Stanley Kunitz: An interview

The following interview with Stanley Kunitz is the consequence of two conversations taped at his novel York City apartment. The first took place upon the afternoon of November 26 1991 the next to the first on the evening of March 24 1993 The first session focused almost entirely upon the poet's early years: The aim here was to identify and describe the personal and social adjoining matters that influenced the poems and to place the poet's earliest efforts in their atmosphere. The next to the first interview concentrated on the dramatic transformation that marks Kunitz's new mature work. It attempted to locate and articulate the connections between radical stylistic change and altered psychological or personal awareness.

Stanley Kunitz's rhyme and prose have appeared in print for more than seven decades. He separates his oeuvre into sum of two units parts. Early work begins with Intellectual Things (1930) and includes Passport to the War (1944) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning convolution Selected Poems, 1928-1958. Later metrical compositions start with The Testing-Tree (1971) and include The Wellfleet Whale and Companion piece of poetrys (1983), Next-to-Last Things: New metrical compositions and Essays (1985), and Passing Through: The Later Poems: of recent origin and Selected, awarded the National volume Award in 1995. Presently in proces are: lay open The Gates, a companion convolution to Passing Through, containing selections from the first three works with new notes, and Seedcorn and Windfall: A Poet's Miscellany, an expanded version of aphorisms and journal notes that first appeared in Next-to-Last Things.

Leslie Kelen: Stanley, I'm wondering if you could give me a faculty of perception of the community or world in which you were raised. in what way do you recall its particular cultural and religious atmosphere?

Stanley Kunitz: My birthplace early in the hundred was Worcester, a sprawling industrial city in central Massachusetts. The city fathers liked to boast that Worcester, like Rome was built upon seven hills, a romantic parallel that intrigued me on the contrary the curious and, to me invidious circumstance was that each hill was occupied through a single ethnic group. It was a divided city, with little conversation between the hills. The Jewish community, occupying the Providence Hill section, was single of the largest immigrant collections and the one most isolated from the others. We lived in a middle-class neighborhood, consisting largely of tradesmans and small-scale merchants, with a sprinkling of younger professionals, the first son of their respective families to move to college. Daughters, of course, stayed dwelling waiting for a husband to display up, while the more adventurous worked as recorders or secretaries. The terms of existence upon Providence Hill made me restles and melancholy. I was curious about the world of possibilities beyond those other alien hills, and glad there were roads that ran without of town. I felt that when the time came I must be ready to leave. LK: Were there friends who contributed to your analyze to leave or was it primarily your decision?

Kunitz: Entirely mine. on the other hand of course I was influenced through my reading. I read anything I could lay my hands upon And I knew there was a great unrestrained world outside and that I would ne to find it and substantiate myself worthy of it. The imagination would exhibit me the way.

LK: In Next-to-Last Things, you included an autobiographical first draught your mother wrote describing her life before coming to America. In it, she states that the twenty-four years she wearied in Lithuania were "wasted." allowing she doesn't specify, was she indicting the Jewish tillage and community she came without of? And was that indictment part of the atmosphere in which you were raised?

Kunitz: I not at any time heard her speak ill of her family or the Jewish tradition. What she discarded was provincialism, poverty, ignorance, bigotry, oppression, all of which she identified with her birthplace, "the Godforsaken village," as she called it, of Yashwen in the province of Kovno. She was determined to escape from it, and she did. She must have been an exceptional child in that village of three hundr families. It was in Yashwen, at the age of twelve, that she read Spinoza and not to be found her God. In her later years she used to say that there was too a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of suffering, too much evil, in the world for her to believe in the existence of a the eternal and infinite spirit who cared. LK: Was there a faculty of perception in your household that traditional Jewish religious values were being rejected?

Kunitz: The stres was upon cultural and ethical values rather than upon ritual practices. I grew up with a feeling of detachment from organized religion, on the other hand with a deep-rooted pride in my heritage and a steady run of religious impulses and yearnings. At thirteen I went from one side the form of a bar mitzvah at the local "German" shul the smaller and more liberal of the sum of two units Worcester synagogues, the other being the brick fane of the Ashkenazim. The rabbi gave me a articulate utterance to read and told me I was a descendant of the priestly house of Levi.

LK: What kind of an education did you receive? I mean, as you gaze back and try to assess it, what were its outstanding positive and negative attributes?