(Robert N. Casper, Stephen Dunn) Pulitzer Prize-winner Stephen Dunn will read his poetry, followed by an interview with Poetry Society of America Programs Director Robert N. Casper.

Published Date: August 25, 2011

Transcription

Voiceover:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast Series. You are now tuning into a reading by Stephen Dunn, presented by the Poetry Society of America. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Washington, DC on Thursday, February 3rd, 2011. Now you will hear Rob Casper provide the introduction.

Rob Casper:

My name is Rob Casper. I'm the program's director for the Poetry Society of America. We're thrilled and delighted to be here and to welcome you to this afternoon's program featuring Stephen Dunn. Mr. Dunn will read for the first half of this program, and then I'll follow with a moderate discussion. A few words about the Poetry Society of America. We are the nation's oldest poetry organization, and we just turned 100 years old this October.

In addition to sponsoring up to 16 readings in 13 cities across the country, we also sponsor 14 annual contests and a Chapbook Fellowship program, which is now in its sixth year. Today's feature poet Stephen Dunn is the author of 17 books, including Selected and New Poems 1995-2009, chosen as one of the notable books of the year by the American Library Association, and Different Hours, which received the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, as well as Local Time, a National Poetry Series selection.

His new collection of poems, which apparently is now Inbound Gallery, Here and Now, his forthcoming from W. W. Norton in May of this year. Dunn's many honors include the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations and the National Endowment from the Arts, and a distinguished artist fellowship from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts.

He has taught creative writing and held residencies at Columbia University, University of Washington, Syracuse University, Princeton University, and the University of Michigan, among others, and is distinguished professor of creative writing at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. He lives not so far away in Frostburg Maryland. Dunn's poetry is as grounded in the world around us as it is willing to examine that world in our place in it.

He sees the self in terms that are clear and clearly universal and speaks with an intimacy and humility that would be shocking were it not so subtly constructed. His is the lyricism of an old friend and his discoveries and arrivals of the plain-spoken, hard-earned con. We gain immeasurably from his work and his wisdom. Please join me in welcoming Stephen Dunn.

Stephen Dunn:

Thank you, Rob, and thank you all for coming and braving whatever weather you might've had to brave to get here. I usually try to start with a poem that's appropriate to where I am place and this is only tangentially. It's about weather, and also finally as you'll see about dictatorships and oppression. The Wind. Tomorrow our weatherman said the wind would hardly exist in Kansas. It would arrive full throttle in Maryland. And with his pointer showed us his version of something beautiful, the ark and dip of the jet stream.

I must confess a part of me wished he'd also speak of tedium and long afternoons of nothingness. But finally, he was a Doppler man, dower, only as smart as his equipment. Next day the wind did come full throttle and branches fell and I was careful not to die. A calm followed, then the mail, and them an aerogram from a friend in a land so tumultuous, tedium for him would've been a luxury. Already the stuff of nostalgia.

It was a disturbing letter, and I imagined a country without a weatherman and the wind therefore without anyone to speak for it, or worse, that the wind belonged to the rulers now and everyone was forbidden to speak of what they had remembered, those big generous winds that once had must their hair and felt so good against their faces. If A Clown. If a clown came out of the woods, a standard looking clown with oversized polka dot clothes, floppy shoes, a red bulbous nose, and you saw him on the edge of your property, there'd be nothing funny about that, would there?

A bear might be preferable, especially if black and berry driven. And if this clown began waving his hands with those big white gloves that clowns wear and you realize he wanted your attention, had something apparently urgent to tell you, would you pivot and run from him or stay put as my friend did who seemed to understand here was a clown who didn't know where he was? A clown without a context. What could be sadder, my friend thought, than a clown in need of a context?

If then the clown said to you that he was on his way to a kid's birthday party, his car had broken down and he needed a ride, would you give him one, or would the connection between the comic and the appalling as it pertained to clowns be suddenly so clear that you'd be paralyzed by it? And if you were the clown and my friend hesitated, as he did, would you make a sad face and with an enormous finger, wipe away an imaginary tear? How far would you trust your art? I can tell you it worked.

Most of the guests had gone when my friend and the clown drove up and the family was angry, but the clown twisted a balloon into the shape of a bird and gave it to the kid who smiled, letting it rise to the ceiling. If you were the kid, the birthday boy, what from then on would be your relationship with disappointment, with joy? Whom would you blame or extol? I want to read a kind of double love poem to my wife and to language itself with a little complaint in it about people who love semiotics too much.

