Stanley Kunitz’s Visitations

J.D. Scrimgeour | November 2022

J.D. Scrimgeour

In Stanley Kunitz’s late poem, “Halley’s Comet,” the speaker remembers a time in first grade when Halley’s comet would be passing near the earth, threatening to destroy it. The recreated first-grader’s mindset is charming: “At supper I felt sad to think /that it was probably / the last meal I’d share / with my mother and my sisters; but I felt excited, too / and scarcely touched my plate.”¹ And then, toward the end of the poem, the boy sneaks onto the roof while the family sleeps. The poem then directly addresses an absent father:

Look for me, Father, on the roof

of the red brick building

at the foot of Green Street—

that’s where we live, you know, on the 

top floor.

I’m the boy in the white flannel gown

sprawled on this coarse gravel bed

searching the starry sky,

waiting for the world to end.

The poem, like much of Kunitz’s work, is clearly autobiographical. The father being addressed seems to be his absent father, who committed suicide six weeks before Kunitz was born and whom, according to his poem, “The Portrait,” he was not allowed to speak of in his mother’s presence. The capitalization of “Father” in “Halley’s Comet” suggests a connection between the father and God, but the speaker’s instructions on where he can be found implies that this “Father” isn’t all-knowing.

The leap in this last stanza makes the poem open up in beautiful and mysterious ways that, to me, are the essence of poetry. The direct address makes a warm poem of bittersweet nostalgia into something singular. Suddenly, the speaker and protagonist—the poet and the boy—are fused in a timeless place, that roof, which no longer existed physically when Kunitz was composing his poem.

The last stanza shows the speaker attempting to invoke a visitation, an arrival by the Father. The father figure, a great absence, has actually visited the speaker in a number of earlier Kunitz poems, such as when he is heard “thumping” ² in the mother’s locked cabinet in “The Portrait,” and when, in “Quinnapoxet,” both father and mother, presumably deceased, appear near the reservoir where the speaker has just sliced his thumb while fishing:

They came suddenly into view

On the Indian road,

Evenly stepping

Past the apple orchard,

Commingling with the dust 

They raised, their cloud of being,

Against the dripping light

Looming larger and bolder.

She was wearing a mourning bonnet

And a wrap of shining taffeta.

“Why don’t you write?” she cried

From the folds of her veil.

“We never hear from you.”

I had nothing to say to her.

But for him who walked behind her

In his dark worsted suit,

With his face averted

As if to hide a scald, 

Deep in his other life,

I touched my forehead

With my swollen thumb

And splayed my fingers out—

In deaf-mute country

The sign for father. ³ 

Visitations, as “Quinnapoxet” shows, are not limited to the absent father. In fact, a visitation is a move that Kunitz makes often and well, a modus operandi. His poems incorporate visitations confidently; it is clearly a gesture that he believes in. In fact, reading through his essays, we can see how visitations, and the way they incorporate both disorder and order, are touchstones to reading Kunitz’s work. While more obvious examples abound, Kunitz’s poem, “End of Summer,” which first appeared in his Selected Poems, 1928–58, shows that visitations haunted Kunitz even during his earlier, formal phase.

An agitation of the air

A perturbation of the light

Admonished me the unloved year

Would turn on its hinge that night.

I stood in the disenchanted field

Amid the stubble and the stones,

Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me

The song of my marrow bones.

Blue poured into summer blue,

A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,

The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew

That part of my life was over.

Already the iron door of the north

Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows

Order their populations forth,

And a cruel wind blows. ⁴

In the second stanza, the “small worm” visits the speaker specifically, a kind of otherworldly visit. This brief “visitation” is so woven into the fabric of the poem that we hardly notice how it opens the entire poem up, inviting mystery, and animating nature so that, in the last line, nature’s forces are marching forth like armies.

In a sparkling little essay, “Swimming in Lake Chaug-go-ga-gog-man-chaug-ga-gog-cha-buna-gun-ga-maugg,” Kunitz writes about his composition of this poem. Curiously, he treats the worm’s visit, and speech, only in passing, saying that lisping seemed “the perfectly right and proper thing for a small worm to do” ⁵ without acknowledging the oddness of a worm speaking in the first place. His acceptance of this unusual moment shows how ingrained the visitation is in Kunitz’s aesthetic, how natural it feels to him. 

Yet Kunitz also writes about how he labored over this poem, and it wasn’t until he realized that the poem wasn’t a “descriptive piece about the migration” of geese but about a “disturbance of the heart” that the poem came together. One senses that the discovery of the worm helped the poem crystallize. It is the moment when the poem moves away from being simply a “descriptive piece.”

