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On Craft & Creativity after Stanley Kunitz

Years ago I came to the realization that the most poignant of all lyric tensions stems from the awareness that we are living and dying at once. To embrace such knowledge and yet to remain compassionate and whole– that is the consummation of the endeavor of art.

So begins Stanley Kunitz's Reflections for The Collected Poems, published in 2020, compiling seven decades worth of his poems. I read this one night in early April, & was struck by the clarity of meaning of the words arranged in this first paragraph. On living & dying, to say they happen at once feels utterly truthful, but the mere slant rhyme of the seeming opposites is not the intended achievement of their specific purpose in a verb phrase. If Kunitz said that life & death happened at once, it would’ve taken me down a different path of thinking, as death is an irreversible, permanent state, while dying is conditioned to being alive. With living & dying at once, I do not wonder about the many ways that life & death coexist in the world, such as losing a parent as a child is born, or bringing home a new puppy as a war kills thousands on another continent, or Kunitz’s own family history of losing his father by suicide before his birth. There is clarity in living & dying because they are the same journey with different emphases, & within the confines of mortality, the reader accepts this as a fact regardless of their environment & relationships.

In the second sentence, I wonder whether the subject that remains compassionate & whole is the writer or the poem. Can an indifferent writer compose a compassionate poem? Is a compassionate & whole person more meaningful than a compassionate & whole poem? Or is it the other way around? But this last sentence of the paragraph is, in fact, not equivocal. With a single word, compassion, Kunitz rejects nihilism that bitterly submits to the inevitability of death, & leaves room for fear & grief towards life’s impermanence. With whole, Kunitz gives equal acknowledgement to hope & devastation, knowing that to live & write without the recognition of life’s ending, or to dictate the ways of living & writing based on the knowledge of life’s ultimate conclusion, are both less than whole.

On the specificity of words, note clatter in this paragraph :

Poems would be easy if our heads weren’t so full of the day’s clatter. The task is to get through to the other side, where we can hear the deep rhythms that connect us with the stars and the tides.

This clatter Kunitz writes of, despite its closeness in sound & potentially exchangeable quality in this context, is not clutter, which is synonymous with mess, meaning a state of disorganization. A day’s clutter connotes unfinished tasks, an exhausting pile of them, disorder of responsibilities, a mundane dread, resentful placation, denied insurance claims, line at the laundromat. Clatter is aggressive, high-pitched, & immediately irritating. A day’s clatter is a fugue, a chemical intoxication by mysterious poison, helpless loss of cognitive function, the deafening laughter of the world laughing without you, uncontrollable dissatisfaction. Clutter feels manageable, has potential to change. Clatter doesn’t.

Those of us who are not dilettantes can learn to be inspired by the clatter sometimes, but ultimately, we do not want to find ourselves saying that’ll do, surrendering to the barrier of noise, connecting two dots at most, using abstraction & obscurity interchangeably, becoming comfortable with the lack of depth. Kunitz is fully aware— he is a writer who became the Poet Laureate of the United States at age 95 after all— that this clatter doesn’t leave when you’ve gained more experience or sense of control over your life. Perhaps to connect with the stars & the tides, we shouldn’t hold onto this feeling of knowing or having a handle on things because if Kunitz had been absorbed by being a man, he would’ve failed to write so vividly how much it hurt to be a boy.

The Portrait

Stanley Kunitz

My mother never forgave my father

for killing himself,

especially at such an awkward time

and in a public park,

that spring

when I was waiting to be born.

She locked his name

in her deepest cabinet

and would not let him out,

though I could hear him thumping.

When I came down from the attic

with the pastel portrait in my hand

of a long-lipped stranger

with a brave moustache

and deep brown level eyes,

she ripped it into shreds

without a single word

and slapped me hard.

In my sixty-fourth year

I can feel my cheek

still burning.