SOURCE: "'Imagine Wrestling with an Angel': An Interview with Stanley Kunitz," in Salmagundi, No. 22/23, Spring/Summer, 1973, pp. 71-83.

[In the following interview, which is an edited transcript of a public interview conducted at Skidmore College in April, 1972, Kunitz discusses, among other subjects, trends in contemporary poetry, the process of composing verse, the function of poetry, the work of up-and-coming poets, his influences, and the practice of labeling poets.]

[Boyers]: Whenever I go and visit people who are interested in poetry, there seems to be constant reference to Stanley Kunitz as the "poets' poet." Have you heard yourself described in this way? What do you think these people mean?

[Kunitz]: When it was said of Spenser, it was meant to be a compliment. Nowadays it would depend on the inflection. I'm a bit leery of it.

I was wondering if the fact that people speak of you in these terms suggests that they have in mind another kind of poetry which is more immediately contemporary, more popular among the young on college campuses, and whether this isn't the poetry, this other poetry, that the best poets themselves consider inferior, perhaps not poetry at all?

That may be so, but it's dangerous to think of poetry as being divided into two kinds—a high art and a low art. No poet can afford to be out of touch with the commonplace. In my youth I suppose I rather willed myself on being an hermetic poet. But for years I have tried to make my work more open and accessible, without sacrificing its complex inner tissue. Film, jazz, and rock have been very much a part of my world of experience.

You read many poetry manuscripts. Can you give us some notions of what the younger poets, those who've not published volumes, are writing?

The most notable characteristic of the poetry written by the young—in their 20's or 30's—is its variety. There is no dominant strain that I can detect. So much depends on local interest—regional associations, university teachers who happen at the moment to be available to them as models. A few years ago it seemed to me that the New York School had many adherents over the country, but I think there are fewer now—it seems to have exhausted its potentiality. Certainly Robert Bly and company have a number of acolytes who follow their precepts thundered from on high—but that's only one aspect of the scene. You can find almost as many different styles as you can find poets.

In particular I was interested in one poet who was awarded the Yale Series Prize, Hugh Seidman, in many ways a remarkable poet. Now many of his poems seem to me to be haphazardly put together, and he seems to trust a good deal to what one might call the "happy accident," the chance hit, which is matched, I guess, by a great many unlucky misses. I wonder if you might speak a little bit about that kind of poetry, a poetry which includes the "happy accident."

The concept of chance is inseparable from the act of poetry. Verse that is precalculated and preordained inevitably goes dead. There has to be room for accidents in the writing of a poem. You leave yourself open to the possibility of anything happening and you hope that it will work—if it doesn't that's your hard luck.

In the volume The Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic, there is a symposium having to do with your poem "Father and Son," a very beautiful poem. There is some talk in the symposium about the line in the poem which reads "The night nailed like an orange to my brow." In the course of your response, you speak of the line as an example of that special kind of risk which poets must take, and which constitutes a kind of signature, a unique signature of the poet. Could you speak a little bit about the relationship between a good risk and a bad risk in poetry?

I don't think that you can tell beforehand whether the risk is a good one or a bad one—but if you take no risks, I doubt that much will happen. I want to venture beyond what I know to be safe and correct, to grapple with a possibility that doesn't yet appear.

And would you say that in taking the risk with a line that doesn't seem readily to yield its private associations even to a reader who's armed with the elementary biographical information, you would justify that risk simply on the basis of what you felt strongly at the time the poem was being composed? That is, must one always take into account the presence of the reader who perhaps won't be able to pick up the association?

In the first place the poet hasn't invited the reader to become the judge of his poem—he enters the scene after the event. It is the reader's choice—he can either continue to work with the poem, or he can decide that it offers him nothing, and if he so chooses, that's his privilege. The poet ought not to complain if the reader decides that he doesn't like that particular poem, or that he can't understand it, and turns to another poem, or to somebody else's work. A poet who begins by saying, "I am myself and only myself," is in no position to demand, "You must read me and love me." My own preference is for a poetry that looks fairly simple on the surface, but that moves mysteriously inside its skin.

