THE WILD BRAID
A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden
by
with Genine Lentine
W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.
Hardcover, 143 pages, $23.95
ISBN 0-393-06141-8
The Wild Braid by Stanley Kunitz is that rare book you savor putting it down after a few pages because you want to save some part of its gentle and generous wisdom for tomorrow and then again the next day. It combines Kunitz brief essays, interviews, and color photographs of the poet and his garden, along with poems, memories of his boyhood in the woods, his years of gardening, and his reflections on the similarity of the natural world, gardening, and poetry.
As a boy he haunted the woods of Massachusetts, and probably for good reason his father killed himself while his mother was still carrying Kunitz in her womb, and his stepfather, kind as he was, died of a heart attack shortly after marrying Kunitz mother. In The Portrait, he recounts how his mother never forgave his father and locked his name where she would not let him out, so that when Kunitz found his father s portrait, she ripped it to shreds and slapped him.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.
This
intense sensitivity, to feel the depth of emotion half a century later, makes
Kunitz work far more compelling than most particularly his ability to end a
poem by opening it up. As John Skoyles
said in a recent tribute after Kunitz death just shy of his 101st
birthday, Kunitz disagreed with Yeats theory that a poem should close like a
click on a box. What Kunitz believed was
the ending should be a door and a window.
It should close but you should be able to look through it. (Skoyles, Poets
& Writers, A Tribute to
The idea that an ending is both a closing and opening is evident throughout The Wild Braid. In Lamplighters: 1914, Kunitz tells us how as a boy in a small town he practiced sleight-of-hand and would fall asleep over picture books of magic, and at dusk, while helping to light the street lamps, he would raise his enchanter s wand to the gas mantles of the lanterns and touch them, one-by-one, until the whole countryside bloomed.
Reading this, you naturally feel as if your own internal lanterns have been lit, that your own countryside has bloomed. Kunitz words and insights have a way of doing this to you. It s much like the story he tells of the dilapidated farm he bought during the Great Depression to escape the city. In the woods there, which he describes as long and deep, he befriended an owl and her fledglings to such an extent over a period of weeks they came to rest on his outstretched arm and then imagine this he carried them into his attic where they could come and go through an open window.
My
encounter with this family of owls was one of the most intimate of all my
experiences with the animal world, a world I consider to be part of our own
world, too.
This
keen relationship with the natural world developed into the garden he built
from nothing but sand at his summer home in
It s
a terrible mistake to impose your pattern on a student. Something that especially pleases me about my
students is that they re all so different, each one. What one needs to cultivate in a young poet
is the assertion of that particular spirit, that particular set of memories,
that personhood.
This is a rare and incredibly giving view of life not often adapted by those who teach us, or by us who teach others, regardless of the subject. In the same way Kunitz was careful not to prune his garden too much, he knew the early draft of a poem should not be pruned so much as to rid it of its essence.
The danger is that you cut away the heart of a poem, and are left only
with the most ordered and contained element.
A certain degree of sprawl is necessary; it should feel as though
there s room to maneuver, that you re not trapped in a cell. You must be very careful not to deprive the poem
of its wild origin.
This sense of the wild, of the unconscious, is significant. As Kunitz recognizes, so much of the power of a poem is in what it doesn t say as much as in what it does say. Just as a garden may need to be weeded, domesticated to a degree, it should not become mere landscaping and simply a thing. In keeping with this principle, his garden contained no straight paths but winding paths. In the same way he recognized and respected the mystery and secrets inherent in poetry. Art conceals and reveals at the same time.
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.
For Kunitz, this unconscious is akin to wilderness something which resists the forms, the limits, the restraints, that civilization itself imposes. So while reason has its place in poetry, Kunitz felt it tended to diminish the power of a poem, and that the language of a poem should be a sensuous instrument which, with rhythm and sound, could transcend reason. Such sound, he felt, came from a deep pulsing in the universe, a life-force with a natural cycle of life and death, similar to a garden, by which the spring season is followed by autumn, and autumn by spring, something Kunitz considered absolutely essential. Often we can only hope to feel the energy of life that Kunitz felt, something he wonderfully described in The Round:
I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
when a new life begins
for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day.
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