*

The visitation, an appearance of a divine or supernatural creature, has been a poetic subgenre for a long time. Think of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which actually has two visitations, the mariner and the albatross. Or Keats’s nightingale, which, curiously, is not seen, only heard. One needn’t leave the city of Worcester to find American poets who include visitations. In Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Moose,” like Keats’s nightingale or Kunitz’s worm, an animal is the visitor. Stopped by the moose who has “come out of / the impenetrable wood,” the passengers, who are on a nighttime bus ride from Nova Scotia to Boston, express their astonishment to each other in a kind of communion: Why, why do we feel / (we all feel) this sweet / sensation of joy?” ⁶ In Frank O’Hara’s “A True Account of Talking to the Sun on Fire Island,” the visitor is the sun, who appears as a humorous god-like character, proffering advice and wisdom in a mix of informal and hoary: “And / always embrace things, people earth / sky stars, as I do, freely and with / the appropriate sense of space.” ⁷

These examples show the range of visitations, reminding us how we shouldn’t limit our conceptions of them—they can be communal, as in “The Moose.” And, as O’Hara’s wonderfully light poem shows, they needn’t necessarily be about the past or future, a haunting or a prediction. What any visitation does, though, is infuse narrative into a poem, often bringing the self out of a lyric moment and into time. The protagonist has to respond. There is suddenly action, a before and after. A sequence of events gets established. Time becomes “present.”

*

Kunitz, in his essay, “The Search for a Style,” acknowledges that he is drawn to contemporary poems that are “relaxed in the line,” “organic in form,” and “fluid in their development.” These qualities make him anticipate a poetry “that will recapture from the novel much of the territory that has been forfeited by it.” ⁸

As he explains in a paragraph from the second of his two “Seedcorn and Windfall” essays, which are essentially compilations from his journals, interviews, and articles, “A major crisis in the history of poetry occurred in the last century [the 19th] when the novel displaced the poem as the accepted medium for story-telling.” Kunitz acknowledges that poetry “gained something in this exchange… by moving inward, gradually forging a link with the new science of psychoanalysis,” but, he says, in “the process of cultivating this art of introversion, poets managed to lose most of their audience.” ⁹

What they often forfeit, Kunitz says, is narrative, and “a poetry deprived of narrative is also in danger of cutting itself off from its mythological roots.” Kunitz seems very aware of the problems of narrative—poetry can’t be simply “an anecdotal art, which is a species of trivialization,” and he senses that a “return to straight-line, sequential narration… offers minimal aesthetic satisfactions to the modern mind.” Yet he feels narrative should be invited in. He quotes Henry James, who writes that to “attach myself” to ‘[t]he march of an action’ is my imperative, my only salvation.”

Kunitz is interested in narrative’s possibilities in poetry, and his own career’s move toward a more “relaxed line” and sense of “fluid” development demonstrate that. Still, he is sensitive to narrative’s pitfalls. In particular, he seems concerned of the “trivialization” that narrative risks, a trivialization that comes from the lure of tidiness narrative offers. 

In “A Kind of Order,” the opening essay in his collection A Kind of Order, A Kind of Folly: Essays and Conversations, Kunitz argues that artists, and art, must ultimately be on the side of order. “To perpetuate any kind of truth about human experience is ultimately to be on the side of order… The human organism is equipped to tolerate only a limited amount of confusion. One of the prime tasks of the imagination is to create an illusion of order.” ¹⁰

And yet he acknowledges the draw and necessity of disorder in art: “That order is greatest which holds in suspension the most disorder, holds it in such precarious balance that each instant threatens its overthrow. In life and in art, consistent with the precept of Paul Tillich, ‘the self-affirmation of a being is the stronger the more non-being it can take into itself.’”

Kunitz’s idea of the poem holding as much disorder as possible echoes Wallace Stevens famous line in “Of Modern Poetry,” that it “must resist the intelligence / almost successfully.” ¹¹

How does one invite disorder, the irrational? In the past, it was easier, Kunitz writes,

When belief in miracle was an article of faith, the irrational could enter art ceremoniously by way of the front door, with hat and calling card in hand, and be confident of a gracious welcome. Today, when the house is burning, we hear the irrational trampling up the cellar stairs, but we cannot be really sure, hearing the blows of its axe, whether it comes to kill us or to save.

Visitations are the “tramping up the cellar stairs,” the door to the irrational. I hear in Kunitz’s metaphor echoes from his poem, “The Portrait,” in which his mother has “locked” his father’s name “in her deepest cabinet / and would not let him out, / though I could hear him thumping / when I came down from the attic.” This irrational here isn’t simply the idea of the dead still being present, but the actual act of the father, suicide, which could be viewed as the ultimate irrational act. The mother refuses the irrational—her “illusion of order” will not allow “suspension” of any “disorder.” And so it becomes the son’s life work to invite disorder in, to make art. 

In his book, Ron Carlson Writes a Story, Carlson says that when he is stuck while writing a story, he introduces a new character. Doing so disrupts the stasis, it opens up new possibilities. A visitation invites disorder. Of course, once you invite disorder in, there’s the danger that things fall apart. An interviewer once noted to Kunitz, “Often your poems deal with dreams,” to which Kunitz replied, “Often a poem is a dream, but I don’t necessarily say it is.” ¹² In dreams, the irrational takes precedence and disorder is the rule, and so in Kunitz’s line we might glimpse the challenge he sets for himself: how to make the irrational felt, believed, graspable. How to make a poem a dream without necessarily declaring it.

Narrative, the mode that allows for visitations, a mode that invites disorder by expanding or exploding the lyric moment, also offers a frame in which to hold it. Within a narrative, a poem can “hold” disorder “in suspension,” can not only incorporate dream, but be it. Narrative, which introduces time in a poem, also tends to harness it. Even memory narratives, which follow the path the mind takes in through memory, rather than strict chronology, can usually be mapped according to chronology. 

With any narrative poem, the reader’s attention is likely to focus on story as much as on language. Kunitz’s affinity for poems that are “relaxed in the line” underscores his emphasis on story. He wants to incorporate the irrational so as to make it feel natural, the way whatever happens in a dream feels natural. That doesn’t mean that the visitation can’t be a surprise, but that the language in which the visitation is presented mustn’t disengage readers by reminding them of language’s elevations and distortions.

*

Some things I do not profess 

to understand, perhaps

not wanting to, including

whatever it was they did

with you or you with them

that timeless summer day

when you stumbled out of the wood,

distracted, with your white blouse torn

and a bloodstain on your skirt.

“Do you believe?” you asked.

Between us, through the years,

we pieced enough together

to make the story real:

how you encountered on the path

a pack of sleek, grey hounds,

trailed by a dumbshow retinue

in leather shrouds; and how

you were led, through leafy ways,

into the presence of a royal stag,

flaming in his chestnut coat,

who kneeled on a swale of moss

before you; and how you were borne

aloft in triumph through the green,

stretched on his rack of budding horn,

till suddenly you found yourself alone

in a trampled clearing.

That was a long time ago,

almost another age, but even now, 

when I hold you in my arms, 

I wonder where you are.

Sometimes I wake to hear

the engines of the night thrumming

outside the east bay window

on the lawn spreading to the rose garden.

You lie beside me in elegant repose,

a hint of transport hovering on your lips,

indifferent to the harsh green flares

that swivel through the room,

searchlights controlled by unseen hands.

Out there is a childhood country,

bleached faces peering in

with coals for eyes.

Our lives are spinning out

from world to world;

the shapes of things

are shifting in the wind.

What do we know

beyond the rapture and the dread? ¹³

Kunitz’s brief essay, “The Layers: Some Notes on ‘The Abduction’,” considers the “genesis” and sources of this poem, even as he acknowledges that a poem is a “gift” that comes “out of nowhere… delivered suspiciously without a postmark and wrapped in bafflement.” ¹⁴ He shares that there are “two women in the poem, maybe three… combined into a single figure.” While acknowledging that any poem’s sources are vast and unknowable, Kunitz notes that “The Abduction” takes most of its imagery from a moment in bed with his wife, a dream he had, and a mythic story from a book he was reading. In sharing these sources, Kunitz is demonstrating what he calls “layering.”

“One of the great resources of the poetic imagination,” Kunitz writes, “is its capacity to mount thought on thought, event on event, image on image, time on time, a process I term ‘layering.’ The life of the mind is largely a buried life.” The combining of different events and images and times in “The Abduction” exemplifies this layering. The process is what prevents the poem from “trivialization,” from being simply “anecdotal.”

For Kunitz, incorporating a visitation seems a primary method to add layers to a poem, to deepen it, shaking the sense of order. Given that the “visitor” is often from another time, another world, another memory, another species, the poem in which the visitor enters is suddenly asked to hold much more than it had been holding. 

Still, as Kunitz concludes in his essay on “The Abduction,” the poem must ultimately take on an order. “Nothing that I have said is meant to suggest that a poem, any poem, is at best an inspired pastiche.” There must be “something more, something at once capricious, idiosyncratic, and whole.” And it seems obvious that this poem is more than a pastiche, though it holds a lot of disorder. Even though the speaker says “our lives are spinning out/from world to world,” an image suggesting great disorder, it is contained within the narrative—it’s presumably a thought the speaker has while in bed with his mysterious beloved. And the poem ends with what seems a rhetorical question that seems to land on the discovery of the poem, the order it has found: “What do we know / beyond the rapture and the dread?” This question acknowledges the vast realms of disorder, the unknowable, but it has created Frost’s “momentary stay against confusion.” Both the narrative and the mind’s journey are contained. 

