Volume 8

This issue of The Worcester Review represents several important firsts for us.

For one, you might say this is our first-anniversary issue. It was just one year ago that The Worcester Review was revived after a several-years’ hiatus. The new Worcester Review — published in late summer, 1984 — was expanded from about three dozen staple-bound pages to a full one hundred-page perfect bound edition. That issue was followed by a spring 1985 issue.

On another level, the current issue — Volume VIII, Number 2 — represents the first time The Worcester Review has published two issues in one calendar year. With continued support from our readers and generous benefactors, we hope to continue publishing two issues of quality literature and art every year.

Finally, although this is not the first time we’ve featured a Worcester poet, it is the first time we’ve featured a Worcester poet who is also a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Stanley Kunitz, who celebrated his 80th birthday this year, won the Pulitzer in 1959 for his influential collection of poetry, Selected Poems, 1928–1958. Kunitz’s reputation has grown with the passage of time and we are happy to present two perspectives on his work — one from Peter Davison, senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly and Kunitz’s long-time editor (“On Publishing Stanley Kunitz”), and one from Michael Ryan, poet, scholar, and friend, whose “Isolation and Apocalypse” was first published in Antaeus on the occasion of Kunitz’s 75th birthday. Mr. Ryan also contributed a poem, “Winter Drought”, to the special feature.

Besides the expected reports of Kunitz’s importance as a major American poet, we heard over and over again of his generosity toward younger poets and of his support of their struggles toward mastery. We were impressed with the genuine love and respect felt for this man by so many in the literary community.

Mary Oliver, 1984 Pulitzer Prize winner has generously allowed us to reprint her poem (“Stanley Kunitz”), first published in The Memphis State Review, which captures so much of what it meant for her life to be touched by this extraordinary man. Mark Rudman, poet and translator, contributed “Winter Solstice”, and Daniel Halpern, editor of Antaeus, sent two poems (“Like Something Out of the Ordinary” and “The Lesson”).

In the midst of a busy schedule, Mr. Kunitz himself chose six poems for The Worcester Review as “fairly representative of what I have been up to, stylistically and thematically, at each stage of my development as a poet.” The poems are presented in reverse chronological order, with the most recent first. We felt that instead of making a leap backward in time and then following the development from poem to poem, it might be more productive to look at Kunitz’s most recent poem first, to see the man as he is now and then to uncover the past layer by layer.

We are honored to be able to join with all of these fine writers and with the Worcester community in celebration of Stanley Kunitz’s 80th birthday and in appreciation for his example to the literary community — as a poet and as a human being.

We are also happy to continue our tradition of publishing quality poetry and fiction, and want to thank all our contributors. It is they who have made this first year of the “new” Worcester Review such a success.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, STANLEY KUNITZ!

— The Editors