Dunn, Stephen
DUNN, Stephen
Nationality: American. Born: New York City, 24 June 1939. Education: Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York, 1958–62, B.A. in history 1962; New School for Social Research, New York, 1964–66; Syracuse University, New York, 1968–70, M.A. in creative writing 1970. Military Service: U.S. Army, 1962. Family: Married Lois Kelly in 1964; two daughters. Career: Professional basketball player for the Williamsport Billies, Pennsylvania, 1962–63; copywriter, National Biscuit Company, New York, 1963–66; assistant editor, Ziff-Davis publishers, New York, 1967–68; assistant professor of creative writing, Southwest Minnesota State College, Marshall, 1970–73. Associate professor, then professor, 1974–90, and since 1990 Trustee Fellow in the Arts, Stockton State College, New Jersey. Visiting poet, Syracuse University, 1973–74, and University of Washington, Seattle, winter 1980; adjunct professor of poetry, Columbia University, 1983–87. Awards: Academy of American Poets prize, 1970; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1973, 1982, 1989; Bread Loaf Writers Conference Robert Frost fellowship, 1975; Theodore Roethke prize (Poetry Northwest), 1977; New Jersey Arts Council fellowship, 1979, 1983; Helen Bullis prize, 1982; Guggenheim fellowship, 1984; Levinson prize (Poetry), 1988; Oscar Blumenthal prize (Poetry), 1991; James Wright prize (Mid-American Review), 1993; American Academy of Arts & Letters award, 1994. Agent: Philip G. Spitzer Literary Agency, 111–25 76th Avenue, Forest Hills, New York 11375. Address: 445 Chestnut Neck Road, Port Republic, New Jersey 08241, U.S.A.
Publications
Poetry
Five Impersonations. Marshall, Minnesota, Ox Head Press, 1971.
Looking for Holes in the Ceiling. Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1974.
Full of Lust and Good Usage. Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1976.
A Circus of Needs. Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1978.
Work and Love. Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1981.
Not Dancing. Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University Press, and London, Feffer and Simons, 1984.
Local Time. New York, Quill, 1986.
Between Angels. New York, Norton, 1989.
Landscape at the End of the Century. New York, Norton, 1991.
New & Selected Poems: 1974–1994. New York, Norton, 1994.
Loosestrife: Poems. New York, Norton, 1996.
Winter at the Caspian Sea: Poems. Aiken, South Carolina, Palanquin, 1999.
Other
Walking Light: Essays & Memoirs. New York, Norton, 1993.
Riffs & Reciprocities: Prose Pairs. New York, Norton, 1998.
Editor, A Cat of Wind, An Alibi of Gifts (anthology of children's poetry). Trenton, New Jersey State Council on the Arts, 1977.
Editor, Silence Has a Rough, Crazy Weather (poems by deaf children). Trenton, New Jersey State Council on the Arts, 1979.
*Critical Studies: "Four from Prospero" by David Wojahn, in Georgia Review (Athens, Georgia), 43(3), fall 1989; "Finding, Discovering, Pursuing: Poets on Poetry" by Sanford Pinsker, in Gettysburg Review (Gettysburg, Pennsylvania), 7(1), winter 1994; "Precarious Balances: A Conversation with Stephen Dunn" by David Elliott, in Mid-American Review (Bowling Green, Ohio), 15(1–2), 1995.
Stephen Dunn comments:
I write what I discover to be true or effective or moving in the act of writing. Then I rewrite for coherence and, ideally, beauty. Certain obsessions emerge. I have a vague idea what they are, but I do not wish to know them too consciously. I want the poem to emerge from my own imperatives and reach out to the reader, naturally, clearly, as if I had cut through all the sanctioned lies and was simply speaking.
* * *The voice of Stephen Dunn's poems is sure, lyric, and comic, in language that is both intelligent and deceptively simple. Much of the joy of his poems arises from their insistence on the "thisness" of the body and a refusal to ignore its pleasures in the midst of awkwardness, even pain.
The characteristic speaker in a Dunn poem wants, like most of us, to wear his body naturally and pleasantly, though someone or something keeps reminding him that it is seldom possible to do so. In "Modern Dance Class," for example, "the instructor looks at me / the way gas station attendants / looks at tires whose treads are gone." The determined dancer, knowing that "grace / is what occurs after technique / has been loved a long while / and then forgotten," tries hard to pull himself together. A reader's delight in such poems is a direct result of the poet's accurate rendering of his (and our) failure to accomplish that recovery.
Dunn has described the typical speaker in his poems as "the normal man, gone public," the person whose "private little efforts / to fulfill himself / are / not unlike yours, or anyone's." There is something approaching perfection in his "inventive mixture of wit and pathos," as one reviewer has said. Happiness, after all, is perpetually there and not there,
A state you must dare not enter
with hopes of staying …
with its perfect bridge above
the crocodiles,
and its doors forever open.
In "Truck Stop: Minnesota," an early poem, the speaker struggles to feel at home in an inhospitable world. "The waitress looks at my face as if it were a small tip," he says, trying to win a friendly response from a woman treated familiarly by other customers—truckers—who call her "sweetheart … Honey. Doll." The poem ends with a familiar complaint, in a line that Dunn chose as the title for his second collection, "I'm full of lust and good usage, lost here."
Ordinary pleasures lead Dunn to ask unexpected questions, as in "A Private Man Confronts His Vulgarities at Dawn." He walks the beach,
my cock
rubbing against my pants
in this public sun, these various doors
swinging in my chest …
I want to know how
to cherish all this,
and just how many debts
a body is allowed.
In Dunn's best poems the speaker's lust for life keeps him ill at ease among people with little or no appreciation for the small anxieties and delights of daily living. He remains wary, attentive both to an occasionally unfriendly world and to troublesome intrusions, like death. Throughout, the poems of love and recollection, such as "Those of Us Who Think Who Know" and "Tenderness," are as beautiful in their rightness as the comic ones.
In collections that appear with a regularity Dunn has extended himself to new subjects, the subtle and not so subtle conflicts between men and women in Local Time and the lingering sense of spirituality in a secular world in Between Angels. "Other angels have urged us / to change our lives," he writes in a characteristically offhand manner,
but you seem to know
we drift, stumbling
toward even the smallest
improvement.
Dunn asks and expects little of human nature. Nor does he take for granted the minor pleasures that ordinary people, ordinary lives are allowed.
For his lyricism to work, however, Dunn, like Robert Herrick, has to ignore significant corners of the world. Conflict and consummate evil remain at some distance. On occasion a hint of complacency undermines Dunn's claim on our attention. In the latter poems, for example, when he tries to extend himself to something beyond private experience, he occasionally loses his way. In "When the Revolution Came," about the transformation in eastern Europe in l989, he can only ask, "Were we thinking of ourselves … And did we feel a little smug?"
Dunn's forte is a kind of comedy of manners in which fundamental or visible economic or political evils seldom intrude. "Altruism," he writes in "Mon Semblable," "is for those / who can't endure their desires." Is it for no one else?
—Michael True