Former US poet laureate Stanley Kunitz dies at 100

NEW YORK, May 16 (Reuters) Pulitzer Prize-winner Stanley Kunitz, a former U S poet laureate remembered as a mentor to young writers and a devoted gardener, has died at the age of 100 in New York, his publisher today said.

A spokeswoman for W W Norton, which published his last book ''The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden'' last year, said Kunitz had died on Sunday of pneumonia.

Tree Swenson, executive director of the Academy of American Poets, said Kunitz would be remembered as both an extraordinary poet of great compassion, and as a mentor who encouraged countless younger poets in their writing.

She recalled a poem called ''The Portrait'' about his mother slapping him when he came across a picture of his father, who had committed suicide shortly before Kunitz was born.

''I swear I can read that over and over and that slap, you can feel it on your own cheek,'' Swenson told Reuters.

''You see that ability to make an experience so vivid and it translates somehow into the same capacity for understanding people's lives,'' she said.

In another poem, ''Touch Me,'' he writes about his wife as he was growing old: ''Darling, do you remember / the man you married? Touch me, / Remind me who I am.'' Born in 1905 in Worcester, Massachusetts, Kunitz won a scholarship to Harvard University in 1922 and after graduation worked as a journalist. His first collection of poems, ''Intellectual Things,'' was published in 1930.

Beginning in the late 1940s, Kunitz held various teaching posts and was involved in a number of arts institutions, helping to found Poets House in New York and the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts where he spent his summers.

''Of any contemporary poet, Stanley Kunitz has mentored and encouraged more young poets than anyone,'' Swenson said.

He won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1959 for his collection ''Selected Poems, 1928-1958.'' Other awards over the years included a National Book Award and the National Medal of the Arts. He was appointed poet laureate in 2000 at the age of 95, a post he held for a year.

Kunitz had homes in Greenwich Village in New York and Provincetown, where he was a passionate gardener. He is survived by his daughter Gretchen and his stepdaughter Babette Becker.

The New York Times recalled in its obituary that Kunitz had said in an interview last year that he had become reconciled to death and gave little thought to his legacy.

''Immortality?'' he said, ''It's not anything I'd lose sleep over.'' REUTERS SY VC2235