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.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a desire for poetry that is both simple and profound, allowing readers to see the world clearly through the art.
Stanley Kunitz's quote reflects his aspiration to create poetry that embodies purity and clarity. He yearns for his work to be not only aesthetically beautiful but also deep and meaningful, offering a transparent view into reality, where the essence of the world can be perceived through his art, inviting the audience to connect with both the poem and their surroundings.
In practice
In a creative writing workshop, to inspire students about the essence of writing.
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.
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.
Photographs donβt lie, but liars may photograph
My partner sometimes liked to go into the studio and improvise voice things just for fun. When I returned from England I transcribed one of her melodies, and had some of the hospice participants sing it, because they said they liked to sing. Their singing is very raw, but I'm going to use it for the final work.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.
The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order symmetry and limitations; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.
The perfection of art is to conceal art.
The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.