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Stanley Kunitz's
The Wild Braid

Review: Stanley Kunitz's The Wild Braid
by Jacqueline Marcus

The art of writing is like the art of gardening.

When my friend, Ken Pobo, poet and gardener, told me to buy Stanley Kunitz’s The Wild Braid, I knew it would be good. After all, it’s Stanley Kunitz. But now I see why this book is so rare and enchanting.

The Wild Braid is a beautiful work of art that includes prose and poems about Kunitz’s life, philosophy, his love of gardening, the work it entails, as well as vivid photographs of Kunitz in a variety of  land and seascapes that are simply gorgeous.

The Wild Braid is a treasure. It’s one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in a very long time.

From the first page, the reader feels welcomed into Stanley Kunitz’s perennial garden. “I don’t want it to be an exuberant annuals garden, flashy in any way. I don’t want the familiar plants like zinnias, that sort of thing, dominating the garden…”

Likewise, poetry shouldn't be artificial.

Kunitz writes:

I associate the garden with the whole experience of being alive, and so, there is nothing in the range of human experience that is separate from what the garden can signify in its eagerness and its insistence, and in its driving energy to live—to grow, to bear fruit.


There is a difference between being in nature and using nature for recreational purposes. Kunitz tells us that he finds “solace in solitude.” Like Thoreau, Kunitz is speaking about an integrated state of being in nature. He values nature for its intrinsic value: “I think of gardening,” wrote Kunitz, “as an extension of one’s own being, something as deeply personal and intimate as writing a poem.”

Some may argue that gardening is a form of using nature or dominating it, an interpretation that echoes biblical scripture. Contrary to the domination theory, Kunitz sees himself as a co-partner, assisting nature from a position of respect: “It’s imperative for any gardener to respect the land before alterations, modifications, or plans for the design of the garden are made. If a garden doesn’t fit into that landscape and reflect in some way, it’s an invasion, an occupation.”

From this inner space of respect, animals and birds seem to sense no harm. Consider, for example, this astonishing story of Kunitz and his love for a family of owls:

Mansfield Center; Connecticut
Owls in the Attic

In the early 1930s, in the midst of the great Depression, after living in New York for two years, I left the city because I hungered to be in the country. And I found, in Connecticut, near Mansfield Center, a place called Wormwood Hill, a hundred-acre farm with an eighteenth-century, fifteen-room gambrel house in deplorable condition. It had no convenience of any kind: no running water, no electricity, no telephone, nothing. But I needed very much to live in the country, and so for three thousand dollars-five hundred down-I bought it and spent about three years bringing it up to livable condition.

The woods behind the house were deep and long, and every day I went out and explored them, evoking images of my childhood. One day, as I stood under a great chestnut tree deep in the center of the woods, I heard some rustling in the branches. I looked up and saw a family of owls, a mother and four fledglings, all on one branch. The moment I moved, they frantically whisked off.

I vowed I would become a friend of theirs, and realized I must not disturb them in any way. I learned if I approached very quietly, advancing just a few steps, then standing still, then advancing a little more, the owls were not intimidated. And then I would reach the chestnut tree and stand under it absolutely motionless for as long as I could, fifteen minutes, half an hour or so.

After doing this day after day for several weeks, I could tell the owls had gained confidence in my presence. Gradually, I dared to raise my arm and lift one of the four babies off its perch and place it on my shoulder for a few minutes and then return it safely. I did that with all of them over a period of weeks and finally made the great maneuver--I extended my arm and lifted them one by one, all five of them, on to my arm. I started with the most familiar one, the mother owl. And tl1en once she was perched there, the others were happy to join. By then they were familiar with my touch. There was no sense of separation; I was part of their life process.

So, with the mother owl and the four little ones perched on my arm I walked gingerly out of the woods and took them home and installed them in the attic where I'd prepared the equivalent of a branch and set out some food to welcome them. They lived there very happily; coming and going through the open window, for the remainder of my stay on Wormwood Hill, until eventually I moved on to another small farm in the town of New Hope in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

My encounter with this family of owls was one of tl1e most intimate of all my experiences with the animal world, a world I consider to be part of our own world, too.

Kunitz speaks a good deal about the creative aspect of writing poetry in this book. He will not play the superior intellectual game on this subject. The language in these prose pieces is reflectively clear, instructive and poetic.

He tells us that “the garden feels different from imagining new poems. The garden has achieved its form; it doesn’t have to be new each year. What it has to do is grow. You’re not going to uproot the entire garden and start all over. The poem is always a new creation and aspires to a transcendence that is beyond telling at the moment when you’re working on it. You know you are moving into an area you’ve never explored before and there is a great difference…There are some gardens, for example, that seem almost stationary because of the repetition of one color. I like a garden that dances; variegation of the leaves and variation in color of the bloom and in texture all keep the garden alive.”

These are instructive clues for the writer – not to fall into stagnation, repetition; stay close to that mysterious impulse from the unconscious. “…you’re tapping the unconscious in a way that is distinct and from the ordinary, the customary, use of the mind in daily life. You’re somehow cracking the shell separating you from the unknown.”

The Layers

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over the scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
in a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
Not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written,
I am not done with my changes.


“How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses,” asks the poet. The unconscious instructs him to “live in the layers, not on the litter.”

There are days when we spend too much time on the surface, making our daily rounds, existing but certainly not living in any meaningful, reflective sense of the word. We accept the idea of change, but in reality, we reject anything that disturbs our routines. We deny the law of impermanence at the expense of creative experimentation. He’s talking about the difference between crafting a poem and allowing the poem to take you to the unknown. “There is no formula for accessing the unconscious.”

Each writer has his or her own way of tapping into it. Some wake up at 4 a.m. with the strange, uneasy feeling that a poem is waiting to be written and they must go down to the writing table or they’ll miss the moment. The creative process is unpredictable.  Conversely, there are dry,  laborious days when we struggle with lines and words and it just doesn’t happen, the poem lacks that lyrical magic, that unique language that belongs to the Dionysian realm of the soul.

Kunitz tells us that the poem holds “the possibility of revelation, and revelation doesn’t come easy.” Poets don't take those revelations for granted when the poem has somehow written itself. “After you’ve written a poem and you feel you’ve said something that was previously unspeakable, there’s a tremendous sense of being blessed.” 

I would say that after reading Stanley Kunitz’s The Wild Braid, you have a sense of being blessed. This book is definitely a keeper! 

Touch Me

Summer is late, my heart.

Words plucked out of the air

some forty years ago

when I was wild with love

and torn almost in two

scatter like leaves this night

of whistling wind and rain.

It is my heart that's late,

it is my song that's flown.

Outdoors all afternoon

under a gunmetal sky

staking my garden down,

I kneeled to the crickets trilling

underfoot as if about

to burst from their crusty shells;

and like a child again

marveled to hear so clear

and brave a music pour

from such a small machine.

What makes the engine go?

Desire, desire, desire.

The longing for the dance

stirs in the buried life.

One season only,

                             and it's done.

So let the battered old willow

thrash against the windowpanes

and the house timbers creak.

Darling, do you remember

the man you married?  Touch me,

remind me who I am.