Last week I wrote about Louise Glück’s appointment as the new poet laureate, and today in the New Yorker I found this great profile of Stanley Kunitz, her teacher and mentor. I loved this anecdote in the piece from another one of his students, Lucie Brock-Broido (who was in turn The Boy‘s teacher a few years ago):

Lucie Brock-Broido, another of his students and now the director of poetry at Columbia’s School of the Arts, says that “much of my adult life had to do with magical direction from Stanley from afar.” Then, ten years ago, when she applied for the position at Columbia, she was asked to compare herself to her mentor. “I was in front of a very formidable committee—the dean, and the chairs of all the divisions of the School of the Arts, the real heavy hitters. The very last question of the interview was “What could you possibly offer here at Columbia that, say, Stanley Kunitz could not?” I took a moment and I said, “More hair.””

(Granted, Kunitz has more hair than most men in their 90s, but she’s got a horse’s mane!)
Slate’s published three Brock-Broido poems so far this year, “Leaflet on Wooing”, “Almost A Conjurer” and “Dire Wolf”—if you have Windows Media Player installed, you can hear her read the poems as well.