[New-Poetry] remembering Kunitz

[Mark Weiss]

He was also well aware of the poetry he chose not 
to acknowledge. As was his right.

At 09:59 PM 11/28/2010, you wrote:

>One interesting link between Stanley Kunitz and 
>Gerald Stern is that they both had to wait a 
>long time for recognition, and thus to join the 
>world of the Poetry Establishment.  Both 
>eventually enjoyed what seem to us like long and 
>laurel-filled careers, but both were in their 
>fifties before they became well known.
>
>Kunitz won the Pulitzer in 1959 when he was 54 
>years old; and Stern's first major press book, 
>*Lucky Life*, appeared in 1977, when he was 52 
>(he had a couple minuscule press pamphlets prior 
>to that).  *Lucky Life*'s back flap informs us 
>that Gerald Stern was teaching then at Somerset 
>County College in New Jersey--not exactly the 
>Iowa Writers Workshop at that point.
>
>We look back now and think of them both, 
>perhaps, as quintessential insiders, but that's 
>at least an oversimplification.  And each one, I 
>think, carried the mindset of the outsider into 
>the academy, when they finally made their marks there.
>
>Not sure that any of this has much to do with 
>the work, of course.  In any case, Kunitz was 
>highly revered by poets like Roethke, Lowell, 
>Kinnell, Rukeyser, and many younger figures; and 
>served himself as a kind of father figure to 
>many generations of younger writers.
>
>I for one am not inclined to dismiss him too 
>readily.  And I very much agree with Barry that 
>about the art of poetry his knowledge of poetry 
>seemed encyclopedic--at least if we're talking 
>about the whole history of poetry, and not just 
>the skirmishes of our own times.
>
>
>
>========================================
>David Graham
>grahamd at ripon.edu
>
>Home Page:
>http://web.me.com/drjazz
>
>Poetry Library:
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>==========================================
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New from Chax Press: Mark Weiss, As Landscape.
$16.  Order from http://www.chax.org/poets/weiss.htm


"What a beautiful set of circumstances! What a 
lovely concatenation of particulars. Here is the 
poet alive in every sense of the word, and 
through every one of his senses. Instead of 
missing a beat or a part, Weiss’ fragments are 
like Chekhov’s short stories­the more that gets 
left out, the more they seem to contain
 One can 
hear echoes from all the various 
ancestors...[but] the voice, at its center, its 
core, is pure Mark Weiss. His use of the fragment 
is both elegant and bafflingly clear, a pure 
musical threnody
[it] opens a window, not only 
into a mind, but a person, a personality, this 
human figure at the emotional center of the poem."

M.G. Stephens, in Jacket. 
http://jacketmagazine.com/40/r-weiss-rb-stephens.shtml
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