I'm very interested also in raising the whole question of composition, the process of composition, and I've come upon all sorts of preferences in poets who come at their poems in a great variety of ways. Roethke, for instance, speaks in the Letters of carrying around a phrase in his pocket, scrawled on a piece of paper for a very long time, and then of allowing that single phrase or image to develop over perhaps several years, and then watching that phrase lead to others, and finally building an entire poem out of that one single image; or I think of Dylan Thomas establishing a whole string of end rhymes and then sort of backing into the poem, filling in the text that leads to the end rhyme. How do you compose a poem?

I'm a night bird, so that most of my poems happen in the small hours and usually after a long struggle to clean my mind out—to get rid of the day—that's the first step. The poem usually ripples out from something buried. Perhaps you turn over the leaves of your notebook and come across a phrase 5 years old, or 15 years old, that leaps out of the page—it's ready now to be played with. And then you begin pushing words and rhythms around. But to me it's mainly dredging, dredging down into the unconscious—trying to find associations, links with the whole life and with the secrets of the life, not with the obvious materials. And so the poem slowly builds. I say it over and over again—whatever I have of it—the lines with which I be gin—it's a kind of incantation and maybe a form of self-hypnosis, who knows, but gradually the rhythm begins to take over, and then I know that nothing is going to stop the poem from happening.

Do you think it's possible for a reader of poems, like yourself for instance, to perceive, in reading the poem for the first time, whether it was written with one approach rather than another, whether a poem suggests in its very contours, its surface contours, whether it was constructed out of an image which gave birth to others, or whether it was originally an "idea poem, " emerging from a particular thematic concern, a political idea, for instance? Do poems yield that kind of information, do you think?

In the kind of poem I'm talking about the stitching between thoughts and feelings is invisible. I don't really care much for "idea poems" as such. They're a form of illustration.

Who were the poetic models that you adopted and followed as a young poet? Were you, for instance, taken by T. S. Eliot, as others were who came of age in the 1920 's and '30's?

I was moved by him but I resisted him—I think that's the answer there—one could not help but be moved by him because he was a poetic event. Certainly "The Wasteland" shook my world at the moment of its appearance. I can still remember the thrill of picking up my copy of The Dial in which it appeared. Subsequently I became a kind of adversary. His definition of poetry as an objective act, a depersonalized performance, was contrary to my own conviction that the art and the life were bound together. I sought a more passionate voice. And I scorned his politics.

Were there other models that you felt closer to in that time, in the '20's, for instance?

Contemporaries? No. The poets who meant most to me then were Yeats (the later Yeats) and Hopkins. I studied both intensively. Hardy was another of my admirations.

Did you study Thomas a good deal, later on, in the '40's and the beginning of the '50's?

Not particularly—though there are five or six of Thomas's poems that I admire. You're talking now of literary fashions—something I have no use for. In the '20's and '30's, one had to follow Eliot in order to have an audience. In the late '30's, into the '40's, one had to be Audenesque. Then Thomas was the rage. Later the Beats had their turn. And so it goes. The easiest poet to neglect is one who resists classification.

In thinking of tastes and fashions in poetry, I've often been fascinated by a number of things the late Sir Herbert Read used to say about poetry, feeling that a sort of betrayal was involved in a poet's going back over ground that had been amply covered by other poets. Do you think that there is such a thing as regression in the life of poetry, and perhaps more to the point, what is the nature of the function of innovation in poetry? Is it necessary that great poets be radical innovators? Can you conceive of a great poet who is an aesthetic reactionary?

Pound more or less covered that ground when he set aside a category of inventors among the poets. They are not necessarily the strongest voices of an age, but they often have great influence. Pound affected his contemporaries more than, let us say, Yeats did, who was not an inventor, but I would be willing to say flatly that Yeats is the greater poet.

