day 24: Touch Me, by Stanley Kunitz

This is turning into a theme - here’s another poem with a voice speaking from middle/old age; still, for some reason, it feels less strange to read this one as if it were my own voice than the Charles Wright poem.

Favorite lines?

“What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.”

I like how Stanley Kunitz talks about writing and poetry. He's the one I quoted earlier this month saying that young poets these days write for the page and not the ear. Here are some other interesting things he's said:

"So often, when you're stumped, the temptation is just to back down, but when you feel this is complicated or so tenuous that there's no way you could say it, you have to persuade yourself that you can say it, that there is a way of saying it, that there's nothing that is unsayable. And this gives you strength for the next time.

"I want to perfect my craft so I won't have to tell lies. The poem, by its very nature, holds the possibility of revelation, and revelation doesn't come easy. You have to fight for it. There is that moment when you suddenly open a door and enter into the room of the unspeakable.”

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“There's grammar in my bones!”

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from the Paris Review

KUNITZ

 I want the energy to be concentrated in my nouns and verbs, and I write mostly in trimeters, since my natural span of breath seems to be three beats. It seems to me so natural now that I scarcely ever feel the need for a longer line. Sometimes I keep a little clock going when people talk to me and I notice they too are speaking in trimeters.

At my age, after you're done—or ruefully think you're done—with the nagging anxieties and complications of your youth, what is there left for you to confront but the great simplicities? I never tire of birdsong and sky and weather. I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.

INTERVIEWER

At forty you still thought of yourself as a stranger?

KUNITZ

I'm reminded of a passage in a letter from Henry James in reply to a young admirer of his. This was late in his life. “You ask me from what port I embark? That port is my essential loneliness.”

INTERVIEWER

Your earlier poems have been accused—I should say that is the right word—of being overly intellectual . . .

KUNITZ

[laughs] . . .which is nonsense.

INTERVIEWER

One of your poems—“The Science of the Night”—has a passage: “We are not souls but systems, and we move / In clouds of our unknowing”. Is that a direct reference to the text by the medieval religious mystic?

KUNITZ

Yes. The Cloud of Unknowing—haunting phrase. But, sure, I think that what we strive for is to move from the world of our immediate knowing, our limited range of information, into the unknown. My poems don't come easy—I have to fight for them. In my struggle I have the sense of swimming underwater towards some kind of light and open air that will be saving. Redemption is a theme that concerns me. We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.

INTERVIEWER

Frost talks about the poet, or himself rather, as a performer, as an athlete is a performer. In what sense do you mean that writing is a performance?

KUNITZ

A trapeze artist on his high wire is performing and defying death at the same time. He's doing more than showing off his skill; he's using his skill to stay alive. Art demands that sense of risk, of danger. But few artists in any period risk their lives. The truth is they're not on a high enough wire. This makes me think of an incident in my childhood. In the woods behind our house in Worcester was an abandoned quarry—you'll find mention of it in “The Testing-Tree.” This deep-cut quarry had a sheer granite face. I visited it almost every day, alone in the woods, and in my magic Keds I'd try to climb it, till the height made me dizzy. I was always testing myself. There was nobody to watch me. I was testing myself to see how high I could go. There was very little ledge, almost nothing to hold on to. Occasionally I'd find a plant or a few blades of tough grass in the crevices, but the surface was almost vertical, with only the most precarious toehold. One day I was out there and I climbed—oh, it was a triumph!—almost to the top. And then I couldn't get down. I couldn't go up or down. I just clung there that whole afternoon and through the long night. Next morning the police and fire department found me. They put up a ladder and brought me down. I must say my mother didn't appreciate that I was inventing a metaphor for poetry.

INTERVIEWER

Not many poets writing during the early years of your career were attracted to science?

KUNITZ

And no wonder. After a quarter of a century I still have to explain to audiences what I am doing with the metaphor of the red shift in “The Science of the Night.” Such terminology ought to be just as common knowledge as the myths were in ancient Greece. The vocabulary of modern science is fascinating—I read everything I can find about pulsars and black holes and charm and quarks—but, by and large, the vocabulary remains exclusive and specialized. The more we know about the universe, the less understandable it becomes. The classic world had more reality than ours. At least it thought it understood what reality was. In 1948, I recall, Niels Bohr visited Bennington and drew a neat picture of neutrons and protons on the blackboard. In the question period that followed I asked him, “Is this really the structure of the atom, or is it your metaphor for the present state of our information about it?” He preferred then not to accept that distinction. Today a diagram of the atom would look vastly different, more complicated, and I would not need to repeat the question.

INTERVIEWER

Scientists think their metaphors are not heuristic.

KUNITZ

The popular impression is that their metaphors are real and the poet's metaphors are unreal. But both are trying to find metaphors for reality. It always haunts me that human beings were accumulating experience and knowledge in their bodies before they had a language. That's where our oldest wisdom is. The language of the imagination is a body language. That's why poetry is resistant to abstractions.

INTERVIEWER

Why do you suppose the metaphors of scientists are taken with much more seriousness than those of poets?

KUNITZ

Because we live in a pragmatic society, and the effects of science are evident, whereas the consequences of poetry are invisible. How many truly believe that if poetry were to be suppressed, the light of our civilization would go out?

...One of the reasons I write poems is that they make revelation possible. I sometimes think I ought to spend the rest of my life writing a single poem whose action reaches an epiphany only at the point of exhaustion, in the combustion of the whole life, and continues and renews, until it blows away like a puff of milkweed. Anybody who remains a poet throughout a lifetime, who is still a poet let us say at sixty, has a terrible will to survive. He has already died a million times and at a certain age he faces this imperative need to be reborn.

...Evil has become a product of manufacture, it is built into our whole industrial and political system, it is being manufactured every day, it is rolling off the assembly lines, it is being sold in the stores, it pollutes the air. And it's not a person!

Perhaps the way to cope with the adversary is to confront him in ourselves. We have to fight for our little bit of health. We have to make our living and dying important again. And the living and dying of others. Isn't that what poetry is about?