Stephen Dunn

[Monique]

Hey, is anyone else a Stephen Dunn fan? A friend of mine introduced me to Dunn’s work recently and I am mightily impressed. A sampling of the author’s work as follows:

Biography in the First Person


This is not the way I am.
Really, I am much taller in person,
the hairline I conceal reaches back
to my grandfather, and the shyness my wife
will not believe in has always been why
I was bold on first dates. My father a crack salesman.
I’ve saved his pines, the small acclamations
I used to show my friends. And the billyclub
I keep by my bed was his, too; an heirloom.
I am somewhat older than you can tell.
The early deaths have decomposed
behind my eyes, leaving lines apparently caused
by smiling. My voice still reflects the time
I believed in prayer as a way of getting
what I wanted. I am none of my clothes.
My poems are approximately true.
The games I play and how I play them
are the arrows you should follow: they’ll take you
to the enormous body of a child. It is not
that simple. At parties I have been known to remove
from the bookshelf the kind of book
that goes best with my beard.
My habits in bed are so perverse that they differentiate me
from no one. And I prefer soda, the bubbles just after
it’s opened, to anyone who just lies there. Be careful:
I would like to make you believe in me.
When I come home at night after teaching myself
to students, I want to search the phone book
for their numbers, call them, and pick their brains.
Oh, I am much less flamboyant than this.
If you ever meet me, I’ll be the one with the lapel
full of carnations.


transcribed from Stephen Dunn -- New and Selected Poems 1974 - 1994
ISBN: 0-393-31300x

[This message has been edited by Monique (edited 01-27-2001).]

[weatheringdaleson]

Wow. Thank you, Monique.

I am adding this to (the top of) my list.

-Brian

[PhilipWright]

Never heard of him.

The poem makes me want to write my own version.

Thank you for posting - I will look up his stuff.

Philip

[Monique]

Yay! I say, Yay! -- I'm thrilled to beat the dickens.

Stephen Dunn won the Pulitzer prize for poetry this year. If interested, check out the following link (great interview):
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/jan-june01/dunn_04-26.html

-Monique (bowing and clapping)

[kas]

Wow...

did I not like that poem. Sorry, Monique.

I will keep an open mind and read something else of his, I promise.

kas.

[Monique]

Originally posted by kas:

Wow...

did I not like that poem.

Hey Kas,

Christ, did that make me laugh. I'll post a couple of others under this link and see if I can change your mind.

If it makes any difference to you, Dunn wrote this poem in the 70's (prior to the inner child b.s. of the 90's). I digress, but in my experience, one's inner child often deserves a tidy spanking. .

-Monique

[This message has been edited by Monique (edited 05-15-2001).]

[Monique]

Years ago, when I was rotten with virtue
I believed loveliness
was just a face, a flower…

Hey Kas (et al), I hope that these following vignettes warm you to Dunn. If not, no harm dunn (couldn’t resist…sorry).

With No Experience in Such Matters

To hold a damaged sparrow
under water until you feel it die
is to know a small something
about the mind; how, for example,
it blames the cat for the original crime,
how it wants praise for its better side.

And yet it’s as human
as pulling the plug on your Dad
whose world has turned
to feces and fog, human as…
Well, let’s admit, it’s a mild thing
as human things go.

But I felt the one good wing
flutter in my palm—
the smallest protest, if that’s what it was,
I ever felt or heard.
Reminded me of how my eyelid has twitched,
the need to account for it.
Hard to believe no one notices.


I Come Home Wanting to Touch Everyone

The dogs greet me, I descend
into their world of fur and tongues
and then my wife and I embrace
as if we’d just closed the door
in a motel, our two girls slip in
between us and we’re all saying
each other’s names and the dogs
Buster and Sundown are on their hind legs,
people-style, seeking more love.
I’ve come home wanting to touch
everyone, everything; usually I turn
the key and they’re all lost
in food or homework, even the dogs
are preoccupied with themselves,
I desire only to ease
back in, the mail, a drink,
but tonight the body-hungers have sent out
their long-range signals
or love itself has risen
from its squalor of neglect.
Everytime the kids turn their backs
I tough my wife’s breasts
and when she checks the dinner
the unfriendly cat on the dishwasher
wants to rub heads, starts to speak
with his little motor and violin—
everything, everyone is intelligible
in the language of touch,
and we sit down to dinner inarticulate
as blood, all difficulties postponed
because the weather is so good.


At the Smithville Methodist Church

It was supposed to be Arts & Crafts for a week,
but when she came home
with the "Jesus Saves" button, we knew what art
was up, what ancient craft.

She liked her little friends. She liked the songs
they sang when they weren't
twisting and folding paper into dolls.
What could be so bad?

Jesus had been a good man, and putting faith
in good men was what
we had to do to stay this side of cynicism,
that other sadness.

OK, we said, One week. But when she came home
singing "Jesus loves me,
the Bible tells me so," it was time to talk.
Could we say Jesus

doesn't love you? Could I tell her the Bible
is a great book certain people use
to make you feel bad? We sent her back
without a word.

It had been so long since we believed, so long
since we needed Jesus
as our nemesis and friend, that we thought he was
sufficiently dead,

that our children would think of him like Lincoln
or Thomas Jefferson.
Soon it became clear to us: you can't teach disbelief
to a child,

only wonderful stories, and we hadn't a story
nearly as good.
On parents' night there were the Arts & Crafts
all spread out

like appetizers. Then we took our seats
in the church
and the children sang a song about the Ark,
and Hallelujah

and one in which they had to jump up and down
for Jesus.
I can't remember ever feeling so uncertain
about what's comic, what's serious.

