Stephen Dunn: Influences

There are many beyond the three I will name — Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Theodore Roethke. But individually and collectively they, I think, are the most important and lasting for me. In a nutshell, Frost for his strategies of composition and his quotidian yet philosophical investigations. Stevens for teaching me that, if the music was right, I could love poems I didn't understand. Roethke for his sensual playfulness, but finally for his lyrical meditations, and his phrasing; yes, Roethke most of all.

All three taught me how to read, each involving a different attentiveness to tone. Of the three Stevens was the wildest, and perhaps the one with the most bifurcated life, insurance executive by day, composer of “The Emperor of Ice Cream” and “The Pleasures of Merely Circulating” by night. I quit my good-paying corporate job at age 26 to go to Spain to see if I could write. A novel, not poems. I wrote a very language-y, poorly plotted novel, and threw it away. It was all about me. Wasn't that poetry's province? I may still have thought it was, but I had two saving graces. I didn't think my life should be of interest to anyone, which the writing of the novel confirmed, and there was a notable absence of a first-person voice in most of Stevens' work. The only books of poems I'd brought with me were Stevens' Collected and a bilingual anthology of Spanish poetry. I was a poetry rookie. I went to graduate school when I was 29, and was amazed just how much of a rookie I was. All the 22-year-olds in the creative writing program at Syracuse were more advanced in their reading than I was. My advantage was that the talk about poems and poetry was all new to me. I had an amateur's wonderment.

I didn't read Stevens in college, but had a healthy dose of Frost. As I recall not one of my English professors knew how sly he was, and how well he balanced ideas. I, more or less, learned that on my own (''my own” taking many years with a little help from Randall Jarrell). I had been a history major in college. As such, I learned that there were versions of the truth, which prepared me, I suspect, for poems like “Mending Wall” and “The Road Not Taken,” among Frost's many others in which point-of-view plays such a large role. The more I read of Frost the more I wanted to seek surface clarities that served complexity. It remains a goal of mine — to let the reader in, to be the kind of guide like the narrator in “Directive,” who “only has at heart your getting lost.”

I encountered Roethke's work in graduate school, first in a book edited by Anthony Ostroff in which several of his peers — Lowell, Kunitz, Berryman, et al. — commented on his poem “In a Dark Time.” Though I've never suffered from mental illness, I've known a few dark times, and I found myself riveted by the poem's phrasing right from the outset. “In a dark time, the eye begins to see,/I meet my shadow in the deepening glade;/I hear my echo in the echoing wood ...” Man, did I want to write like that.

Later on, “Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire ...” and a question every thoughtful, introspective person at one time or another must ask himself, “Which I is I?” Earlier in the poem he poses a question that's maybe too self-flattering, “What's madness but nobility of soul/at odds with circumstance?”, but nevertheless is brilliantly provocative, and no doubt apt in some cases.

I fell in love with “I Knew a Woman” and “The Waking” and “Elegy for Jane,” and felt some ante being raised in The Far Field. Philip Booth, one of my great teachers at Syracuse, would sometimes write in the margins of my poems, “Deepen your concerns!” And that's what Roethke seemed to be doing in The Far Field, especially in its title poem and in “Meditation at Oyster River,” delivering a quieter, less sensational entree into the soulful varieties of the human condition.

Poems by Stephen Dunn

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.

---

Story

A woman's taking her late-afternoon walk
on Chestnut where no sidewalk exists
and houses with gravel driveways
sit back among the pines. Only the house
with the vicious dog is close to the road.
An electric fence keeps him in check.
When she comes to that house, the woman
always crosses to the other side.

I'm the woman's husband. It's a problem
loving your protagonist too much.
Soon the dog is going to break through
that fence, teeth bared, and go for my wife.
She will be helpless. I'm out of town,
helpless too. Here comes the dog.
What kind of dog? A mad dog, a dog
like one of those teenagers who just loses it
on the playground, kills a teacher.

Something's going to happen that can't happen
in a good story: out of nowhere a car
comes and kills the dog. The dog flies
in the air, lands in a patch of delphiniums.
My wife is crying now. The woman who hit
the dog has gotten out of her car. She holds
both hands to her face. The woman who owns
the dog has run out of her house. Three women
crying in the street, each for different reasons.

All of this is so unlikely; it's as if
I've found myself in a country of pure fact,
miles from truth's more demanding realm.
When I listened to my wife's story on the phone
I knew I'd take it from her, tell it
every which way until it had an order
and a deceptive period at the end. That's what
I always do in the face of helplessness,
make some arrangements if I can.

Praise the odd, serendipitous world.
Nothing I'd be inclined to think of
would have stopped that dog.
Only the facts saved her.