Has a few lines stolen from Neruda, but I won't tell you which they are.Language: a Love Poem. When I say your hair is the color of a moonless night in which I've often been lost, I mean approximately that dark. And the dove outside our window is no symbol, merely wakes us at dawn, its mate a grayish creature that coos quite poorly. Peace is an entirely different bird. The rose, to me, signifies the rose, and the guitar signifies a musical instrument called the guitar.

At other times language is a slaughterhouse, a hammering down, its subjects hanging from hooks, on the verge of being delicious. When I say these things to you it's to watch how certain words play themselves out on your face, as if no one with imagination can ever escape being a witness. The whale, for example, no matter its whiteness, is just a mammal posing as a big fish, except of course if someone is driven to pursue it. That changes everything. Which is not to suggest I don't love the depth of your concealments.

When I say your name over and over it's because I can not possess you.What's the most overused and wrongly used word of our generation? What would you say? Awesome. Yes, that would be my vote anyway. People say awesome ice cream cones. Anybody who has ever experienced awe and probably not few, probably only few of us have, know that it makes you silent. You don't go around using it as casually as people do. This is a poem that starts with that anyway. It's called Love.

Found dead in the alley of words: awesome, no hope for it, and share, which must have fallen trying to get by on its own, and near the trash cans, almost totally exhausted, the barely breathing cool. But there's love among the disposables, waiting, as ever, to be lifted into consequence. And here comes a forager looking for anything that might get him through the night. Love's right in front of him, his if he wants it. In the air the ashy smell of cliches, the stink of obsolescence. He's leaning love's way.

All the words are watching, even the dead ones. It's as if what he does next could be the equivalent of restoring awe to awesome, that love, if chosen might be given back to love, made new again. But the man is just a man, out for easy pickings. Or has he just remembered how, early on, love always feels original? Let us forgive him if he keeps on foraging. After. Jack and Jill at home together after their fall, the bucket spilled, her knees badly scraped, and Jack with not even an aspirin for what's broken.

We can see the arduous evenings ahead of them. And the need now to pay a boy to fetch the water. Our mistake was trying to do something together, Jill sighs. Jack says, If you'd have let go for once you wouldn't have come tumbling after. He's in a wheelchair, but she's still an item, for the rest of their existence confined to a little, rhyming story. We tell it to our children, who laugh, already accustomed to disaster. We'd like to teach them the secrets of knowing how to go too far, but Jack is banging with his soup spoon, Jill is pulling out her hair.

Out of decency we turn away, as if it were possible to escape the drift of our lives, the fundamental business of making do with what's been left us. The Imagined. If the imagined woman makes the real woman seem bare-boned, hardly existent, lacking in gracefulness and intellect and pulchritude, and if you come to realize the imagined woman can only satisfy your imagination, whereas the real woman with all her limitations can often make you feel good, how, in spite of knowing this, does the imagined woman keep getting into your bedroom, and joining you at dinner, why is it that you always bring her along on vacations when the real woman is shopping, or figuring the best way to the museum?

And if the real woman has an imagined man, as she must, someone probably with her at this very moment, in fact doing and saying everything she's ever wanted, would you want to know that he slips in to her life every day from a secret doorway she's made for him, that he's present even when you're eating your omelette at breakfast, or do you prefer how she goes about the house as she does, as if there were just the two of you? Isn't her silence, finally, loving? And yours not entirely self-serving? Hasn't the time come, once again, not to talk about it?

What Goes On. After the affair and the moving out, after the destructive revivifying passion, we watched her life quiet into a new one, her lover more and more on its periphery. She spent many nights alone, happy for the narcosis of the television. When she got cancer she kept it to herself until she couldn't keep it from anyone. The chemo debilitated and saved her, and one day her husband asked her to come back, his wife, who after all had only fallen in love as anyone might who hadn't been in love in a while, and he held her, so different now, so thin, her hair just partially grown back.

He held her like a new woman and what she felt felt almost as good as love had, and each of them called it love because precision didn't matter anymore. And we who'd been part of it, often rejoicing with one and consoling the other, we who had seen her truly alive and then merely alive, what could we do but revise our phone book, our hearts, offer a little toast to what goes on.

