SOURCE: “An Interview with Stanley Kunitz,” in Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XXXVI, No. 4, Fall, 1997, pp. 646–54.

In the following interview, Kunitz comments on his life, work, creative inspiration, Jewish heritage, and the significance of poetry.

On Tuesday, December 5, 1995, I interviewed Stanley Kunitz in his spacious Greenwich Village apartment, crammed with books and plants and works of art. He had just returned from a reading in Cambridge, but had found time while on the train to write some answers to my questions and referred to these texts during the interview. In the spring of 1997 we had a follow-up discussion that led to a number of revisions and additions.

Stanley Kunitz was born in 1905 and has won many honors for his poetry, including the Pulitzer, Bollingen, and Lenore Marshall Prizes, and most recently the National Book Award for Passing Through: Later Poems, New and Selected. In 1993, he received the National Medal...