Peter Lattu

The Wild Braid: A Review

The Wild Braid by Stanley Kunitz with Genine Lentine reflects on poetry and gardening. The book arose from a series of conversations between Kunitz and Lentine between 2002 and 2004. Musing on gardening and poetry, Kunitz looked back on a century of doing both:

… the garden is a metaphor for the poems you write in a lifetime and give to the world in the hope that these poems you have lived through will be equivalent to the flower that takes root in the soil and becomes a part of the landscape. If you’re lucky, that happens with some of the poems you create, while others pass the way of so many plants you let into the garden, or grow from seed: they emerge and give pleasure for a season and then vanish.

The dozen poems included in The Wild Braid have taken root in our literary landscape.

Kunitz explains that writing poetry taps into the unconscious, “the wilderness” of which he said “its beasts are not within our control”. Other writers have seen creativity as like a beast emerging from the wilderness. The poet Gary Snyder wrote that his poems came from things lurking in the darkness at the edge of his campfire. The writer Stephen King said that his stories came from creatures in the shadows at the edge of his garden. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in “Inversnaid”: “Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.” Kunitz says of Hopkins: “… that’s exactly what he was saying. When people say they are moved by a poem they are saying they have been in touch with the untouchable.” Out of this wilderness of the unconscious come poems and they “seem to have no maker at all”.

While poems may come from the wilderness of the mind, Kunitz finds a lot of similarity between poems and gardens. Stanzas are like terraces, “letting our mind rest before moving on”. Revisiting a garden or a poem leads to new perspectives with different colorations. To Kunitz, a poem has a sense of secrecy like a flower about to unfold: “So much of the power of a poem is in what it doesn’t say as much as in what it does say.” He finds that poems are “muddied by too much explanation, too much exposure.”

For all the similarities, Kunitz enumerates ways a new poem differs from a garden:

Thinking of a new season in the garden feels different from imagining a new poem. 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 that you are moving into an area you’ve never explored before and there is the great difference.

Poems live in a wilderness beyond the garden.

The Wild Braid is an enchanting book: beautiful photographs, fine poems, and lucid conversations. Stanley Kunitz and Genine Lentine distill Kunitz’s century of gardening and writing into a short book full of insight into both.

{Essay by Peter Lattu}