Happy B-Day to S.K.

" I don't want to talk about my age, or longevity or anything else like that. I think everybody knows I'm no youngster. So here is my poem: The Long Boat."

- Stanley Kunitz


Stanley Kunitz is a two time poet laureate. He has in the course of his lifetime received a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and the National Medal of the Arts. And yesterday, July 29th, 2005 he turned 100.

And as I listened to him speak yesterday on my drive home I heard a well-worn voice intone in a scratchy hum just above inaudible the three sentences above. Here was a instrument grown tired from over use, rusty from lack of care, or both. After a brief "by the way" condescendingly explaining that the Long Boat of the poem referred to a Viking tradition of sending one's dead out to sea in a boat to "drift for an eternity" Kunitz cleared his voice, once, twice and then began to read.

Here the needle hit the record a bit more solidly, confident, as if this was a place in which it more suitably belonged.

When his boat snapped loose

from its mooring, under

the screaking of the gulls,

Here the pops and crackles so notable in his opening speech seemed appropriate and necessary as if almost a underscoring of sound accompanying the poem.

He tried at first to wave
to his dear ones on shore,
but in the rolling fog
they had already lost their faces.

Kunitz slowed and lingered over the sounds, as if rolling them in his mouth to taste each syllable individually.

Too tired even to choose

between jumping and calling,

The voice changes, softens or loosens, I'm not quite sure. Clearly a smile has come across the face of the reader.

Somehow he felt absolved and free

of his burdens, those mottoes
stamped on his name-tag:

And now as if questioning or pondering, his voice loses its gravel and becomes light and free as if wistfully recalling things he has lost and cannot quite remember.

Conscience, ambition, and all

that caring.

Here the voice once again becomes solid, resigned almost, if thoughtful.

He was content to lie down
with the family ghosts
in the slop of his cradle:

It slows, stops after each word as if tasting them. Looking for what they're made of.

Buffeted by the storm,
endlessly drifting.

Here the voice regains the gravely age-worn quality. This time though it is harsher, cracking and popping under the weight of anger and resentment

Peace! Peace!
To be rocked by the Infinite!
As if it didn't matter
which way was home;

And finally Kunitz quiets again to a whisper, a plaintive mew. So soft and trembling one gets the sense every fiber aches to cry out in pain, or sorrow, or fear.

As if he didn't know
he loved the earth so much
he wanted to stay forever.

This is a poem written by a man about to embark on his own Long Boat journey into eternity. In a way I admire Kunitz's need to plunge ahead into his poem. To gloss over the previous awards and accolades. To ignore the obvious desire by many to re-hash his long and full life. The only thing he came on air to do was to give us all he's ever offered. And I like that bold statement. That even at 100 we are allowed to be people in the present and not merely functions of our past. Kuntiz's reading says to me: I will not let you put me away. I will not use the rest of my life to get ready to leave it. I will use it instead to live. You might think I would rest on the laurels of all that I have. That I should be content, that this is enough for me.

No. We will not do it like that.

I could have sat and given you an interview of my life. Instead, I give my preferred choice of expression. I prefer it because it is a poem that exposes, in its way, my life as a poet while the other is merely an exposition on the poetic life. One is beautiful and the other is not. One is art and the other isn't. One speaks from the heart of one person to another when the latter simply resigns itself to a column of numbers and banal factuality.

For Kunitz is not content to let the world announce his centennial and ride along as a display. Kunitz is not a exhibit. Kunitz is a poet. And a poet by definition writes poetry. And that is his birthday present to us.