I had the privilege to work as Literary Assistant to the late Stanley Kunitz beginning in 2000 when he began his second appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate and through his death at the age of 100 in 2006. In the fall of 2002, as a central part of the process of working on The Wild Braid : A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden, Stanley and I began to have a series of conversations exploring gardening and poetry. Those conversations continued over the next two years. Our intention was to let the discussions range freely, drawing on the exploratory, interactive fluidity of conversation as a way to generate raw material. I transcribed the conversations and, much like a film editor, gathered topics together from disparate conversations, and then from those “rough cuts,” we shaped the essays in the book. Such a process of course generated far more material than we could possibly include, though we needed all of it in order to get to what ultimately became the book.
