Stanely Kunitz, Fathers, the Dictionary and Halley's Comet

I love the poetry of Stanley Kunitz and reading about his life illuminates some things about his poetry but they are also interesting stories by themselves.

He was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1905 to Jewish immigrant parents. I had read earlier that his father committed suicide in a public park before Kunitz was born. His mother tried to erase his father from Stanley's life. Photos were destroyed and she refused to speak about him.

One of the few things from his father that she allowed remaining were his books. Most of hem were classics - Tolstoy and Dickens - but one of Stanley's favorites was the dictionary.

"I used to sit in that green Morris chair and open the heavy dictionary on my lap, and find a new word every day. It was a big word, a word like eleemosynary or phantasmagoria — some word that, on the tongue, sounded great to me, and I would go out into the fields and I would shout those words, because it was so important that they sounded so great to me. And then eventually I began incorporating them into verses, into poems. But certainly, my thought, in the beginning, was that there was so much joy playing with language that I couldn't consider living without it."

Stanley wrote an essay about the quest for a father. One of my favorite poems of his about his father is "Halley's Comet." It is about learning in school that the comet was heading to Earth, though he was misinformed about it possibly hitting Earth. The poem ends with a message to his father that he never met.

Look for me, Father, on the roof
of the red brick building
at the foot of Green Street—
that's where we live, you know, on the top floor.
I'm the boy in the white flannel gown
sprawled on this coarse gravel bed
searching the starry sky,
waiting for the world to end.

He attended Harvard, moved to a farm in Connecticut and sold fresh herbs to markets, and also worked as a reporter. He was drafted into World War II.

After the war, he was offered a teaching position at Bennington College. Here's a great story from 1949. The college tried to expel one of his students (it happened to be Groucho Marx's daughter Miriam) right before her graduation because she had violated curfew. Stanley decided to be part of a protest against the decision. The college president came to his house and demanded that he stop. Kunitz took a plant that he was potting and threw it in the president's face. Then, he quit his position.

He published two books of poems that garnered little attention and his third book was to be Selected Poems (1958). It was rejected by eight publishers but when it was finally published it won the Pulitzer Prize. It was a slow but steady climb. An avid gardener, Stanley was a patient man. He didn't publish his next book until 1971, The Testing Tree.

He was appointed the U.S. Poet Laureate when he was 95 years old. He died at the age of 100.

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