we lost a dear friend, a great poet, a surpassing philanthropist and a wise patriarch. … His steadfast labors and large generosity inspired generations of disciples, ‘the tribe of his true affections,’ who united in helping to bring his dreams to fruition. … A matchless love and knowledge of poetry made him a beloved sage among young and old alike. … He was a man of nature, gladly, proudly part and parcel of it, and had neither fear nor rue of death. He wrote at night in the dawn hours, by day loved to work in his now famous tiered garden, a barren sand dune when he and his late wife Elise Asher bought the house. … To him poetry was not an art but a life, not only words but a quest for the basics of human existence, the web that binds all things together. A profoundly joyful, moral being, his spirit touched countless thousands in his century of years. He leaves a legacy to be reflected upon with gratitude and rededication.”
He was named Poet Laureate of the United States in 2000 and formerly was the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the precursor of the Poet Laureate post. Last year he was named as Provincetown’s first Poet Laureate, an honor that could have gone to no one else. He received numerous fellowships and honors, including the Bollingen Prize, Ford Foundation Grant and a senior fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Poet Gail Mazur praises his spirit and forethought in recognizing how the town would change and how hard it would be for young or beginning artists to be here. “Stanley more than anyone was the moving force for saving Provincetown for artists. In founding the Work Center he was making sure that artists would continue to be able to be part of the art and the light of the community.”
When Stanley turned 100 last summer he took part in a big party honoring him. No one expected he would choose to read but he did, at length, offering a late public glimpse of his focused power and vision.
Mazur recalls that last summer when Stanley was 100 he had daily visitors, old friends and young poets he had never met. It was decided that “Moby Dick” would be read aloud and the book was passed around from reader to reader every day including Stanley. “He would take his turn, his shoulder moving in rhythm to the words.”
Stanley seemed the physical embodiment of what he referred to as a spare, translucent style. He was quoted many times as saying, “I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through it and see the world.” Certainly one could, through his words, look through him and see the world in its most pared down simplicity and richest complexity.
Survivors include his two daughters, Gretchen Kunitz of Orinda, Calif., and Babette Becker of Manhattan; two grandchildren; and three step-grandchildren.
Burial will be private. A memorial for the public will be planned for this summer at FAWC.
artseditor@provincetownbanner.com
The Long Boat
When his boat snapped loose
from its mooring, under
the screaking of the gulls,
he tried at first to wave
to his dear ones on shore,
but in the rolling fog
they had already lost their faces.
Too tired even to choose
between jumping and calling,
somehow he felt absolved and free
of his burdens, those mottoes
stamped on his name-tag:
conscience, ambition, and all
that caring.
He was content to lie down
with the family ghosts
in the slop of his cradle,
buffeted by the storm,
endlessly drifting.
Peace! Peace!
To be rocked by the Infinite!
As if it didn't matter
which way was home;
as if he didn't know
he loved the earth so much
he wanted to stay forever.
Stanley Kunitz — 2000
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Higher ‘affordable’ income sought
In the News
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May 18th, 2006