Talk to God. Thank him for your little house on the periphery, its splendid view of the wildflowers in summer, and the nervous, forked prints of deer in that same field after a snowstorm. Thank him even for the monotony that drives us to make and destroy and dissect what otherwise would be merely the lush, unnamed world. Ease into your misgivings. Ask him if in his weakness he was ever responsible for a pettiness, some weather, say, brought in to show who's boss when no one seemed sufficiently moved by a sunset, or the shape of an egg.

Ask him if when he gave us desire he had underestimated its power. And when, if ever, did he realize love is not inspired by obedience? Be respectful when you confess to him you began to redefine heaven as you discovered certain pleasures. And sympathize with how sad it is that awe has been replaced by small enthusiasms, that you're aware things just aren't the same these days, that you wish for him a few evenings surrounded by the old, stunned silence. Maybe it will be possible then to ask, Why this sorry state of affairs?

Why, after so much hatefulness done in his name, no list of corrections nailed to some rectory door? Remember to thank him for the silkworm, apples in season, photosynthesis, the northern lights. And be sincere. But let it be known you're willing to suffer only in proportion to your errors, not one unfair moment more. Insist on this as if it could be granted: not one moment more.

I wrote a book some years ago called Riffs and Reciprocities, which some people thought of as prose poems and that's all right. I thought of them as prose paragraphs that were tangentially related. They were such twosomes that I would never read one apart from the other, but now I don't care. I'll read you a few. Scapegoat. It's the Day of Atonement and Aaron has a brilliant idea, two goats as offerings to the Lord. One he kills as a personal atonement for himself and his house. The other is the scapegoat.

He lays both hands on its head, confessing the sins of the people, then sends it off into the wilderness. Poor goats, lucky unburdened people. It's easy to see why such an idea caught on. There's a burnt offering too involving a ram. In the face of the ineffable, Aaron tries to cover all bases. But we're most interested in the goat that bears our large and small mistakes and carries them away from us. Leviticus knew how to tell a story, but here's what was never reported. The Lord saw the goat in the wilderness stumbling, half dead.

He said to it, "A goat's life is an awful thing. This was not my intention. What they've done to you is just one more of their sins." This is a poem called or a prose piece called Acquaintances, and I read it to some of you Facebook people who have many too many friends, I think. Acquaintances. Not friend. A friend after all is someone with whom you need not discuss important subjects, though often you do, nor do you have to clarify the status of your relationship except when you must.

Your good news doesn't bother him too much. Bad news brings out the empathetic best in you both. And each of you knows what small misfortunes to keep to yourself. To be just an acquaintance is normal enough, but terrible to be an acquaintance when you want to be a friend. Terrible when one person is thinking friend, the other acquaintance. And after a long separation, those rapid uncomfortable pats on the back when they hug. Show me a back patter and I'll show you an acquaintance lost among his intuitions, whose body's morse code is doubt, doubt, doubt.

At a party full of acquaintances, it's almost as bad. What do we say after we've said what we usually say? Better to be a stranger with small hopes and a plan. One of the benign, but rather repetitive arguments I had with my ex-wife had to do with crows. Her contention that crows always travel in threes. No amount of empirical evidence would alter her view. Seriousness. Driving the Garden State Parkway to New York, I pointed out two crows to a woman who believed crows always travel in threes.

And later just one crow eating the carcass of a squirrel. "The others are nearby," she said, "hidden in trees." She was sure. Now and then she'd say "See!" and a clear dark trinity of crows would be standing on the grass. I told her she was wrong to under- or overestimate crows, and wondered out loud if three crows together made any evolutionary sense. I was almost getting serious now. Near Forked River we saw five. "There's three," she said, "and two others with a friend in a tree."

I looked to see if she was smiling. She wasn't. Or she was. "Men like you," she said, "need it written down, notarized, and signed." History. It's like this, the king marries a commoner, and the populace cheers. She doesn't even know how to curtsy, but he loves her manners in bed. Why doesn't he do what his father the king do what his father did, the king's mother wonders, those peasant girls brought in through that secret entrance, that's how a kingdom works best. But marriage!

The king's mother won't come out of her room, and a strange democracy radiates throughout the land, which causes widespread dreaming, a general hopefulness. This is, of course, how people get hurt, how history gets its ziggy shape. The king locks his wife in the tower because she's begun to ride her horse far into the woods. How unqueenly to come back to the castle like that, so sweaty and flushed. The only answer, his mother decides, is stricter rules, no whispering in the corridors, no gaiety in the fields.

