The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Sun 5/21/06)

[RetroLounge]

Touch Me

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that's late,
it is my song that's flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it's done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

Stanley Kunitz

********************



"A poet cannot concern himself with being fair to the reader. Time will tell. All poems contain a degree of mystery, as poetry is a discovery of one's hidden self. . . . Poetry is not concerned with communication; it has roots in magic, incantation, and spell-casting."



"Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call. We have need of them, for in their sum they epitomize the wisdom and experience of the race."

The poet Stanley Kunitz died on Sunday, May 14, 2006 at the age of 100. More amazing than that unusually long life is that he was a productive, live artist for most of it. Indeed, he became poet laureate of the United States at 95.

The ability to stay alive in both senses has to be in part a matter of good fortune, the right genes, and antibodies. But will and motivation also count, and Kunitz had specific, intimate reasons to defy death resolutely. Six weeks before Kunitz was born, in Worcester, Mass., his father committed suicide, leaving behind his failing business, two young daughters, and a pregnant wife who never forgave him. Kunitz was not an autobiographical writer for the most part, but he sometimes chose to be explicit.

The determination to survive was strong in the man—and not only to survive, but to thrive, kicking against pricks of different kinds. In an incident well-known to poets, Kunitz, as a brilliant Harvard undergrad—apparently in those days certain undergrads became grad assistants the fall after graduation—assumed that he would be awarded a graduate teaching fellowship. When he saw that his name was not on the list, he went to his adviser, who chuckled affectionately and explained that the young poet should have realized that Anglo-Saxon students at Harvard would not accept being taught English by a Jew. In Stanley's account, he decided then and there to reject the academic world, and he began farming in Connecticut He became a teacher many years later when his friend Theodore Roethke recommended him for a job at Bennington.

The drama of resisting fate, a sardonic joy in embattlement and retrenchment, clearly appealed to him. He was a richly formal, incantational, sometimes epigrammatic poet early in his career. The later poems are more terse, less formal. At every point, in every mode, he maintained a bardic intensity about the poet's calling. Even his description of stripping down to essentials has some air of high drama, along with the comedy

Perhaps the willful absence of his father disposed Kunitz to be a paternal figure to young poets. In my generation, he helped foster Louise Glück, Robert Hass, Michael Ryan, and Olga Broumas, to name only a few. Younger poets who predeceased him, including Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg, brought him books and manuscripts. In his devotion to the urgent, high calling of the poet, as embodied by Blake, Hopkins, Keats, he was a fiery son as well as a steady elder.

Robert Pinsky - From Slate. http://www.slate.com/id/2141886/

********************

RL

If you have a request for a certain Poet, post their name in the thread and I will find a poem by them and post it...

if you want to see some of my poetry, see the blog at:
http://www.myspace.com/retropaul

[yvr girl]

1. I'm sure there's more than one season

[miss_american_pie]

2. I wonderd if you had heard of his passing

:hi:

[RetroLounge]

4. Just heard yesterday...

:hi:

RL

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. My dear RetroLounge!

This is wonderful.....Gently erotic.....

Hidden too....

And yet I feel his power coming through with such vivid clarity.....

Mmmmmmmmm....really good!

I thank you.....:loveya: :hug: