“For those of us who write poetry, Stanley Kunitz’s life and his work remind us that although we have been born into an unkind world that tells us to be hard and separate, it is our calling to dance for the joy of survival on the edge of the road. We must have faith that we will change, and yet we must remain modest. Poetry is a necessary and natural phenomenon, neither superior to the work of the tortoise beetle larva nor less wonderful. We must choose love before love story, sky before painting of sky, gentian blossoms before poem, even though those these choices might lead to heartbreak. We must be kind. We must be present. Kunitz reminds us not to neglect the humble life that dies into our poems, and is no less blazingly luminous for being ordinary.”
-from “I Dance for the Joy of Surviving: Stanley Kunitz’s Meditations on the Writing Life” by Dante Di Stefano. Writer’s Chronicle, September 2014