The king announces his wife is very tired and has decided to lie down, and issues an edict that all things yours are once again his. This is the kind of law history loves, which contain sits own demise. The villagers conspire for years, waiting for the right time, which never arrives. There's only that one person, not exactly brave, but too unhappy to be reasonable, who crosses the moat, scales the walls.

Don't Do That. It was bring-your-own if you wanted anything hard, so I brought Johnnie Walker Red along with some resentment I'd held in for a few weeks, which was not helped by the sight of little nameless things pierced with toothpicks on the tables, or by talk that promised to be nothing if not small. But I'd consented to come, and I knew what part of the house their animals would be sequestered, whose company I loved. What else can I say, except that old retainer of slights and wrongs, that bad boy I hadn't quite outgrown, I'd brought him along, too.

I was out to cultivate a mood. My hosts greeted me, but did not ask about my soul, which was when I was invited by Johnnie Walker Red to find the right kind of glass, and pour. I toasted the air. I said hello to the wall, then walked past a group of women dressed to be seen, undressing them one by one, and went up the stairs to where the Rottweilers were, Rosie and Tom, and got down with them on all fours. They licked the face I offered them, and I proceeded to slick back my hair with their saliva, and before long I felt like a wild thing, ready to mess up the party, scarf the hors d'oeuvres.

But the dogs said, No, don't do that, calm down, after a while they open the door and let you out, they pet your head, and everything you might have held against them is gone, and you're good friends again. Stay, they said. I don't know if any of you have a particular time of day when you're most likely to get in trouble, but I do. It's usually around 4:00 in the afternoon. This is a poem that will speak to that. Bad. My wife is working in her room writing and I've come in three times with idle chatter, some no news news.

The fourth time she identifies me as what I am, a man lost in late afternoon and the terrible in-between, good work long over, a good drink not yet what the clock has okayed. Her mood, a little bemused, leave me the hell alone, mixed with a weary smile. And I see my face up on the post office wall among men least wanted looking for Lauren. In the small print under my name, annoying to loved ones in the afternoons lacks inner resources. I go away, guilty as charged and write this poem, which I insist she read at drinking time.

She's reading it now. It seems she's pleased, but when she speaks, it's about charm and how predictable I am. How when in trouble I try to become irresistible, like one of those blonde dogs with a red bandana around his neck. Sorry, he's peed on the rug. "Forget it," she says, "this stuff is old. It won't work anymore." And I hear, "Good boy, good boy," and can't stop licking her hand. A few more. Around the Time of the Moon. The experts were at work doing expert work. Amateurs were loving what they hardly knew.

"Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed," came over our televisions, accidental poetry, instant lore. Our parents couldn't believe it. "Can you believe it," said my sister Sam. Elsewhere on terra firma, a chemist must have smiled an inner smile having perfected Agent Orange. "Mistakes were made," said our president, an area of personal pronoun could be heard. My friend on acid said he was the bullet, but sometimes also the wound. The moon was finished, he went on to explain, never again would haunt or beguile.

Mary Travers was leaving on a jet plane, didn't know when she'd be back again. I, for one, was sad. Soon everyone had a harmonica, on every street corner a guitar. A few of us thought, we thought it was possible to change the world. We were love's amateurs, its happy fools. I let my hair grow into a badge, became an expert on right and wrong. And under artificial light in my room, read strangely comforting books about alienation and despair. Meanwhile, almost unnoticed, quotation marks descended from the sky, began to fit around everything we thought we knew.

And trot upon or not, the obstinate moon would only be itself kept bumping up the crime rate, lifting the helpless seas. Shatterings. In my dream, I'm addressing a large class about Trotsky and Rambo. Trotsky wanted perpetual revolution, I tell them. Rambo, a derangement of the senses. Wouldn't it be fun to have dinner with them? Most of my students have forsaken home or are planning to. They don't want to have dinner with anybody. They've mastered the boredom they think conceals them.

But the hungers of the few are palpable. They're famished for the marrow of experience for the yet to arrive viscera of their historical moment. Rambo is now 22, I say, gun running in Africa. He's already given up poetry, grown tired of breaking its rules. Trotsky has fled to Mexico. Stalin's thugs with will soon cross the border with their ice axes. My class is called whatever I feel like talking about. No matter what the subject over the years, it's the only course I've ever taught. Meanwhile, a rose explodes on the chalkboard.

