I was given the book, The Wild Braid – A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden, by Stanley Kunitz.
It’s a collection of conversations and poems from 2002-2006 when Kunitz was in his mid-90s. Yes…90s.
He writes about his garden and his poetry; with such lovely metaphors about life that, well, I felt compelled enough to post a few:
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There’s that sense that unless something’s in bloom, nothing is going on; it’s dead in the garden. People talk about a plant being “done” –“the salvia’s done for the season” — as if blooming is all a plant has to do. That’s a complete fallacy and limitation.
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…you need the silence. So much of the power of a poem is in what it doesn’t say as much as in what it does say. As when a flower is preparing to bloom, or after it has bloomed, when it is suspending its strengths and its potency and is at rest — or seems to be, its mission to flower and to produce seed having been fulfilled.
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Almost anything you do in the garden, for example weeding, is an effort to create some sort of order out of nature’s tendency to run wild. There has to be a certain degree of domestication in a garden. The danger is that you can so tame your garden that it becomes a thing. It becomes landscaping.
Mary C. M. Phillips 