View this email on a browserForward to a friend
July 29, 2014
 

The Layers

 
Stanley Kunitz

About This Poem

 

About “The Layers” Stanley Kunitz has said, “I wrote ‘The Layers’ in my late seventies to conclude a collection of sixty years of my poetry. Through the years I had endured the loss of several of my dearest friends, including Theodore Roethke, Mark Rothko, and—most recently—Robert Lowell. I felt I was near the end of a phase in my life and in my work. The poem began with two lines that came to me in a dream, spoken out of a dark cloud: ‘Live in the layers, / not on the litter.’”

 

Stanley Kunitz was born on July 29, 1905, in Worcester, Massachusetts. His many honors include the Pulitzer Prize and serving as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Kunitz was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and died at the age of 100 on May 14, 2006.

Poetry by Kunitz

 

The Collected Poems

(W. W. Norton and Company, 2002)

"Almost Sixty" by Jim Moore

read-more

"A Song on the End of the World" by Czeslaw Milosz

read-more

"Archaic Torso of Apollo" by Rainer Maria Rilke

read-more

Poem-a-Day

 

Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.