The late Stanley Kunitz, who served two terms as US Poet Laureate, was nearly as famous for his garden as his poems. After buying a home in Provincetown with his wife, Elise Asher, in the 1960s, the Worcester-born poet spent much of his time there, cultivating a lush plot he’d grown by building terraces in the dunes and filling them with seaweed and peat moss. When Ada Limón, the current Poet Laureate, came to Provincetown to begin a seven-month fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in late 2001, Kunitz’s garden was on her mind.
Her best friend, the playwright Trish Harnetiaux, drove her up from New York City. As they pulled into the lot at the retreat, Trish accidentally backed over a small bit of landscaping. “Oh, no!” she exclaimed.
“Did I just run over Stanley Kunitz’s garden?” Limón’s fellowship came at a critical time. She’d been living in Brooklyn during the Sept. 11 attacks.
In Provincetown, she suffered panic attacks. She found herself taking long walks every day, across the causeway or out to the lighthouses. “I was walking almost eight or 10 miles a day,” she recalled on a recent Zoom call.
“I would wear myself out so that I could write. It really was such a beautiful time, because it taught me the healing power of poetry. “I think it was that moment when I made those connections between nature’s power and the power of poetry.
” On Friday, Limón returns to the Fine Arts Work Center — which Kunitz helped found in 1968 — to la.