Three crows call hole in the sky. My job is to shatter a few things. Should I put them back together? What's going on here? What kind of dream with Rambo in it finds itself concern with responsibility? Yet I ask what's the responsibility of the lyric poet? How it feels being himself? Why should anyone care? The political philosopher, shouldn't he know wildness can't go on forever? Perpetual anything, I say. Give me a break. Just how many deaths can a good idea justify?

This dream is in need of a boutonnière or maybe a bullet suspended in midair, but just in time a student rises and says, "In the spirit of Trotsky, let's tear up all our notes from this class ridden class. Let's caress the world with leaflets." Half of the class follows him out the door. Clearly I've poorly educated the others who remain seated, terrified they can't find what's next on the syllabus. But there isolated among them is that boy, a Rambodian, all testosterone and refusal, the one I always teach to.

Look how he shrugs and heads toward the exit as is if the future already had assured him it had openings for someone so unafraid of it. His assignments unfinished, his grade in doubt. Two more. Sweetness. Just when it has seemed I couldn't bear one more friend waking with a tumor, one more maniac with a perfect reason, often a sweetness has come and changed nothing in the world except the way I stumbled through it, for a while lost in the ignorance of loving someone or something, the world shrunk to mouth-size, hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness that doesn't leave a stain, no sweetness that's ever sufficiently sweet. Tonight a friend called to say his lover was killed in a car he was driving. His voice was low and guttural, he repeated what he needed to repeat, and I repeated the one or two words we have for such grief until we were speaking only in tones. Often a sweetness comes as if on loan, stays just long enough to make sense of what it means to be alive, then returns to its dark source.

As for me, I don't care where it's been, or what bitter road it's traveled to come so far, to taste so good. I'll conclude with this. It's called A Postmortem Guide, the epigraph is for my eulogist in advance. Do not praise me for my exceptional serenity. Can't you see I've turned away from the large excitements, and have accepted all the troubles? Go down to the old cemetery; you'll see there's nothing definitive to be said.The dead once were all kinds, boundary breakers and scalawags, martyrs of the flesh, and so many dumb bunnies of duty, unbearably nice.

I've been a little of each. And please, resist the temptation of speaking about virtue. The seldom-tempted are too fond of that word, the small-spirited, the unburdened. Know that I've admired in others only the fraught straining to be good. Adam's my man and Eve's not to blame. He bit in; it made no sense to stop. Still, for accuracy's sake you might say I often stopped, that I rarely went as far as I dreamed. And since you know my hardships, understand they're mere bump and setback against history's horror.

Remind those seated, perhaps weeping, how obscene it is for some of us to complain. Tell them I had second chances. I knew joy. I was burned by books early and kept sidling up to the flame.Tell them that at the end I had no need for God, who'd become just a story I once loved, one of many with concealments and late-night rescues, high sentence and pomp.

The truth is I learned to live without hope as well as I could, almost happily, in the despoiled and radiant now. You who are one of them, say that I loved my companions most of all. In all sincerity, say that they provided a better way to be alone. Thank you very much.

Rob Casper:

Thank you for a great reading. One of the great opportunities I want to get a chance to do a moderate discussion like this is to get questions answered or at least get questions partially answered that I've wondered about for a long time. The balance between rhetoric and imagery and the balance between framing argument and showing that argument through things.

I know you've talked about being someone who is, as a younger poet, very image oriented and moved away from that. I wonder if you could just talk about how that works in your poems now, how you're able to hold those both and not delve too far into image rear or be too constrained by argument.

Stephen Dunn:

Well, years ago when I was starting to write as you're away from the image and being more discursive, I read an essay by the Italian poet Pavese, which was very liberating for me, in which part of the argument was that you didn't have to write a poem, metaphor after metaphor, image after image, that the entire poem was a metaphor. That was how I was writing it.

It was wonderfully liberating. But my other way, which really has been with me somewhat all along, I suspect, is that my philosophical disposition is to disagree with myself. I'm one of those people who might make a statement and immediately hear its opposite. So often my poems work themselves down the page that way, either a series of counter statements or a series of refinements.

Rob Casper:

Do you feel like those sorts of moves are the kind of thing that poetry can best reflect, or do you feel like you'll argue something and then suddenly an image will come along and change things?

Stephen Dunn:

I'm not against image or metaphor in any way, and I love them when they arrive. I just don't like to crank them up. I don't think that's poetry. What I think we should be doing is saying what we mean for as long as we can straight out. And then of course, because life is complex and our emotional lives are messy, there's a point where you can no longer say it straight and you have to reach for analog.