You would say, then, that the whole idea of regression in the life of poetry is not really a viable notion, that it is possible to go back over old ground, and to do things which are essentially similar to what earlier poets perfected?

The trouble with Read's idea is that the idea of regression, like the idea of progress, has no aesthetic relevance. The way backward and the way forward are the same. A rediscovery of the past often leads to radical innovation. We know, for example, that Picasso was inspired by African sculpture, that the art of the Renaissance is linked with the resurgence of classic myth. Poetic technique follows the same route. At the moment I can think of Hopkins, who went back to Old English for his sprung rhythm; of Pound, who turned his ear on Provencal song; of Berryman, who dug up inversion and minstrel patter for his Dream Songs. These are all acts of renewal, not tired replays of the style of another period—which is the last thing I am prepared to defend. Pound was, of course, right, in his criticism of "The Wasteland" manuscript, when he dissuaded Eliot from trying to compete with Pope in the matter of composing heroic couplets. As he said, Pope could do it better. In general, a poet has to rework—not imitate—the past, and the success of his reworking is dependent on the degree of his contemporary awareness. If a poet has an ear for the living speech—whose rhythmic pattern is ever so slightly modified from generation to generation—he has at least the foundation of a style, the one into which he was born. I recall that Roethke and I used to challenge each other to guess the dates of the most obscure poems we could find. Over a long period we become so expert at the game that we almost never missed by more than ten years. It was simply because the voice, the stylistic voice, of any decade is unmistakable.

Is there such a thing as a direct relation between the poet and the particular moment of his culture, conceived as a political situation? What I'm referring to is the kind of statement we've heard from Denise Levertov of late, where the claim is made that a poet who is of his time must necessarily reflect the moment of his culture, especially when that culture is in crisis and turmoil, that to indulge a strictly personal kind of poetry at a time when one's own country is engaged in destroying thousands of people in Vietnam, for instance, is to do something that is totally irresponsible and runs counter to the whole life of poetry. Does that make any sense to you?

The war disgusts and outrages me, just as it does Denise, but I'm not inclined to tell other poets what they may or may not write. Each of us has to be trusted with his own conscience. The fanatic is the direct opposite of the poet. It's no accident that most of the poetry of confrontation is such appalling stuff. What could be more spiritually stultifying than an exclusive diet of anti-war or anti-Nixon tracts? An age in crisis needs more than ever to be made aware of the full range of human possibility.

In that respect, what do you see as the basic function of your own art? Is it essentially designed to give pleasure, is it educative, does it serve the function of rendering the general experience more complex?

Let me try to reply in an historical context. Modern poetry, in the long view, springs out of the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. When faith withered and the Church could no longer satisfy the universal need for otherness, poetry became the alternative medium of transcendence. The poet assumed, or reasserted—from an earlier tribal structure—an ambiguous but socially disturbing role with prophetic or shamanistic implications. One of his functions—as Blake clearly understood—was to serve as defender of the natural universe and of natural man against the greed and ambition of the spoilers and their faceless agents. Politically, I see the poet as the representative free man, the irreconcilable adversary of the Nation-State.

Is there any useful connection to be made, in a general sense, between age and creativity? Many have claimed that the creative powers wane with the advancing years, yet we all know of very wonderful poets who seemed to have their powers grow stronger with the passage of the years. For me, for instance, the major period of William Carlos Williams is his final period, though that is not the case, of course, with people like Eliot or Stevens. Is there any general relationship that's worth pointing to?

The determining factor there is the relationship between the life and the work. Yeats has a phrase, "radical innocence," that I cherish. As I interpret it, it's the capacity for perpetual self-renewal, as opposed to a condition of emotional exhaustion or world-weariness; it's waking each day to the wonder of possibility; it's being like a child—which is not to say being childish. "There lives the dearest freshness deep down things"—Hopkins' line—that's an expression of radical innocence. With Blake, it's the very essence of his art and of his prophetic function. The poets of radical innocence stay alive till the day they die—and, even then, they take that last step as an adventure….

