“The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.”
I always dedicate the April episodes of Myth Matters to poetry as a way to celebrate National Poetry month here in the United States. This year, I’m turning to the work of Stanley Kunitz.
Kunitz received nearly every honor bestowed upon a poet in this country. His work is a marvelous blend of deep feeling and philosophy, and clear observations of the natural world.
He lived to be a 100 years old and was lucid to the end; the writing from his later years is beautiful and wise, marked by his earthy eroticism and fascination with the mysteries.
Poetry is a valuable tool and resource in this time of cultural transformation, a source of truth, inspiration, and companionship, and a doorway into inner calm.
I hope you enjoy this episode and if you have a favorite poem or poet, please share them with me!
Transcript of The Wild Braid: Stanley Kunitz for National Poetry month
Hello and welcome to Myth Matters, an exploration at the intersection of mythology, creativity, and consciousness. I’m your host Dr. Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide beautiful crazy world of ours, I’m glad that you decided to join me here today.
Today I have some poetry to share with you. I always dedicate the April episodes of Myth Matters to poetry as a way to celebrate National Poetry month here in the United States. I’m motivated to do this for several reasons, but before I touch on them, I’d like to say a few words about this present moment, what’s going on here in the United States, and the ripples of that around the world.
There are times when I really feel the heaviness and grief over the destruction and suffering. Times when I feel helpless, as one person, a concerned citizen, who does not have her hand upon any of the levers of institutional power. In these moments, I do the things that fuel my faith in life and the great good that survives despite the terrible headlines. I remind myself that although our written histories have largely been constructed around important individuals and singular events, history as life, is the daily story of an uncountable number of small acts by anonymous.
Our human world is maintained by those of us who will never be famous and whose lives may not be recorded, who nonetheless do the important work of caring, building, nurturing, and creating, fueled by love, compassion, and an appreciation for the gift of being here, whether by design or accident, in this glorious, singing world. Those who bring as much love and beauty to our collective enterprise as they can.
So, I share poetry with you today for several reasons. Because myth and poetry are related forms of expression with a shared history. Both of them utilize metaphor and symbol to expand our awareness and understanding of reality, of this world, of the human condition, and the mysteries that surround us. The oldest myths that have survived to this time were originally shared in the form of poems.
And because reading a poem, like entering a story, is a marvelous way to connect with yourself and your inner world. To contact the part of you that knows and feels the truth of your life that exists beyond the headlines and logistics of daily life that fill the to-do list.
And because I love so many poems myself, and am enriched in spirit, mind, heart, and soul by the time that I spend reading and reciting poetry. A stillness opens up. The usual frenzy of competing thoughts subsides. I sense the companionship of the poet and the invitation to be present. I feel. And I often find inspiration.
Finally, poetry is a valuable tool and resource in this time of cultural transformation. Many of us talk about “resistance” and yet, what I see is a revolution of the heart that is taking place in each one of us. Poetry is part of this revolution. As Philip Pullman says,
Poetry is not a fancy way
of giving you information;
it’s an incantation.
It is actually a magic spell.
It changes things; it changes you.
—Philip Pullman
Today I want to share the work of a poet whose been a favorite of mine, Stanley Kunitz. Kunitz received nearly every honor bestowed upon a poet in this country, including the Pulitzer and a National Medal of the Arts from President Clinton in 1993. His work is a marvelous blend of deep feeling and philosophy, and clear observations of the natural world.
I appreciate his delight in beauty and mystery, his earthy eroticism, and the way that he grapples with the truth of our human condition. Kunitz writes, “The deepest thing I know is that I am living and dying at once, and my conviction is to report that dialogue. It is a rather terrifying thought that is at the root of much of my poetry.” Note that his awareness of death was not abstract. Kunitz’s father commited suicide before he was born and he grew up in the shadow of this loss. One of the poems that I’ll read to you today speaks directly to this event.
Kunitz died in 2006, only a couple months shy of his 101st birthday, and I’m going to read some poems and excerpts from a journal that he kept in his final years of life. This material was published in a collection titled The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden, co-written with Genine Lentine. He was a devoted gardener and this collection feels like a fitting complement to the changing cycles and arrival of spring here in the northern hemisphere.
I’m excited to share Kunitz and his work with you. I hope to offer you an antidote to the chaos, confusion, and cruelty. May you find that calm, grounded, inner presence and some inspiration in Kunitz’s observations about poetry, life, and this beautiful world.
Let’s begin with a poem titled “The snakes of September.”
The snakes of September
All summer, I heard them
wrestling in the shrubbery,
outracing me from tier
to tier in my garden,
a whisper among the viburnums,
a signal flashed from the hedgerow,
a shadow pulsing
in the barberry thicket.
Now that the nights are chill
and the annuals spent,
I should’ve thought them gone,
in a torpor of blood
slipped to the nether world
before the sickle frost.
Not so. In the deceptive balm
of noon, as if defiant of the curse
that spoiled another garden,
these two appear on show
through a narrow slit
in the dense green brocade
of a north-country, spruce,
dangling head down, entwined
in a brazen love-knot.
