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