You have to reach for a metaphor. I love metaphors that arrive out of necessity, that arrive out of a certain urgency of the moment rather than what I think are false notions of creative writing, image, metaphor, one after the other.

Rob Casper:

Well, I think it's interesting, we can look at a poem like If A Clown and how that poem seemed to use the image or the conceit of this lost clown character to get to that moment of saying, how far would you trust your art? Do you often feel like your poems allow you situations to move into saying something that might be surprising, that might argue for a way of living that?

Stephen Dunn:

Well, that poem actually came rather fast. You hope to arrive... There's inspiration that precedes the poem. If you wait for that, you're going to write about four poems a year, unless you have a more interesting life than I do. But the major inspiration for me occurs once I'm in the poem where the language that you find yourself using becomes seminal.

The sounds of it become things that ask for companions. That moment in the poem became available to me because of where I had gone. Nothing in the poem ever happened. It was just those nice moments when you're writing a what if proposition for as far as you can go.

Rob Casper:

I know you've talked about another interview is moments that startled yourself, the moment when the engine of the poem gets going. I wondered, often do those moments end up at the ends of the poems, or do they frame the beginnings of poems? Do you suddenly become startled and think, okay, this is the beginning of the thing that I need to make?

Stephen Dunn:

I think if any of us who've written a long time truly confess, there are so many answers to that question, that you wrote something over here, you put it over here. You wrote your most interesting line in the 19th line and it had nothing to do with the poem so that you had to write something in the second line so that your mind appeared shapely all along.

Putting poems together is some like that one pretty much came in a flow, but that can happen, stitching together parts of poem, stealing lines from old poems, stealing lines from other poets, fucking them up a little bit so nobody knows. There's no one way for anybody to write a poem.

Rob Casper:

Why not even talked a lot about the importance of revision to you. I mean, clearly your poems have a great, great shapeliness. I wanted to talk a little bit about, and using another poem that you read as an example, Don't Do That, talk about the relationship between the muses and artifice, between the saying things that you feel like your audience wants to directly get and then launching off into a world either through the structure of the poem or the images themselves or in the case suddenly dogs that are human-like that we know is not part, we know is invented, and how you balance those out too.

Stephen Dunn:

I don't know. I mean, there's no doubt that artifice has gotten most of us as far as any kind of genuine emotion. Genuine emotion often produces very bad poems. But when you look at something that's poorly made, you might say that's artificial. When the very same things, well-made, you call a poem. Artifice is... I mean, that's the root of it. We make things. I think the key for all poets, young poets in particular, is to become makers rather than utterers.

Rob Casper:

It raises another question I had that I wanted to delve into. At one point, you talked about nakedness and stylized. You're talking about a particular poem at the time, but you emphasized the value of stylized. It makes me want to get back to what you're saying about genuine emotion creating very bad poems. Is it because a certain deep, very direct, very powerful emotion is one that a given writer can't quite get around or it can't contain?

Stephen Dunn:

It's just harder. I mean, I'm all for genuine emotion, but if you feel strongly about something, the great danger of putting something in a poem because it happened to you, the worst reason possible. I've lost track of your question. Say it once again.

Rob Casper:

Oh, I lost track of the question too. I wondered if it's impossible to handle big, genuine emotions because you can't, as a poet, as a writer, really wrap your mind around it.

Stephen Dunn:

No, I think big genuine emotions are lucky to have and fine, the same thing is operative with the little poem with not very big emotions is that you have to get beyond your original impulse for your subject. If you're still working your original impulse by the end of the poem, haven't developed any other allegiances, I suspect the poem isn't going to be very good. With the poem of larger motion, I would hope to have those poems pushing me towards something.

But if I don't make discoveries in them, if I don't discover... Most poems have hidden subjects. And if we're lucky, we locate them. It's that much harder with political poems, for example, where you have your convictions. I'm all for political poems, but the problem is how to say that, which you don't yet know. The same thing in big love poems and grief poems.

Rob Casper:

Sure. Well, it's funny you bring up love because I think about the two poems you read, the Double Love poem and the one you followed it with Language: a Love Poem, which were themselves... I mean, they're layered poems, but they're foregrounding their arguments, they're foregrounding their need to say, wait a minute, and that inner contrarian that you've talked about.

