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.
The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live. Be a man before being an artist!
If you can't create physical life, you find a life force. If that's in music, that's in music. I started to find this deep, primitive rhythm, and I started to move to it. And I held hands with sorrow, and I danced with her, and we giggled a bit.
The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.
The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.
I wanted to be Stan Laurel, then I wanted to be Fred Astaire and then Captain Kangaroo. I actually started out as a radio announcer when I was 17 and never left the business so that's literally 70 years.
In Africa, those who have money - businessmen and banks - do not believe in film.
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