Following Stanley Kunitz around Manhattan
Jefferson Navicky on Stanley Kunitz
1999—that summer and fall, we couldn’t have been more new to New York City or to anything like a literary scene. I was 23, and my brother was 22. He had the impressively unlikely job of working in an art gallery in Soho, and I had the job more suited to my experience and which was probably more fun—grade school assistant gym teacher for special education kids on the Upper East Side. We shared a one-bedroom apartment on East 88th St.
One of our friends said it smelled like boy. I’m sure she was right, but we couldn’t smell it, and we didn’t clean all that much, because we spent most of our time out in the world of Manhattan. The rent was a then-obscenely high $1200 a month. We split it right down the middle. We subscribed to one magazine: Time Out New York. Inside our beloved magazine, we discovered the poet Stanley Kunitz was reading seemingly everywhere around the city. By that time in his early 90s, still spry from all his gardening out in Provincetown, he was the closest we had ever come to poet royalty. We didn’t know who he was when we first heard him read at the 92nd St. Y, but we both loved him. Who was this old guy and his soft gravelly voice that managed to so thrill us? We hardly knew how to get around by subway, so we learned the New York City subway system by following Stanley Kunitz readings all around Manhattan: in a small bar on the Lower East Side; in Bryant Park next to the New York Public Library as a part of a poetry festival (a poetry festival?! who would’ve ever thunk it); then again to the 92nd St. Y, this time for a reading with Kay Ryan. We never talked to him. We were pure fans, and it would be years before the thought of even approaching a poet was something to consider. But back then, my brother and I came to look forward to emerging from the hot stench of the underground into a cool evening, orientating ourselves on Manhattan streets to figure out where we could find Stanley Kunitz. We came to look forward to his portrait of his mother, that famous poem he read every time. We got so that we could feel the crowd hush and brace itself at the start of the poem. And we began to look forward to the hard slap in the face at the end of the poem that we could all feel. We looked forward to feeling it again somewhere else in Manhattan next week.
Jefferson Navicky is the author of four books, most recently, Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands, a Finalist for the Big Other Book Award in Fiction, as well as Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments in Short Prose, winner of the Maine Literary Award for Poetry. He lives in midcoast Maine, and is a board member of Millay House Rockland and the Nobleboro Historical Society.
