The Truth

The Truth is our parents never loved us or each other. They were two ungrateful children. My siblings hop on planes and drink bottles of wine to out run the truth. Perhaps it will never catch them, alive.  I sit in a room and watch the bare tree in my yard swaying in the wind.

Those of us who think we know by Stephen Dunn

Those of us who think we know
the same secrets
are silent together most of the time,
for us there is eloquence
in desire, and for a while
when in love and exhausted
it’s enough to nod like shy horses
and come together
in a quiet ceremony of tongues.
It’s in disappointment we look for words
to convince us
the spaces between stars are nothing
to worry about;
it’s when those secrets burst
in that emptiness between our hearts
and the lumps in our throats.
And the words we find
are always insufficient, like love,
though they are often lovely
and all we have.”
― Stephen Dunn, New and Selected Poems, 1974-1994

I love what's left after love has been tested.

 Stephen Dunn

I’ve had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches. A heart is to be spent. Stephen Dunn, Different Hours

And the words we find are always insufficient, like love, though they are often lovely and all we have. Stephen Dunn

 “All I wanted was a job like a book so good I'd be finishing it for the rest of my life.”

― Stephen Dunn

“Originality, of course, is what occurs when something new arises out of what's already been done.”
― Stephen Dunn, Walking Light

“All good poems are victories over something.”
― Stephen Dunn

I've tried to become someone else for a while, only to discover that he, too, was me. ― Stephen Dunn

The Sudden Light and the Trees by Stephen Dunn

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.

― Stephen Dunn 

There will always be people who think suffering leads to enlightenment, who place themselves on the verge of what’s about to break, or go dangerously wrong. Let’s resist them and their thinking, you and I. Let’s not rush toward that sure thing that awaits us, which can dumb us into nonsense and pain. Stephen Dunn, Pagan Virtues: Poems

A Troubled Guest

 “A man’s mistakes (if I may lecture you), his worst acts, aren’t out of character, as he’d like to think, are not put on him by power or stress or too much to drink, but simply a worse self he consents to be.”

― Stephen Dunn, Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry

“Why not just try to settle in, take your place, however undeserved, among the fortunate? Why not trust that almost everyone, even in his own house, is a troubled guest?”
― Stephen Dunn, Pagan Virtues: Poems

I’ve turned corners there was no going back to, corners in the middle of a room that led to Spain or solitude.

 “And I’ve turned corners there was no going back to, corners in the middle of a room that led to Spain or solitude. And always the thin line between corner and cornered, the good corners of bodies and those severe bodies that permit no repose, the places we retreat to, the places we can’t bear to be found.”

― Stephen Dunn, New and Selected Poems 1974-1994

“so many people walk up to me and tell me they’re dead, though they’re just describing their afternoons.”
― Stephen Dunn, New and Selected Poems 1974-1994

worked through the terrors of influence, and are willing to acknowledge their debts by using them in order to go their own way

“Poets who remain poets have, presumably, worked through the terrors of influence, and are willing to acknowledge their debts by using them in order to go their own way. They’ve learned what Thomas Mann knew: “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

― Stephen Dunn, Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry

“Surely those folks who play their lives and their work eminently safe don’t often put themselves in the position where they can be startled or enlarged. Don’t put themselves near enough to the realm of the unknown where discovery resides, and joy has been rumored to appear.”
― Stephen Dunn, Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry

 

“Arnold said, “Poetry should be a criticism of life,” and I think it should be, too. I also think it should be an elucidation of life, a celebration of life, an addition to life, an emblem of the mysteries of life, etc.”
― Stephen Dunn, Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry

Evil always has an advantage and always succeeds until its enormous feet understep some moral chasm, or a damsel held dear by the populace cries out and is heard. Stephen Dunn, Whereas: Poems

 

 

“She was thinking a woman needed an angel for every son of a bitch she’d ever known.”
― Stephen Dunn, Whereas: Poems

 

“She’d seen her best friends disappear into their marriages. Even when she spoke on the phone to them, they weren’t there.”
― Stephen Dunn, Whereas: Poems

 

“I look for those with hidden wings, and for scars that those who once had wings can’t hide.”
― Stephen Dunn, Between Angels: Poems

“Doesn’t blood usually follow when language fails?” ― Stephen Dunn, Whereas: Poems

A Circus of Needs: Poems

“He didn’t want to be
this thin man whose desires
were barely covered by skin,

standing absolutely still.
But everytime he moved
there was another place to go,

and everytime sadness would arrive
with its wonderful cocoon
not even that would last.”
― Stephen Dunn, A Circus of Needs: Poems

Each of them used the same words, like people who’ve been trained in sales, and as they moved to their Miatas and Audis I noted the bare shoulders of their women were the barest shoulders I’d ever seen, as if they needed only the night as a shawl. Stephen Dunn, Everything Else in the World: Poems

Flaubert said — I assume about the balance between repression and freedom — “Be regular and orderly in your daily life, so you can be violent and original in your work.” ― Stephen Dunn, Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry

 “Your poem effectively begins at the first moment you’ve surprised or startled yourself. Throw away everything that preceded that moment, and begin with that moment.”

― Stephen Dunn, Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry

“Too many poets are insufficiently interested in story. Their poems could be improved if they gave in more to the strictures of fiction: the establishment of a clear dramatic situation, and a greater awareness that first-person narrators are also characters and must be treated as such by their authors. The true lyric poet, of course, is exempt from this. But many poets wrongly think they are lyric poets.”
― Stephen Dunn

“Finally, what I want from poetry is akin to what Flaubert wanted from novels. He thought they should make us dream. I want a poem, through its precisions and accuracies, to make me remember what I know, or what I might have known if I hadn't been constrained by convention or habit.”
― Stephen Dunn 

 

“How to survive as an other? The small town may be a paradigm of how boundaries can permit generosity, but it is also a place where people on the fringe, say homosexuals or intellectuals or African-Americans, develop a hunger for larger and more hospitable boundaries, those offered by cities, or, in another sense, by poems. There may be implications here for open and closed forms. That aside, true community — beyond physical parameters — often arises when you realize that everything you’ve thought peculiar to yourself has been thought or even lived by someone else. This is how poetry, not to mention literature in general, manifests some of its most exquisite manners; in the course of being true to itself it makes a gesture to others.”
― Stephen Dunn, Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry

“The good poem is implicitly philosophical. The not so good poem, conversely, may exquisitely describe a tree or loneliness, but if the description does not suggest an attitude toward nature, or human nature, we are left with a kind of dentist office art — devoted to decoration and the status quo.”
― Stephen Dunn, Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry

 

“Donald Justice’s admonition that a good poem should exhibit “that maximum amount of wildness that the form can bear” is also relevant, though again it’s equally useful to think of expanding the notion of form to accommodate even more of the wild.”
― Stephen Dunn, Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry

Anyone out without the excuse of a dog
should be handcuffed
and searched for loneliness.
― Stephen Dunn, Different Hours

Stephen Dunn Poem

“Where are we going?
It’s not an issue of here or there.
And if you ever feel you can’t
take another step, imagine
how you might feel to arrive,
if not wiser, a little more aware
how to inhabit the middle ground
between misery and joy.
Trudge on. In the higher regions,
where the footing is unsure,
to trudge is to survive.”
― Stephen Dunn, Lines of Defense: Poems

When I stop becoming, that's when I worry.

 Stephen Dunn