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Choy Moo Kheong, “Echo Through The Canyon” (2024).
Acrylic on Canvas, 152.4 × 101.6 cm.
Private Collection.

Welcome, everyone. Dora here from Dreams from a Pilgrimage to invite you to join us in writing for Prosery Monday. Prosery is unique to dVerse in that we incorporate a given line of poetry without any alteration, except in punctuation, into our 144 words (or less) of prose.

The poet from whose work I’ve chosen is Stanley Kunitz whose multi-generational influence extends to Theodore Roethke, W. H. Auden, and Robert Lowell. Among Kunitz’s poems, my favorites include “End of Summer,” “The Layers,” “The Testing-Tree” and “King of the River.” The autobiographical “The Portrait” gives a glimpse into a pivotal moment in his life.

The Poet

Stanley Kunitz, NYC, 1977 (Paris Review)

Stanley Kunitz, born in Worcester, Massachusetts, was America’s Poet Laureate twice, first in 1974 and then again in 2000 when he was 95 years old. He won a Pulitzer for Selected Poems: 1928-1958. In the preface to his 1995 collection, Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected, Kunitz wrote: “Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of the stories of the soul. . . these stories recount the soul’s passage through the valley of this life—that is to say, its adventure in time, in history.” These words were so deeply attuned to his creative enterprise that they were quoted by Seamus Heaney before a reading of his own poetry in 2011. The Chicago Tribune in its review of Passing Through wrote: “A luminous and deep accounting of the times to which he has belonged, Kunitz’s poetry reminds us that the best art stakes its claim in crossroads territory, at the resonant intersection of the private and the public.”

The Poem

One of Kunitz’s most famous poems is “King of the River,” of which Robert B. Shaw commented: “Kunitz’s willingness to risk bombast, platitude or bathos in his contemplation of what he calls ‘mystery’ is evident in [this poem]. Mystery—of the self, of time, of change and fate—is not facilely dispelled but approached with imaginative awe in his work; in our rationalistic century this is swimming against the stream. This is a form of artistic heroism; and when Kunitz’s scorning of safety meshes firmly with his technical skills, the outcome is poetry of unusual power and depth.” Mary Oliver similarly observed in the Kenyon Review that “what is revealed, then, is courage. Not the courage of words only, but the intellectual courage that insists on the truth, which is never simple.”1

The Line

I’ve chosen the following line from “King of the River” for you to use in your prose:

. . . and the iridescent image swims
through a mirror that flows.”

Stanley Kunitz (The Atlantic, 1970)

The Prosery Challenge: Your prose—fiction or nonfiction—may be no more than 144 words. You must use the given line, and you may not alter the words, change the word order, or insert words into the line. However, you may change the punctuation.

Writers, let your ink and imaginations flow!

For newcomers, here’s what to do:
Write your prose and link it up to Mr Linky below.
Please put a link back to this post in your post – it increases our traffic, and ultimately yours.
Read and comment – there’s no better way to get to know your fellow poets. Enjoy!