Stanley Kunitz

When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself... That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitiude for the gift of life.

Some poems present themselves as cliffs that need to be climbed. Others are so defensive that when you approach their enclosure you half expect to be met by a snarling dog at the gate. Still others want to smother you with their sticky charms.

...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.

Writer's block is a natural affliction. Writers who have never experienced it have something wrong with them. It means there isn't enough friction-that they aren't making enough of an effort to reconcile the contradictions of life. All you get is sweet monotonous flow. Writer's block is nothing to commit suicide over. It simply indicates some imbalance between your experience and your art, and I think that's constructive.

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.

The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking it is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn

The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.

I have walked through many lives,_x000D_ some of them my own,_x000D_ and I am not who I was,_x000D_ though some principle of being_x000D_ abides, from which I struggle_x000D_ not to stray.

Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.

I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.

Live in the layers,_x000D_ not on the litter.

We have all been expelled from the Garden, but the ones who suffer most in exile are those who are still permitted to dream of perfection.

Be what you are. Give What is yours to give. Have Style. Dare.