Here’s a scene from 1992. A girl with big hair blown in the style of the ‘80s is asking Stanley Kunitz about the frustrations of trying to write.
“Have you ever tried to make your poetry more appealing? Do you find yourself doing that in order to appeal more to the reader?”
She’s sitting at a long table with about 40 other teenagers, paper plates in front of them piled with pizza crusts. A wispy-haired Kunitz, peering down from the far end, focuses intently on his questioner. When he talks, his hands are perpetually active ("an agitation of the air, a perturbation of the light"), bare wrists extending past the sleeves of his tweed jacket, big knuckles, the incandescent paper of his 85-year-old cheek burning with inspiration and the rosiness of age.
“The ideal is not even to care whether there’s an audience,” he says. “The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write those poems. What you try to do with your life is transform it. And in poetry, the transformation of the life means that what you are concerned with is making a legend out of your life. And one’s whole life, all the years you spend in writing your poem, are years in which you are constructing that legend about yourself, which is not confession, and which is not autobiography. And if you create that legend about yourself, which is meaningful both to yourself and to others, people will want to read what you have to say. Because we’re hungry for those secret truths about experience, which nobody else gives us, except through the medium of art.”
