Stanley Kunitz's 'Halley's Comet': The Night Sky and Memory

This link will take you to 'Halley's Comet' by Stanley Kunitz on the Poetry Foundation website. Many of his other poems, and biographical information, are also included.


HALLEY'S COMET (Stanley Kunitz)


I was simply going to post a link to this on my Facebook page which supports this blog, with a brief comment, but I thought that it might be worth a short blog post in itself.

The poem struck me because of its powerful evocation of childhood memories. The poet's memories are of a different nature from mine; a teacher in 1986 would probably not have told her class that if Halley's Comet "wandered off its course/and smashed into the earth/there'd be no school tomorrow." I was six years old when both Challenger and Chernobyl happened, as well; there was plenty of disaster going around then, already. I don't personally remember this, but my mother tells me that after the Challenger disaster, I came home from school and said to her that my young teacher had cried. As for the aftermath of Chernobyl, when we went to Finland as usual that summer, we were told to be more careful than usual about what we ate from the garden and so forth. Around when my Finnish grandmother died of cancer in 1995, other friends in that part of Finland were also being diagnosed with cancer or dying of it; it's hard not to wonder if there were connections to the disaster years earlier, although if the winds had blown otherwise, Finland might have been slapped even harder by radioactive fallout than it was.

The address to Kunitz's father, however, is something more than memory. His father died by suicide before he was born, and this presence who he never met constantly haunts his poems.

In my case, I remember seeing Halley's Comet in 1986, or maybe not seeing it. My father, mother, brother and I went out to the golf course in my hometown of Victoria, BC, which was the favoured star-gazing locale in town as it was a patch of exceptional darkness by night. We looked and looked and to this day we are not sure if we saw the comet. I think perhaps there were too many other faint and whirling stars that night to be certain. My parents are pretty sure that we did see it, and I suspect our gazes crossed it at least. Whatever really happened, it is a good memory. Years later, in 1997, we had an extraordinary view of the Hale-Bopp comet every night for weeks, immediately outside our front door practically every night (and outside a lot of people's front doors, I guess.)

The night sky is not one of my greatest fascinations, though it's perhaps just because I haven't sufficiently opened myself to it or because I have always lived in cities. The stars were much more visible where I grew up, although it is a (small) city too, but in London you really don't see much of them. I have been awestruck by the night sky in the deserts of Morocco and Australia, and even in the small desert ecosystem of the Okanagan in British Columbia. But mainly, this poem makes me think of the complex and interwoven nature of memory. Things which happened, things which didn't happen, inconclusive events, events which seem unrelated but are in fact intimately related, loss and emotion, things which have remained, lack of resolution and the eternal desire to find it.

The Luminous Vision of Stanley Kunitz

THE LAYERS (Stanley Kunitz)

The above link will take you to 'The Layers' by Stanley Kunitz on the Poetry Foundation website, as well as an impressive collection of his other poems, and biographical/critical information.

I must have started reading Stanley Kunitz in 2000 or 2001 - coincidentally, right around when he was appointed US Poet Laureate. I would have been 20 or 21, but unlike many of my poetic discoveries around 17-21, this one owed nothing to my university experience. If I remember correctly, I picked up a book of his poems in the used bookshop where I was working after I finished my degree. Russell Books in Victoria, BC was a wonderful shop - still is! - run by a lovely, book-obsessed family, and I discovered enormous numbers of books and authors while working there. I certainly began to build my travel writing and poetry collections around that time.

I think that I must simply have dipped into a collection of Kunitz's poems, been struck and bought the book. I have often cited him as one of my favourite poets since then, but I have to admit that I haven't really absorbed his body of work (yet). I have just dipped in and out, and discovered a number of poems that I really loved, and some phrases which will stay with me forever: "O Heart; this is a dream I had, or not a dream" (from 'Poem'), or "I caught the cold flash of the blue/unappeasable sky" (from 'Robin Redbreast' - why do I love poems about birds, but I don't love birds?!)

There is something luminous and, I feel, optimistic about Kunitz's work. Certainly not in every poem - there are many poems haunted by the suicide of his father before he was born, and by the wars. Both of his parents were of Jewish Russian Lithuanian descent, and he encountered anti-semitism even in academic settings. In a lecture on Paul Celan, he said: "Through the years, I realize that the Holocaust has been the basic subtext of a good part of what I have produced in poetry." And yet, when I read him, I see phrases like bars of brightness, streaming with light.

He lived to a great age right through the events of the twentieth century, an extraordinary time period. His dates were 1905 to 2006, and he died shortly before turning 101. His first collection, Intellectual Things, appeared in 1930 - he was writing when W B Yeats was still alive and writing, and was deeply influenced by Yeats's beautiful, fire-burnished symbolism. His later work was to be more personally emotive and stylistically restrained, and less intensely formal. I have found poems which I have loved right through his creative output.

'The Layers', a poem from the late 1970s, is a great example of Kunitz's style and outlook. He is on a journey on a hard road, partly in darkness; he experiences loss and deep uncertainty, but finds himself still "exulting somewhat" (perfectly balanced in ambiguity). "I am not done with my changes"; if there is fear there, I feel that it is overwhelmed and conquered by defiance and hope.

Kunitz was also a gardener and cultivated a renowed seaside garden in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Despite my incurable laziness, there is something that draws me to gardening - metaphorically - to the idea of it. It seems like a good sideline for a poet or a poetry lover. We'll see. "I am not done with my changes..."