From the Archive: Interview with Stanley Kunitz

By Alex Wexelman

Photograph of Stanley Kunitz circa 1950s

The first piece in the debut issue of Columbia Journal features three female poets quizzing the recently retired United States Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz. Kunitz, who lived to be 100, was a teacher, a poet, and a gardener of great repute. In this political moment, his statement contained within this 1977 interview—“To be an artist is to defend the life principle against dehumanization”—feels comforting and pertinent. There’s little I can do while our country aids in imminent genocide, but art can be a great comfort when protesting and direct action have exhausted the soul.

In a 1972 interview with Candace DeVries Olesen for Quadrille, Bennington College Alumni Magazine, Kunitz remarked, “A poet without a sense of history is a deprived child.” And while former student and recently departed poet, Louise Glück is quoted as saying, “He kept me working like a love slave,” it is obvious Kunitz was an erudite educator who pushed his students to fill in their gaps in knowledge.

A professor of Writing at Columbia at the time of this interview’s run in 1977, Kunitz espouses wisdom in an avuncular fashion.  While some of the topics covered (the women’s movement, Watergate) have firmly dated this piece, the placid, patient musings of this legendary poet who casually references aesthetic theories of Coleridge and Goethe and offhandedly quotes Dylan Thomas and Joseph Conrad, are worth revisiting.