Stephen Dunn:

Yeah, no, it helps to be opposed to something. That gives the poem energies. Most of us begin our poems with our conventional workaday minds, and you have to say something to startle yourself out of that. For me, it's usually either something that just comes from nowhere, but it's usually something that establishes a counter tension, something posited. I remember beginning the love poem, the Language: Love Poem, and not thinking of it as anything except a love poem to my wife.

But then other things got in there and the imagination had to reach for them and accommodate them. I mean, the great fun is to be in the middle of a poem, it seems to me, where... I mean, every poem has crossroads, where you can take it here, take it there, where you have to make the decisions and those decisions you make in the middle of the poem really separate poets from other poets and you from yourself, from having a good day or a less than good day.

Rob Casper:

Given that, what comes to mind when you think about some of the most difficult decisions you've made in the middle of the poem or the scariest or the most shocking?

Stephen Dunn:

Somebody's just written an essay about writing wisdom lines, which you're always a little bit in trouble, but now and again, you think you might have written one. It's best to bury that line. To have it in the poem, but not make it the last line, not have drum rolls and the music coming up behind it. There's been the lines that might be too confessional, too naked, how to transform that, how to make it a poem.

I think for those of us who write first person poems, as I mostly do, it's very useful to begin them with boredom, with being very bored with yourself so that you might make something. Also, and this is the hard thing to know, that nobody cares about your life, your hardships, your love. They don't care and they shouldn't care, unless you can make them care. The burden is on you as a maker always. When I write something that seems juicy or naked or wise, I got some work to do.

Rob Casper:

Yeah, yeah, no, it's interesting to think about, because there's that sense that poems have that authority to say something wise or juicy or naked.

Stephen Dunn:

Yeah. Well, also the problem of we counsel our students not to write abstractly. I like to get away with that stuff, but it's always good advice for students. Because if you don't know something say about the history of ideas, that idea that you think is wise about, everybody has heard it 20 times before and they're not excited by it whatsoever, as you are. You need to have some familiarity with ideas and the history of them before you even should risk a wisdom line.

Rob Casper:

I have a question about form, and I'm going to preface it by saying that I discovered, through a video that I watched, that you are quite the table tennis player. I'm a big, big fan of table tennis. I'm the only person I know who's taken table tennis lessons.

Stephen Dunn:

Let's play.

Rob Casper:

Yeah, I'm sure you beat me. No doubt. But it seems so, as an activity, so opposed to your poems, which are so... They're not frenetic. They're not reactive. They're very slow and thoughtful, and as I said in my intro, humble, but I wondered if there was something about table tennis that had any relation to your poems whatsoever?

Stephen Dunn:

No. No. I've been an athlete all my life, and the only relationship I can think of between athletics and poetry writing is that you have a chance to be better than yourself. You have a chance to exceed yourself by process. In the poem, it's by process. If you're a basketball player and you're making a lot of shots in a row, you're on that kind of roll. But that's as far as I wish to push that comparison.

Rob Casper:

I totally understand. I totally understand. Let me just try a different direction and see where that would go. You've talked a lot, I know, with your book Riffs and Reciprocities about... It seems like people ask you a lot of questions about it as prose poems and you had to defend it as maybe prose poems or not, but I'm interested in the opposite perspective. Given that you wrote those, what did that teach you about what it meant to for yourself break your lines into lines and use stanzas? What did it show you about how poems work that's different from that?

Stephen Dunn:

I don't think anything really. My goal was to write great sentences, one after the other, and to try not to say anything that I had already heard or said. Maybe something like that is behind a lot of poems too. I suspect that if you take, and I'm not calling my prose great, but I suspect if you take great prose and break the lines properly, everyone would be happy to call it a poem.

Rob Casper:

Yeah, yeah, no, that's interesting. I thought I saw a hand out there? Is there anything subject wise that you've turned away from in a poem that you've denied yourself in a poem?

Audience:

Well, not necessarily subject wise.

Rob Casper:

Okay, in any sense.

Stephen Dunn:

Well, if you've written as long as we have for these years, you've written a lot of bad poems. I hope I could recognize that and turn away from them fast. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you need your friends to say or your editors to say no. But certainly there have been poems that I thought were working of certain personal quality that didn't get beyond that, where I was unable to transform them and they were just two naked things. I put them away. There's many things which I've turned away from.