I put out my hand and stroke
the fine, dry grit of their skins.
After all,
we are partners in the land,
co-signers of a covenant.
At my touch, the wild
braid of creation
trembles.
“The wild braid of creation trembles.” I love the marriage of material life and the mythic in that line, and the sense that we are living that mythic moment every day. Because, we are.
I debated reading you this long excerpt from one of Kunitz’s journal entries. It’s prose after all, in an episode about poetry. And yet what he says about poetry, creativity, the unconscious, and being a “friendly host” is so lovely that I’m setting that technicality aside.
What follows is from an essay titled “A friendly host.” (page 87 of The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden)
Kunitz writes: “One of the great delights of poetry is that when you’re really functioning, you’re tapping the unconscious in a way that is distinct from the ordinary, the customary use of the mind in daily life. You’re somehow cracking the shell separating you from the unknown.”
“There’s no formula for accessing the unconscious. The more you enter into the unconscious life, the more you believe in its existence and know it walks with you, the more available it becomes, and the doors open faster and longer. It learns you are a friendly host. It manifests itself instead of hiding from your tyrannical presence, intruding on your daily routine routines, accommodations, domestication.”
“The unconscious is very much akin to what, in another framework, I call wilderness. And it’s very much like the wilderness in that its beasts are not within our control. It resists the forms, the limits, the restraints, that civilization itself imposes. I’ve always felt, even as a child, that there was the decorum of the social structure, the family structure, and so forth, and then there was the wild permissiveness of the inner life. I learned I could go anywhere in my inner life.”
“One function of dreams is to inform us that the boundaries of experience are infinitely open, and that the limits we perceive in our daily life are in themselves an illusion, that actually to be alive is to occupy territories beyond those we recognize as our physical universe. Each person’s dream life is in itself a universe, a product of a single tangle of membranes and nerve centers and the rest of it. In the dream you move beyond that dominion into one where the rules have not yet been discovered and never will be.”
“Pressures from the social structure enter into the whole process of wrestling the poem into being. The challenge is not to be intimidated by convention.”
“I have often said, ‘I want to perfect my craft so I won’t have to tell lies.’ So often, when you’re stumped, the temptation is just to back down, but when you feel this is so complicated or so tenuous that there’s no way you can say it, you have to persuade yourself you can say it, that there is a way of saying it, that there is nothing that is unsayable. And this gives you strength for the next time.”
“The poem, by its very nature, holds the possibility of revelation, and revelation doesn’t come easy. You have to fight for it. There is that moment when you suddenly open the door and enter into the room of the unspeakable. Then you know you’re really perking.”
“After you’ve written a poem and you feel you’ve said something that was previously unspeakable, there’s a tremendous sense of being blessed.”
“There’s a sense of emancipation, and then the recognition that you are not absolutely free, but there are limits, restraints, conventions, that are the expression of the social order. You recognize that language itself is a creation of the social order; within such limits you travel as far as possible, but your feet are slipping off the roadway into the weeds and the mire”.
“That’s part of the journey. When Hopkins wrote in in “Inversnaid,” ‘Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet,’ that’s exactly what he was saying. When people say they are moved by a poem, they are saying that they have been in touch with the untouchable.”
“The mystery of the creative process is that the poem is there but not there within you, accumulating experience, accumulating images. It needs to be released, but sometimes there are barriers. The poem incites fear; you are coming into truth in the writing of the poem, you are hesitant to explore unfamiliar areas.”
“If the terrain were familiar, the poem would be dead on birth. I’ve written somewhere that the path of the poem is through the unknown and even the unknowable, toward something for which you can find a language.”
“It is that struggle, of course, that gives the poem its tension. If the poem moved only through the familiar, it would be so relaxed that it would have no tension, no mystery, nothing that could even approximate revelation, which is the ultimate goal of the poem.”
“I’ve been grounded all my life to believe in the mystery of existence itself. Can there be any possibility of completely understanding who we are and why we’re here or where we’re going?”
“These are questions that can never be answered completely so you have to keep on asking, and in some strange way every poem that you write impinges on that mystery. If it doesn’t, you really shouldn’t write it because it’s not really yours. That’s why I get angry and impatient with poets who use the medium just to write something pleasant or ornamental or amusing.”
Those were some of Kunitz’s thoughts about creativity and poetry and the unconscious, and the mystery. Thoughts that I find applicable to some areas in life. From an essay/ journal entry titled “A friendly host.” And now a poem titled “The portrait.”
The portrait
My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave mustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.
That was “The portrait.” That poem is obviously about a sadness that existed at the core of his life. Well, Kunitz was also happily married for many years. Here is a poem about that love, written when he was an old man. It’s titled “Touch me.”
Touch me
Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late,
it is my song that’s flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.
