One hundred years of plenitude

PROVINCETOWN -- In a corner chair on a hot day, with his famous garden below the window, Stanley Kunitz sits and pushes forward the words, with all his strength. Each comes slowly, and just when it seems he has lost his train of thought, the next word emerges, and the result is a distilled idea about life, poetry, the world.

Kunitz turns 100 tomorrow, and his centenary has been or soon will be celebrated in New York, in his hometown of Worcester, and here in Provincetown, where he has spent summers for decades. His new book, ''The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden," with Genine Lentine and with photographs by Marnie Crawford Samuelson, is a kind of valedictory for a life spent, as Kunitz once put it, ''caught in the dangerous traffic between self and the universe."

In his time, Kunitz seems to have known or had contact with practically everyone of note in the poetry world. He has also won virtually every prize and honor, and propelled or redirected the careers of dozens of poets. He won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and served as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress from 1974 to 1976 and again from 2000 to 2001, at age 95, after the position was renamed poet laureate.

His writer friends included Theodore Roethke, e.e. cummings, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell. He knew Ogden Nash and Marianne Moore. In the '60s, he met Joseph Brodsky in Russia, years before he was exiled to America, won the Nobel Prize, and became the poet laureate. Many of the poets he chose in the prestigious Yale Younger Poets series, which he edited during the '60s and '70s, became famous. Two of his proteges, Robert Hass and Louise Gluck, became poets laureate.

Kunitz is pencil-thin, with hands the color of old meerschaum, but his eyes and ears are clear. Lentine, his assistant, sat in on the interview, and at times quietly suggested that a question might be refocused. Occasionally, Kunitz's words were delayed by slow coughs. There were some repetitions in his answers, yet he heard, thought, and spoke with care and clarity.

Asked what poetry had done for him, Kunitz said, ''I would say that poetry has been so much a part of my life that it's hard to think of it in those terms. Poetry is inseparable from my life force, and that began very early. It was a great gift, and it has sustained me through the years, and the losses that have attended those years."

He was asked how he had managed to keep his positive feeling about life, given early family tragedies and the death last year of his wife, Elise Asher. ''I cannot conceive of a life that hasn't had serious disappointments," he said. ''I am familiar with sorrow, and yet basically I truly have enjoyed my life and cannot think of anything that has meant more to me. Marriage was important to me, and love, and gardening. Poetry has been to me a great gift, for which I am grateful, and it has sustained me through the years and losses that have attended those years. Life itself is the greatest gift I can think of, and I seem never to forget that."

Genesis of a poet
He was born a few weeks after his father, who owned a struggling dress business, killed himself by drinking carbolic acid. His mother, Yetta, erased Solomon Kunitz from any mention in the family, rebuilt the business, and remarried. But the second husband, whom Stanley loved, soon died of a heart attack.

Valedictorian of his high school class, Kunitz went to Harvard on a scholarship and graduated summa cum laude in English in 1926. His hope of a literary/academic career was crushed when the word was passed indirectly, as he put it once in an interview, that ''Anglo-Saxons would resent being taught English by a Jew."

He went home and got a job as a reporter for the Worcester Telegram, and covered the notorious Sacco-Vanzetti case. He was so outraged by what he saw as the injustice of the two men's 1927 execution for murder that he was known as ''Sacco" around the city room. He was also assigned to interview a Worcester character named Robert H. Goddard, who today is remembered as the father of rocket science.

In 1927 he went to New York and began a long association with publisher H.W. Wilson, co-editing a series of literary reference books, some still in print. His first book of poems was accepted in 1930 by Ogden Nash, who was then the poetry editor of Doubleday.

Kunitz's early poems had formal, stately cadences, such as ''Endlessly to no end wending / Pilgrim O my conscience in the green / Nacre of twilight abbreviate the heart." But that manner didn't last. Forty years later, a poem called ''The Portrait" begins: ''My mother never forgave my father / for killing himself, / especially at such an awkward time /and in a public park."

He was drafted in 1943, at age 37, and served in noncombatant jobs for the duration. Two marriages came and went (his daughter Gretchen is from the second), and in 1958 he married the painter Elise Asher. Though he never cared for city life, he and Asher lived in New York in the winter, and in 1962 they bought the house in the West End of Provincetown, where they spent summers thereafter. In 1968 he and several others founded the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.

After winning the Pulitzer in 1959, Kunitz became more in demand as a teacher. Though he taught at many colleges at various times, he shunned a permanent professorship, viewing it as a hindrance to full-time art. Gluck said that as her teacher at Columbia University, Kunitz ''managed to convey that the poet was the servant of the poem and that you made yourself entirely available to it, gave it the full benefit of your conscious mind, intuition, and patience.

In an art form with many generations, factions, and schools, Kunitz was companionable across boundaries. Any serious poet was a member of his tribe. ''He is beloved by poets of many different styles and ways of thinking about poetry," said the poet Sharon Olds. He seems always to have known how to criticize without inflicting a wound. Almost 75 years ago, in 1931, he wrote a tough review of the poetry of Conrad Aiken, criticizing ''the unmistakable vapor of sentimentalism" in some of Aiken's work and urging him to give up ''the perpetual vaudeville of his brain." In response, Aiken wrote to him what Kunitz described as ''a generous and forebearing note."

''He helped me a great deal," said poet Donald Hall, 76. ''When my first book [''Exiles and Marriages"] came out in 1955, my first reviews were puffs. Then Stanley wrote a long, somewhat censorious review in Poetry magazine. He gave me hell about some things. He said good things about my skill, but it was a case of lots of skill but not much self-knowledge. Stanley was right."

''He changed my life," said Carolyn Forche, chosen by Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets award in 1975. He had turned her down for the award the year before but sent her an encouraging handwritten letter about her poems, which led her to revise and submit them again. ''Had Stanley not pulled me out of the barrel at that moment," Forche said, ''I might have written for the cupboard all my life."

She became one of his devoted young friends -- and as he aged, most of them were younger. ''He was very kind to me, and his advice was always right," she said. ''He forced me to think about my art in the most serious terms, not to be deflected from it. He would never allow us to languish. He insisted upon growth."

Tending the garden
With the interview at an end, it was time for a visit to the garden. Kunitz moved with surprising vigor, Lentine carefully holding his upper arm.

The garden is a subdued, complex texture of perennials and dwarf evergreens, 37 feet by 50 feet, its terraces defined by low brick walls and a sinuous path of crushed white stone. Over the decades, Kunitz turned what had been an arid dune into fertile soil with compost and seaweed gathered at low tide. With its varied moods and points of view, it crops up in many of his poems. In the interview, he had said, ''I have a very positive feeling about the earth and what it has given me."

The visit concluded on the small screened porch, with the reading of a poem, one of Kunitz's recent ones, ''My Mother's Pears." It's about the tree his mother planted in their Worcester yard, which still bears fruit, and from which the current owners send Kunitz a few pears each year. Before he began to read, his narrow chest rose and expanded visibly. Voice and verse emerged from the frail body with determination, in the plaintive timbre of a cello or a bell-buoy.

Afterward, the poet was asked if he is still writing. He answered, ''Oh yes. I don't think I will ever stop writing, until I stop breathing. As long as I have strength, I'll continue."

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.