Evolution is magical but devoid of heroes.
You can't say to your child
"Evolution loves you." The story stinks
of extinction and nothing

exciting happens for centuries. I didn't have
a wonderful story for my child
and she was beaming. All the way home in the car
she sang the songs,

occasionally standing up for Jesus.
There was nothing to do
but drive, ride it out, sing along
in silence.


The Routine Things
Around the House

When Mother died
I thought: now I’ll have a death poem.
That was unforgivable.

Yet I’ve since forgiven myself
as sons are able to do
who’ve been loved by their mothers.

I stared into the coffin
knowing how long she’d live,
how many lifetimes there are

in the sweet revisions of memory.
It’s hard to know exactly
how we ease ourselves back from sadness,

but I remembered when I was twelve,
1951, before the world
unbuttoned its blouse.

I had asked my mother (I was trembling)
If I could see her breasts
and she took me into her room

without embarrassment or coyness
and I stared at them,
afraid to ask for more.

Now, years later, someone tells me
Cancers who’ve never had mother love
are doomed and I, a Cancer

feel blessed again. What luck
to have had a mother
who showed me her breasts

when girls my age were developing
their separate countries,
what luck

she didn’t doom me
with too much or too little.
Had I asked to touch,

Perhaps to suck them,
What would she have done?
Mother, dead woman

Who I think permits me
to love women easily
this poem

is dedicated to where
we stopped, to the incompleteness
that was sufficient

and to how you buttoned up,
began doing the routine things
around the house.

The Sudden Light and the Trees

My neighbor was a biker, a pusher, a dog
and wife beater.
In bad dreams I killed him

and once, in the consequential light of day,
I called the Humane Society
about Blue, his dog. They took her away

and I readied myself, a baseball bat
inside my door.
That night I hear his wife scream

and I couldn’t help it, that pathetic
relief; her again, not me.
It would be years before I’d understand

why victims cling and forgive. I plugged in
the Sleep-Sound and it crashed
like the ocean all the way to sleep.

One afternoon I found him
on the stoop,
a pistol in his hand, waiting,

he said, for me. A sparrow had gotten in
to our common basement.
Could he have permission

to shoot it? The bullets, he explained,
might go through the floor.
I said I’d catch it, wait, give me

a few minutes and, clear-eyed, brilliantly
afraid, I trapped it
with a pillow. I remember how it felt

when I got my hand, and how it burst
that hand open
when I took it outside, a strength

that must have come out of hopelessness
and the sudden light
and the trees. And I remember

the way he slapped the gun against
his open palm,
kept slapping it, and wouldn’t speak.




[This message has been edited by Monique (edited 05-27-2001).]

[Scavella]

Monique -

Forget about kas - I'm sold!

Scavella

[kas]

I really liked "I come home wanting to touch everyone".

Stephen Dunn should be flattered by your effort!

Thanks much,
kas.

[arsonist]

i love stephen dunn! i bought one his poetry books for 50 cents on a whim. boy, was i blessed! he has an interesting voice. my favorite poem by him is the one where he makes fun the the miss america pagent by writing about pieces of meat, it's funny as heck.

[katherine]

Monique...

Consider me converted. http://www.everypoet.com/poetry/poetry_forums/smile.gif

Loved "At the Smithfield Methodist Church".

[Monique]

Scavella, kas, arsonist and Katherine:

Scavella,

I’m so pleased that you appreciate Dunn. Here’s another one for you:

Walking the Marshland

It was no place for the faithless,
so I felt a little odd
walking the marshland with my daughters,

Canada geese all around and the blue
herons just standing there;
safe, and the abundance of swans.

The girls liked saying the words,
gosling,
egret, whooping crane, and they liked

when I agreed. The casinos were a few miles
to the east.
I liked saying craps and croupier

and sometimes I wanted to be lost
in those bright
windowless ruins. It was April,

the gnats and black flies
weren’t out yet.
The mosquitoes hadn’t risen

from their stagnant pools to trouble
paradise and to give us
the great right to complain.

I loved these girls. The world
beyond Brigantine
awaited their beauty and beauty

is what others want to own.
I’d keep that
to myself. The obvious

was so sufficient just then.
Sandpiper. Red-wing
Blackbird. "Yes," I said.

But already we were near the end.
Praise refuge,
I thought. Praise whatever you can.

Kas

...one outta six ain't bad.

arsonist

I’m really pleased that you too enjoy Dunn.

A word of advice— steer clear of "Outside" as fellow posters (okay, namely me) are wary of those who purposely wade through the mires of "Outside".

To clarify, after reading your post(s), I was reminded of a party crasher, pounding an empty, shot-gunned, pen-stabbed, beer can against a kitchen window — demanding entrance…only to be denied.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Just a suggestion — you may want to ease back for a while and read, read, read…then comment. Sit pretty for bit (I did…still do) and I promise you’ll enjoy the forums. Cheers.


Katherine,

I’m so pleased. I'll join you in the "Church of the Converted". Thanks for responding Katherine.

-Monique



[This message has been edited by Monique (edited 06-02-2001).]