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Searching for Green Street: A Memorial for Stanley Kunitz, 1905-2006 One evening in September, about three years ago, my friend Anna and I went on a search for the boyhood home of the poet Stanley Kunitz. We were both living in Kunitz’s hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts at the time for different reasons: Anna was working on a Ph.D. in Geography; I was undergoing a seven-week treatment of radiation for a brain tumor. Ever the researcher, Anna had a copy of one of Kunitz’s work stuffed with notes on the house’s possible whereabouts. Both of us were strangers to this city—Anna had recently begun studies at Clark University and my only contact with Worcester was what I saw through the window during the daily van rides to Massachusetts General in Cambridge. We plowed on anyway, trundling the streets of evening-darkened triple-decker apartment houses in Anna’s well-traveled pickup. *** Stanley Kunitz was the first big-name poet I saw in the flesh. The spring of my senior year in college, an English professor wrangled tickets for a reading in Charlottesville, Virginia. My friend Bethany—Anna’s younger sister—and I snatched them up immediately. We drove over the Blue Ridge Mountains on a crisp March night; Bethany and I curled in the back seat like first graders, our teacher and his wife murmuring words we could never make out over the rush of the heater. The opening poet was incredibly annoying. Every little thing that annoys me when listening to a poet read manifested itself in this one man: he had great pauses after every line, he spoke in that unnatural sing-song voice that either drives one mad or asleep and each word was painfully over-emphasized as though his audience was dim-witted. He was a celebrated poet and a former student of Kunitz’s. But I could not tell you if his work was excellent or not. When Kunitz took the podium, the energy in the room flowed in time with his voice. His voice was quiet, and one had to lean forward to listen as he spoke through the inadvertent coughs and rustlings of winter fabric, but it was worth it. I do not remember all of poems he read, but the one that sticks most in my memory was “The Wellfleet Whale:” Somebody had carved his initials in your flank. Hunters of souvenirs had peeled off strips of your skin, a membrane thin as paper. You were blistered and cracked by the sun. The gulls had been pecking at you. The sound you made was a hoarse and fitful bleating. What drew us, like a magnet, to your dying? You made a bond between us, the keepers of the nightfall watch, who gathered in a ring around you, boozing in the bonfire light. Toward dawn we shared with you your hour of desolation, the huge lingering passion of your unearthly outcry, as you swung your blind head toward us and laboriously opened a bloodshot, glistening eye, in which we swam with terror and recognition. He read simply and naturally. There was none of the pomp and circumstance we had heard earlier. He allowed his words to do their work alone. What Kunitz realized through his work is what any writer fears: that without those words on a page in a burned down city hall, without the “documentary proof” of initials carved into a whale’s side, he or she will cease to exist when their own “bloodshot, glistening eye” closes forever. *** The reason, I believe, why Kunitz has been a sort of muse for me since that night in March is because of the presence of loved ones during moments of intense need for companionship—and Stanley Kunitz happened to be one of them. Bethany had caught me the first time I had a seizure from the brain tumor lurking in my head, and had been there during surgery a year and a half later in my own “hour of desolation.” It was around this time that my husband, Tom, had given me my copy of The Collected Poems while my brain struggled to regain its ability to read. When I was forced to travel to Massachusetts to finish off the said tumor with photon and proton radiation, Anna had been around to take me to doctoral Geography parties and late night drives in search of the homes of poets to give me something else to think about. Some time after I returned to New York I introduced Anna to my brother, Ben. They were married this past Christmas. *** Anna and I didn’t find his house that night. It was too dark to see whether the pear tree mentioned in “My Mother’s Pears” guarded the house of the aging, now departed, poet. I later learned the official Stanley Kunitz home was on 4 Woodford Street. The family had lived in two other addresses before this one, including a Green Street residence. But we never looked again while I was in Worcester. I can’t remember why. Maybe it was laziness or busyness. Maybe it was because it made a better story to tell, because no one really cares if the protagonists get what they wanted all along. It’s what happens during the search that counts. June 1, 2006 |
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