More simply, the poem coheres in that it gives us a story that we can follow, regardless of its meanings: a single speaker is in a long-term relationship with a “you” who had experienced some mysterious visitation in the distant past that haunts them both and makes the “you” “always seem ungraspable.”

*

Kunitz’s ouvre has plenty of visitations. There’s the old darned man, in the prose poem of that name, who visits the speaker and cries out, “I hear the worms tumbling in this house.” ¹⁵ There’s “The Wellfleet Whale,” a beached whale who seems godlike and otherworldly, the “chief of the pelagic world.” ¹⁶ And, of course, there is his ever-present absent father, visiting Kunitz’s speaker even in poems in his first book, such as “Master and Mistress.” ¹⁷ These visitors infuse his poems with the power and mystery of myth, and they show how narrative can contain and harness that power.

I think, too, that such visitors tend not to be forgotten, either in real life, or in poetry, and they often grow to be symbols for the poet, ways to access a poet’s life work. Let’s return to that worm that lisped to Kunitz in “End of Summer.” A version of it reappears in two of his late poems, “Hornworm: Summer Reverie” and “Hornworm: Autumn Lamentation.” Both these poems are actually in the voice of a hornworm, and in the latter, it is the hornworm who is visited by the human. Kunitz, the poet, has transformed into the otherworldly visitor, “an angel of death / or of mercy.” Like “The Abduction,” this poem ends with a question, which may be as much order as we can bring to our world.

Sir, you with the red snippers

in your hand, hovering over me,

casting your shadow, I greet you,

whether you come as an angel of death

or of mercy. But tell me,

before you choose to slice me in two:

Who can understand the ways

of the Great Worm in the Sky? ¹⁸

J.D. Scrimgeour’s fourth book of poetry, Festival, was published in January, 2020. He’s also the author of two books of nonfiction, including AWP Award Series winner, Themes for English B: A Professor’s Education In & Out of Class. His poetry has won awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. This essay owes its inspiration to the Stanley Kunitz Boyhood Home in Worcester, Massachusetts and the Worcester County Poetry Association.

Notes

1. Quotations here and throughout are taken from Stanley Kunitz, “Halley’s Comet,” The Collected Poems (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), pp. 256–257.

2. Ibid., “The Portrait,” p. 142.

3. Ibid., “Quinnapoxet,” pp. 190–91.

4. Quotations here and throughout are taken from Stanley Kunitz, “End of Summer,” Selected Poems, 1928-58 (New York: Little Brown, 1958), pp. 115–16.

5. Stanley Kunitz, “Swimming in Lake Chaug-go-ga-gog-man-chaug-ga-gog-cha-buna-gun-ga-maugg,” A Kind of Order, A Kind of Folly: Essays and Conversations (New York: Little Brown, 1975), pp. 116-117.

6. Elizabeth Bishop, “The Moose,” Poems, Prose, and Letters, eds. Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz (New York: Library of America, 2008), p. 162.

7. Frank O’Hara, “A True Account of Talking to the Sun on Fire Island,” Collected Poems, ed. Donald Allen (Berkeley: University of California, 1995), p. 307.

8. Stanley Kunitz, “The Search for a Style,” A Kind of Order, A Kind of Folly: Essays and Conversations (New York: Little Brown, 1975), p. 16.

9. Stanley Kunitz, “Seedcorn and Windfall,” Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1985), p. 124.

10. Quotations here and throughout are taken from “A Kind of Order,” A Kind of Order, A Kind of Folly: Essays and Conversations (New York: Little Brown, 1975), p. 9–13.

11. Wallace Stevens, “Of Modern Poetry,” The Collected Poems, Corrected Edition, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Vintage, 1982), p. 239.

12. “Table Talk: A Paris Review Interview,” Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays, (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1985), p. 110.

13. Stanley Kunitz, “The Abduction,” The Collected Poems, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), pp. 222-23.

14. Stanley Kunitz, “The Layers: Some Notes on ‘The Abduction,’” Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1985), pp. 69–71.

15. Stanley Kunitz, “The Old Darned Man,” The Collected Poems, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), pp. 227–228.

16. Ibid., “The Wellfleet Whale,” p. 241.

7. Ibid. “Master and Mistress,” p. 49.

18. Ibid., “Hornworm: Autumn Lamentation,” p. 239.