On Stanley Kunitz and the Fine Arts Work Center
The Fine Arts Work Center.
When my wife and I first started dating, the poet , one of the founders of the Fine Arts Work Center, visited her in a dream. She told him about our budding romance, and he said, with all the brightness and benevolence one would expect, “That’s wonderful! Wonderful!” (We later named our spaniel after him, though he turned out to be more like Stan Laurel than Stanley Kunitz.) That Stanley Kunitz might travel through the weird ether of dreams seems not wholly far-fetched. He believed in the necessary work done by the secret, sleeping self, busy “tunneling the purple sea,” as he puts it in an early poem. That belief was at the bedrock of his poetry and his teaching, and it continues to shape the institutions that he helped create, Poets