I mean, when you're younger, I think you're more inclined... And this is not a bad idea, just for the sake of writing poems, which is essentially maybe at a certain point, practice or practice. You stay with trash. You stay with your less than good stuff for a long time. I try not to do that anymore, but I certainly would stay with a poem that hadn't arrived at its concerns, at its real concerns for a long time when I was younger, but I try not to now. I'm actually been working on some curious things.

One of them Stephen Corey knows, which is to write a full interview with myself in which there are no questions. I only write the answers. The questions, I guess are presumed. But that's been a lot of fun. But really what I've been doing is I've been working on the galleys of my new book. I have occasionally been writing a new poem or two, but I'm in that little limbo world right now between books and just seeing what comes.

Audience:

If you find yourself in those creative doldrums, is there any writer or poet that you try to read to jumpstart you?

Stephen Dunn:

No, not one in particular, but I have very good notebooks. Nothing of my own in great sentences, great lines from other people, pithy moments. When I'm stuck, I'm likely to turn to those notebooks to see how something in there might push me towards something.

Rob Casper:

Did someone tell you once upon a time to start taking notebooks as advice for writers, or is it something you just took on?

Stephen Dunn:

No, no, I just did. I think I started to do it around the time I decided that I was going to write essays, which was in my 40s, and it really has continued ever since.

Audience:

Just the bringing up the table tennis, it made me wonder, do you ever have a physical response to [inaudible 00:58:24]

Stephen Dunn:

No, it's mostly worry. I have a friend who's a sculpture who uses words like enthusiasm and how happy he is and excited when he does something. I'm still worrying it forward, worry about if it's good. You rarely give your poem a high five. I don't know artists who do that. I think maybe when you're very young and you get excited about just making a poem almost turn out right, it probably hasn't turned out, but you think it does. You might be a little excited. I've been satisfied and a little pleased, and then I'm full of doubt pretty quickly.

Rob Casper:

It does beg the question if you're someone who feels often doubtful about your poems and you're also a serious revisor, how you know how to do that? How you know, okay, this poem has arrived at a place that I can't massage it anymore, or it's arrived at a place that is fulfilling something that I didn't know it would?

Stephen Dunn:

I mean, somebody was asking me this the other day at a Q&A and he said, "You're not allowed to use Paul Valerie's line," which poems are abandoned, not finished. I wasn't allowed to do that. I had to think of something else. I think it has something to do when regardless of content, when you've solved all the aesthetic problems that you can think are there. I can't tell you how many times I'm wrong about a poem being finished. I showed it to my wife, she makes an ugly face at it. I sent it to my friend in the mail.

He writes back why it needs to make two more moves. Those things make sense often and sometimes you cling... I think you should cling to what you've done in life for as long as you can. You just don't want to give it up. But certainly the history of my writing poems is that I probably don't have it until I do. Then more worry. It's nice to have an editor who says, "You can't revise anymore. It is all over," and then you let it go.

Rob Casper:

Yeah, that makes sense.

Audience:

Speaking out about a naked moment in poetry, do you think that's ever been a useful move?

Stephen Dunn:

I think if it's a naked moment and it is a consequential moment to you, you need to find ways to allow it in the poem. I mean, it's all about giving yourself permission writing poems. You give yourself permission to what you've found yourself doing and saying. If it were a naked moment that mattered to me, I wouldn't throw it away. I would see what could be done with it. But naked moments are just ones that are like unreconstructed lives.

Let me tell you about your life. I had an interesting life. I want to hear my novel. It doesn't happen that way. You have to reconstruct, and then you could do a lot with your nakedness, I think, if you can reconstruct it.

Rob Casper:

Do you mean in a way by making this the ways in which we're trained to or just naturally without much thought speak of the things that have happened to us or the things that we've thought? Because I mean, certainly it's easy enough to talk on the phone with someone and say, "Oh, this happened to me," and not really examine how you're phrasing it and how you're containing it within language.

Stephen Dunn:

Well, as you know, there are people who actually think they're telling the truth when they say what they mean. Almost never are they telling the truth, not even close. I've always loved that strategy in Mark Strand's elegy to his father, where a question is posed to the father like, why did you travel so much?

The father gives an answer, and then the question is posed again, and you get a little more essential answer. I mean, you do that with your friends. How are you? Fine. You look at them again, they might tell you something a little better, and then don't accept that either. The truth is an achievement. It is not what you say.

Rob Casper:

That's probably the best place we could end on.

Voiceover:

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