Stephen Dunn
Stephen Dunn
Stephen Dunnis an American poet and educator. Dunn has written fifteen collections of poetry. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 2001 collection, Different Hours and has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his other awards are three National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, Guggenheim Fellowship, and Rockefeller Foundations Fellowship. A collection of essays about Dunn's poetry was published in 2013...
real i-can
Everything I can't see / is at least as real as what I can.
rain sunset animal
exaggerated sunsets / splashed with rain, odd collisions / of roots, animals, seeds. / I didn't like a thing I saw, / so much effort to be strange.
abstract ache abstraction
Oh abstractions are just abstract until they have an ache in them.
moments elegance curious
Isn't there a curious elegance in how one moment passes into another?
basketball writing discovery
Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.
links purpose answers
Better to be furious at one thing, become radiant with purpose. Better to love links and rhythms than all-embracing answers.
thinking parent littles
I think because my parents died in their early 50s, mid 50s, I always thought I would die young. And that's been both a useful thing and I suspect something that's haunted me a little bit.
music lying taken
What feeling feels like over time. An attempt to screw up what feeling feels like over time. Heartbreak and a high C.... The often welcome melodic lie.... The soul's undersong. The orchestration of randomness, a flirtation with the boundaries of silence and space.... a reminder that the self wants to disappear, be taken away from itself and returned.
years worry desire
I make myself up from everything I am, or could be. For many years I was more desire than fact. When I stop becoming, that’s when I worry.
simple trying legends
There are always the simple events of your life that you might try to convert into legend.
heart son hearted
I’ve had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches. A heart is to be spent.
like-love lovely insufficient
And the words we find are always insufficient, like love, though they are often lovely and all we have.