Do you especially care for the work of poets whose names are frequently linked with Lowell as part of the confessional school? Do you feel any kinship with poets like Snodgrass, or Sylvia Plath? Is this where the energy of our best poetry has been?

I must tell you that, like most poets, I hate labels. I'm not quite sure what confessional poetry is, though certain critics have seen fit to discuss me as a late convert to that school. I guess I resent that. I've always admired a fierce subjectivity; but compulsive exhibitionism—and there's plenty of that around—gobs of sticky hysteria—are an embarrassment. Perhaps I sound more censorious than I intend. One of my premises is that you can say anything as long as it is true … but not everything that's true is worth saying. Another is that you need not be a victim of your shame … but neither should you boast about it. In this context maybe Roethke showed me a way of coping with affliction. Nearly all his adult life he was a manicdepressive, subject to intermittent crack-ups of devastating violence. In the beginning he was terribly ashamed of these episodes and tried to conceal them, even from his closest friends. When he was sent away to a mental hospital, he pretended that he had gone off on vacation. The onset of his best work coincided with his discovery that he need not feel guilty about his illness; that it was a condition he could explore and use; that it was, in fact, convertible into daemonic energy, the driving power of imagination. At the same time he began to read Jung, who clarified for him the act of psychic regression, that is, of reliving one's embryonic passage through fish-shape, frog-shape, bird-shape until one is born human. That knowledge, that deep metamorphic awareness, became the source of Roethke's strength in his major poems. What they speak of is archetypal experience—which has nothing to do with being a "confessional" poet.

You've spoken of your own work in terms of the note of tragic exaltation. Can you describe what this constitutes, how you see this tonality functioning in your poems? Does it bear relation to what we get in classical tragedy, for instance?

Not much—but maybe in so far as Recognition is an element of Greek tragedy. It's easier to locate the feeling than to define it. I could offer some lines as a touchstone: "I stand on the terrible threshold, and I see / The end and the beginning in each other's arms." Or Mandelstam, at a greater distance, saying: "Only the flash of recognition brings delight." Or Pascal invoking "the eternal silence of the infinite spaces." Not everybody detects the exaltation, for it's a far more secret thing than terror or despair. Imagine wrestling with an angel, the darkest one of the tribe. You know you're doomed to lose. But that weight on your shoulder!

Do you read much besides creative or imaginative literature? Do you keep up with developments in psychoanalysis, in aesthetics, in the sciences, and so on?

I try to, except for aesthetics, which seems to me an arid subject. Astrophysics has always fascinated me. And anything to do with the natural universe. Right now I'm deep in whales.

But you do feel that the most exciting things at the moment are still poetry, that the work of young and coming poets is still more exciting and alive than work done in other areas?

No doubt I'm prejudiced, but I honestly believe that the poetic imagination is capable of embracing the actualities of our time more fully than any other discipline, including the scientific. That's one explanation of my involvement with the graduate writing program at Columbia, with the Yale Series of Younger Poets, and with the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where young writers and artists can find a loosely structured community, created for their benefit. Has anyone noticed how the poetic and scientific imaginations are beginning to draw together for mutual sustenance? Perhaps it's an instinctive alliance determined by our crisis of survival. You mentioned Seidman earlier, my first poetry choice at Yale. He was trained as a physicist, and is an expert on the computer. My second choice, Peter Klappert, was a student of zoology, who planned to be a veterinarian. Michael Casey, who came back from Vietnam with his collection of Obscenities, was another physics major, who expected to become an engineer, till the Yale award threw him off his course. Robert Hass's book isn't out yet, but its title, Field Guide, suggests that it isn't incompatible with the others. Love and botany are his twin preoccupations. Different kinds of intellect may be turning to poetry out of desperation, but it's a good sign, nevertheless.

You mentioned last night that you 've been working on a long poem. Is there any special reason why you haven't written one before now, and could you speak a little bit about the general failure of our poets to write successful long poems, in most cases even to undertake them?