The energy of these poems leads me to another of Kunitz’s essays about the creative life; this one is titled “saturated with impulse.” (page 103 of The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden)
Kunitz writes: “So much of the creative life has its source in the erotic. The first impulse is strongly erotic, but then one becomes reflective – a philosophical human being, an explorer – and then as one grows older and older there’s a need to renew that energy associated with the erotic impulse.”
“There is always an element of the erotic in a poem about death. In fact, I would venture that all one’s feelings about death are kind of elegy for the erotic, just as all poems about age have that element.”
“A poem without a strong libido almost inevitably belongs to the weaker category; such a poet can carry off a technical effect with a degree of flourish, but the poem does not embody the dominant emotive element in the life process. The poem has to be saturated with impulse and that means getting down to the very tissue of experience. How can this element be absent from poetry without thinning out the poem?”
“This is certainly one of the problems when making a poem is thought to be a rational production. The dominance of reason, as in eighteenth-century poetry, diminished the power of poetry. Reason certainly has a place, but it cannot be dominant. Feeling is far more important in the making of the poem. And the language itself has to be a sensuous instrument; it cannot be a completely rational one. In rhythm and sound, for example, language has the capacity to transcend reason; it’s all like erotic play.”
“That’s the nature of aesthetic impulse, aesthetic receptivity. Whether you’re walking through the garden or reading a poem, there’s a sense of fulfillment. You’ve gone through a complete chain of experience, changing and communicating with each step and with each line so that you are linked with the phenomenon of time itself. The erotic impulse is so basic to human experience that we can never be free from it, even in old age.”
“‘Desire’ is one of the strongest words in the language, which is why, in “Touch Me,” as I look back on it, the very sound of that word is like a cry.”
“In the middle of the night, if I wake, as I often do, I hear the sound of the night. Not street noises, or the sounds of animals, a sound of something humming like a motor that seems to emanate from the movement of the spheres.”
“I hear it very strongly in Provincetown. The night air seems to produce all sorts of secret sounds that simply flow through it and often I’ll get up and walk through the house and say ‘Where is the sound coming from?’ And it’s not coming from anywhere in particular; it’s a deep pulsing in the universe.”
That was an excerpt from an essay titled “Saturated with impulse.” Now, all of the poems and thoughts that I’ve read thus far are from The Wild Braid and I do have one more from that collection to read to you today. But I can’t dip into Kunitz without sharing one of his better-known poems, one that is a personal favorite of mine. It’s called “The Layers.”
The Layers
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face,
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
—from The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz
“How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?” Desire and disappointment, love and loss– another form of the tension like that between life and death, or living and dying, that forms us and the path we make.
I want to read one more poem to you, but first let’s make our customary pause to welcome new email subscribers: Mary Kathryn, Trés, Kat, Maria, Blanca, Lenore, Ralph, Melissa, Michelle, MJ, Elizabeth, Tracy, Deneane, Amy, and Belind.a Welcome to Myth Matters!
If you’re new to Myth Matters, I invite you to head over to the Mythic Mojo website. You can join the email list if you’d like to receive links to new Myth Matters episodes in your inbox, and you’ll find information about mythic mentorship and creativity coaching that I offer.
Many thanks to the Patreon patrons and supporters on Bandcamp who lend their financial support to this podcast. Shout out to longtime supporters Sam, Jessica, and Jeff — thank you!
If you’re finding something of value here then I hope you’ll support this podcast in some tangible way. Join me on patreon, share an episode with a friend, post a positive review online, or email me to say hi and share a reflection. Thank you so much for your support of Myth Matters in whatever form makes sense for you.
Now, one more poem from Kunitz before we part ways. This poem is titled “The Round.”
The Round
Light splashed this morning
on the shell-pink anemones
swaying on their tall stems;
down blue-spiked veronica
light flowed in rivelets
over the humps of the honeybee;
this morning I saw light kiss
the silk of the roses
in their second flowering,
my late bloomers
flushed with their brandy.
A curious gladness shook me.
So I have shut the doors of my house,
so I have trudged downstairs to my cell,
so I am sitting in semi-dark
hunched over my desk
with nothing for a view
to tempt me
but a bloated compost heap,
steamy old stinkpile,
under my window;
and I pick my notebook up
and I start to read aloud
the still-wet words I scribbled
on the blotted page:
“Light splashed. . . “
I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
when a new life begins for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day.
(Link to profile on Poetry Foundation at his death, references The Wild Braid)
I hope you enjoyed this little glimpse into Kunitz and his work. If you’re reading or writing poetry this month and have found a favorite, please share it with me. Now or anytime.
If we have a better understanding of our need for myth, and all that our old stories–and poems– offer, we can live more satisfying lives. We can inhabit a better story and create a more beautiful, just and sustainable world.
And that’s it for me, Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters. Take good care of yourself and until next time, keep the mystery in your life alive.
Want more? Here are links to a couple more episodes devoted to poetry:
Myth, poetry, and the power of the word
And the link to the April 2025 episode because joy feels even more necessary and radical now. Joy and Poetry for National Poetry month
Leave a Reply