Poem: TOUCH ME
Stanley Kunitz welcomed his ninetieth year in 1995 with a collection of his later poems, Passing Through. His most recent book, The Collected Poems, was published by W.W. Norton and Company in 2000. His other books include Intellectual Things; Passport to the War; Selected Poems 1928 - 1958; The Testing Tree (poems); The Coat Without a Seam (poems); A Kind of Order, a Kind of Folly: Essays and Conversations; The Wellfleet Whale and Companion Poems (chapbook); Next to Last Things: New Poems and Essays;
and Interviews and Encounters with Stanley Kunitz. His translations include: Poems of Akhmatova (with Max Hayward); Story Under Full Sail, by Andrei Voznesensky; Orchard Lamps, by Ivan Drach. He has edited Poems of John Keats; The Essential Blake and, with David Ignatow, The Wild Card, Selected Poems of Karl Shapiro. He has received nearly every honor bestowed upon a poet in this country, including the Pulitzer and Bollingen Prizes, a National Medal of Arts from President Clinton in 1993, and the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America in 1998. He served as consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (now called U.S. Poet laureate), State Poet of New York, and Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. For many years he taught in the graduate writing program at Columbia University. As editor of the Yale Younger Poets Series from 1969 to 1977, and as a founder of both the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Poets House in New York City, he has promoted poetry and public access to the arts, encouraging many of the younger poets and artists who are now prominent figures in American culture. Stanley Kunitz and his wife, Elise Asher, live in New York City and Provincetown, where he cultivates a celebrated seaside garden.
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