The problem of the long poem, like that of the novel, is related to our loss of faith in the validity of the narrative continuum. Joyce invented a technique for coping with a new time sense, but that required a superhuman effort, which no longer seems consistent with an anti-heroic age. The collapse of Pound's Cantos remains a central symptomatic event. Technically he understood the problem, as his contribution to the making of "The Wasteland" proves, but his own project was too indeterminate, and he had overreached himself in the matter of scale. As a collection of fragments, of fairly limited scope, "The Wasteland" seems better adapted for enduring the weathers of an age. I suppose the last major effort to build a solid block of marble was Hart Crane's—and "The Bridge" has its magnificence, but it is the magnificence of failure. "Mistress Bradstreet" and "Howl" arepassionate apostrophes, but their architecture is too frail for the weight of their rhetoric. Berryman's Dream Songs and Lowell's Notebook—to be called History in its next incarnation—don't aspire to the unity of the long poem. Essentially they're poetic sequences, like the sonnet cycles of the Elizabethans. I am half-persuaded that the modern mind is too distracted for the span of attention demanded by the long poem, and that no single theme, given the disorder of our epoch, is capable of mobilizing that attention. But I am only half-persuaded.

I also wanted to ask you about the whole question of obscurity in the poem, something that Randall Jarrell suggests in a number of places to the effect that in an age which is so apt to appropriate poets, to convert them into acrobats of a sort, it may in fact be the business of the poet to be obscure, to challenge this audience, to make readers uncomfortable, to make them work for whatever pleasures they can get from the poem. Do you feel any sympathy with that?

During the heyday of the New Criticism, there were poets who trafficked in obfuscation, providing grist for the critics who trafficked in the explication of obfuscation. A beautiful symbiotic relationship! Poets today tend to be clearer—sometimes all too clear. I strive for a transparency of surface, but I should be disappointed if my work yielded all its substance and tonality at first reading. "Never try to explain," I say somewhere. A poem is charged with a secret life. Some of its information ought to circulate continuously within its perimeters as energy. And that, as I see it, is the function of form: to contain the energy of a poem, to prevent it from leaking out.

You spoke last night at dinner of the frustrations of so many contemporary artists, and this led you to reflect on the idea of the poet as monster. Would you care to expatiate?

It's a notion that enters into several of my poems—for instance, "The Approach to Thebes," and later "The Artist," which grew out of my friendship with Mark Rothko. So many of my attachments are to the world of painters and sculptors. I recall a conversation with Mark one evening, in which I referred to Picasso—not without admiration—as a monster. And then I added Joyce's name, for good measure. Mark was troubled by my epithet. I tried to explain to him why, in the modern arts, the words "genius" and "monster" may be interchangeable. His face darkened. "You don't mean me, do you?" he asked. Less than a year later he was dead, by his own hand. What is it in our culture that drives so many artists and writers to suicide—or, failing that, mutilates them spiritually? At the root of the problem is the cruel discrepancy between the values of art and the values of society, which makes strangers and adversaries out of those who are most gifted and vulnerable. The artist who turns in on himself, feeds off his own psyche, aggrandizes his bruised ego is on his way to monsterdom. Ambition is the fire in his gut. No sacrifice is judged too great for his art. At a certain point he becomes a nexus of abstract sensations and powers, beyond the realm of the personal. That's when the transformation into monster occurs. I don't mean to imply that everybody is worthy of that designation—it requires a special kind of greatness … Sylvia Plath's, for example. If we search among the poets of an older generation for the masters who were whole, who excelled in their humanity, who fulfilled themselves in the life as well as in the work, whom can we name? Not most of "the best among us"—in Pound's words. Certainly not Pound himself, not Eliot, not Yeats, nor Frost, nor Stevens … the list could be extended indefinitely. I am told that Pasternak was a notable exception, and I know, closer to home, that William Carlos Williams was another. Then I have to pause. They make a shining pair. The young around us give me hope that eventually they'll have plenty of company. But the condition may well be the creation of a new society.