Editorial October 16, 2000 Issue

Good morning, poet!

Mary Metzner Trammell

When America's new poet laureate, Stanley Kunitz, wakes up in the morning, he doesn't think first about his beloved garden in Provincetown. Or about his ninety-five-year perspective on the twentieth century. No, he thinks first about being a poet. "I don't wake up as a nonagenarian," he says. "I wake up as a poet. I think that's a big difference."^{Mark Feeney, "The poet's progress: rejection to laureate," The Boston Globe, August 27, 2000, p. 1 .}

And what does being a poet mean to Stanley Kunitz? It means, as he explains in his poem "The Layers," holding to the "principle of being."^{Bill Moyers, Fooling with Words (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1999), p.13 .} For Kunitz, poetry is "a form of spiritual testimony"; each poem is "a blessing."^{Stanley Kunitz, Passing Through (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), p. 12 .} And the poet is someone who's ready "to convert the daily-ness of the life into something greater than that little life itself."^{Feeney, p. A30 .}