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...
identity juicy
I've tried to become someone else for a while, only to discover that he, too, was me.
both chunk large lives visible
I think most of our lives are made up of both things visible and things interior, with a large chunk of them being interior.
american-poet reaction
The reaction has been overwhelming, and I'm just getting used to it. I think I actually, though, could get used to it for a long time.
astonishment alive body
Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body.
mask unfair knows
Although I know it's unfair, I reveal myself one mask at a time.
alive said proof
Bring to me, it said, continual proof / you've been alive.
victory
All good poems are victories over something.
done originality something-new
Originality, of course, is what occurs when something new arises out of what's already been done.
disappointment love-you thinking
Altruism is for those who can't endure their desires. There's a world as ambiguous as a moan, a pleasure moan our earnest neighbors might think a crime. It's where we could live. I'll say I love you, Which will lead, of course, to disappointment, but those words unsaid poison every next moment. I will try to disappoint you better than anyone else has. --Mon Semblable
worry becoming
When I stop becoming, that's when I worry.
tested has-beens left
I love what's left after love has been tested.
trying disappoint
I will try to disappoint you better than anyone ever has.
mouths whispering deny
I’ll always deny that I kissed her. I was just whispering into her mouth.
order patterns way
Connubial Because with alarming accuracy she’d been identifying patterns I was unaware of—this tic, that tendency, like the way I've mastered the language of intimacy in order to conceal how I felt— I knew I was in danger of being terribly understood.