Poetry Discussion with Janet Krauss: The Poetry of Stanley Kunitz

Event Details

Please join us as Janet Krauss leads a discussion of a selection of poems by Stanley Kunitz. A readings packet will be emailed in advance of the program.

No charge for the program. Advance registration required. Register online in order to receive the Zoom session invitation link and readings packet. Please email Michael Bellacosa at mbellacosa@wiltonlibrary.org with any questions.

Stanley Kunitz had the good fortune to write his most mature poems during the later years of his life. In Passing Through, published in 1995, his poems reach out to us as “contemplative, confiding, mythic and elegiac,” a critic keenly remarked. Kunitz was so well respected as a poet, he was twice named Poet Laureate of the United States, first in 1974 and then in 1995. Many years previously, he received the Pulitzer for Selected Poems, 1928-1958. In 1993, President Clinton honored him with the National Medal of Arts.

He was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1905 and died in Manhattan in 2006. He received his BA and MA from Harvard, 1926 and 1927, respectively. Later in his life, he found peace and inspiration in Provincetown and in his garden there, the source of his solace and the ongoing assurance of the life cycle. His book The Wild Braid: a Poet Reflects on a Century in a Garden in collaboration with Genine Lentine is a collection of his thoughts, interviews, gardening experiences and the creative process written between the years 2002-2004. Community conscious concerning artists and poets, he founded The Poets House in NYC and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He taught at Bennington and other colleges.

He influenced major poets of his time: W. H. Auden, Theodore Roethke, and Robert Lowell. He still has an influence on us with his openness, emotional intensity and humaneness. “Poetry is for the sake of the life,” he remarked. Poetry sustained him. He said, “the poem comes in the form of a blessing—like rapture breaking in the mind.”

Janet Krauss, who has two books of poetry published, “Borrowed Scenery,” Yuganta Press, and “Through the Trees of Autumn,” Spartina Press, has recently retired from teaching English at Fairfield University. Her mission is to help and guide Bridgeport’s young children through her teaching creative writing, leading book clubs and reading to and engaging a kindergarten class. As a poet, she co-directs the poetry program of the Black Rock Art Guild. Several of her poems have been published in Ameythst Review.

Event Type(s): Online Event

Age Group(s): Adults

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