Out of My True Affections

I owe a debt of gratitude to Seth Godin. And another to Stanley Kunitz. To Seth, I am grateful for the daily model of his posts. More often than not, he inspires me with his thinking, his provocative questions, and his general missive to get up, harness possibility, and make something happen. He also provides the best model that I’ve seen for clear, digestible writing online that is smart, useful, and nourishing. His posts have this wonderful DNA and voice, and I look forward to them each day.

To Stanley Kunitz, I am grateful first for the poems. For “The Layers,” “The Portrait,” “Halley’s Comet,” “The Knot,” “Route Six,” and so many more. He was 100 when he died and wrote stunning poems in his eighties (and nineties?). He was a generous teacher, a trail-blazer as a Jew, and he wrote with such honesty and poignancy to address his personal loss – his father commited suicide while his mother was pregnant with him. His is a model of artistry, longevity, patience, generosity, and beauty. I have a friend who tells of Kunitz, in his eighties, visiting his undergraduate program and telling the undergrad writers, “your job right now is to become the people who will write the poems.”

And where they overlap is in the territory of Tribes. Seth might be interested to know – if he doesn’t already – about “The Layers,” which starts “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.” And in the middle of his poem, he says, “Oh, I have made myself a tribe of my true affections,” and I can’t help but wonder what better task there could be for a person in this world than to go about doing just that. So Seth and Stanley, thank you.