Stanley Kunitzfrom A Curious Gladness: A Garden Conversation with Stanley Kunitz and Genine Lentine
IntroductionIn the fall of 2002, as a central part of the process of working on The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden (W.W. Norton, 2005), photographs by Marnie Crawford Samuelson, Stanley Kunitz and I began to have a series of conversations exploring gardening and poetry. Our intention was to let the discussions range freely, drawing on the exploratory, interactive fluidity of conversation as a way to generate raw material for what would become the essays in the book. Such a process of course generated more material than we could possibly include, though we needed all of it in order to get to what ultimately became the book. Presented here is one of the first of these talks, from November 2002, centering on the poem "Touch Me."
--Genine Lentine
Genine Lentine: You often talk about the "essential loneliness" of the artist. Do you think your encounters with animals, such as the snakes in your garden that you speak of in "The Snakes of September" help you to bridge that loneliness?Stanley Kunitz: One of the great satisfactions of the human spirit is to feel that one's family extends across the borders of the species and belongs to everything that lives. And one has the same feeling about flowers and plants in general, and shrubs and trees, that they all belong to your family. That makes one feel more kindred than if you're isolated in your species.
GL: What are some of the ways that sense of kindred spirit presents itself? When you're connecting on a level that's not just about "I'm a human being looking at this animal from a distance" but you're actually connecting, what does that feel like?
SK: You feel you're not only sharing the planet with it, but you're sharing your life, as you do with a domestic animal that has become part of your family.
GL: You refer to the snakes as "co-signers of a covenant." What do you think there is for a writer in having a kind of relationship with plants and animals that is transacted wholly without language? Do you think there's something special about that kind of connection that has to be carried out without language?
SK: I don't think language is the only means of communication. The warmth of one's body is a form of communication. The stroke of one's hand is a means of communication.
GL: So, are those heightened for you in the garden?
SK: Oh, yes. Even with the plants, I know I have a tendency when I'm walking in the garden to brush the flowers as I go by them, and I get a sense of reciprocity that is very comforting, consoling.
GL: I know exactly what you're talking about. Do you ever get a sense of something being communicated to you beyond that core feeling of connection and reciprocity? Do you ever have a sense of anything that feels like information, where somehow, you're actually learning--I don't mean learning by observing, but that something actually is being communicated to you?
SK: I think there are forms of communication beyond language, that have to do not only with the body, but with the spirit itself, and they're so internal, there's no way you can define them. It's a permeation of one's being.
GL: "A curious gladness shook me." The temptation is to try to fit language around it.
SK: Well, the hope is that it will become language and sometimes that happens.
Stanley Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1905. His many books of poetry include The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz (W. W. Norton, 2000); Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected (1995), which won the National Book Award; Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays (1985); The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928-1978, which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Passport to the War (1940); Selected Poems, 1928-1958, which won the Pulitzer Prize; The Testing-Tree (1971); and Intellectual Things (1930). In 2000 he was named United States Poet Laureate. A founder of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Poets House in New York City, he taught for many years in the graduate writing program at Columbia University. Stanley Kunitz died on May 14, 2006.
Genine Lentine is currently shaping her manuscript of poems, Mr. Worthington's Beautiful Experiments on Splashes. She received an M.S. in Theoretical Linguistics from Georgetown University and an M.F.A. in poetry from NYU. Since 2000, she has worked as literary assistant to Stanley Kunitz. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in American Speech, The Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, and O, the Oprah Magazine.
