...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.
Interpretation
Writing poetry for print lacks the warmth and connection of performance.
Stanley Kunitz highlights the importance of performance and auditory experience in poetry. He suggests that many young poets focus too much on the written word, neglecting the vital connection that comes from speaking their poetry aloud and engaging with an audience, which can create a more intimate and impactful experience.
In practice
In a workshop about poetic expression, this quote can illustrate the importance of oral delivery.
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.
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 always thought of myself as a painter derailed by circumstance.
Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world.
I began by listening to my mother's collection of Amelita Galli-Curci and Lily Pons records, and then was taken (at age eight) to hear Pons at a Met performance of Lakme. It was at that moment that I decided to become an opera star. Not just an opera singer, but an opera star!
If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child's soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man's wisdom for the child's.
If you had a sign above every studio door saying ‘This Studio is a Musical Instrument’ it would make such a different approach to recording.
When you hear Bach or Mozart, you hear perfection. Remember that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were great improvisers. I can hear that in their music.
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