Stephen Dunn Quotes

I've tried to become someone else for a while, only to discover that he, too, was me.

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.

I’ve had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches. A heart is to be spent.

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

I love what's left after love has been tested.

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.

I’ll always deny that I kissed her. I was just whispering into her mouth.

When I stop becoming, that's when I worry.

Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body.

Although I know it's unfair, I reveal myself one mask at a time.

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.

All I wanted was a job like a book so good I'd be finishing it for the rest of my life.

May you turn stone, my daughter, into silk. May you make men better than they are.

Originality, of course, is what occurs when something new arises out of what's already been done.

I will try to disappoint you better than anyone else has.

All good poems are victories over something.

There are always the simple events of your life that you might try to convert into legend.

Bring to me, it said, continual proof / you've been alive.

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.

Anyone out without the excuse of a dog should be handcuffed and searched for loneliness.

I don't think I'd complain if I were overrated.

God knows nothing we don't know. We gave him every word he ever said.

Where are we going? It’s not an issue of here or there. And if you ever feel you can’t take another step, imagine how you might feel to arrive, if not wiser, a little more aware how to inhabit the middle ground between misery and joy. Trudge on. In the higher regions, where the footing is unsure, to trudge is to survive.

I am astonished by the various kisses we’re capable of. Each from different heights diminished, which is simply the law. And the big bruise from the long fall looked perfectly white in a few years. That astounded me most of all.

He didn’t want to be this thin man whose desires were barely covered by skin, standing absolutely still. But everytime he moved there was another place to go, and everytime sadness would arrive with its wonderful cocoon not even that would last.

That time I thought I was in love and calmly said so was not much different from the time I was truly in love and slept poorly and spoke out loud to the wall and discovered the hidden genius of my hands And the times I felt less in love, less than someone, were, to be honest, not so different either. Each was ridiculous in its own way and each was tender, yes, sometimes even the false is tender. I am astonished by the various kisses we’re capable of. Each from different heights diminished, which is simply the law. And the big bruise from the long fall looked perfectly white in a few years. That astounded me most of all.

I was calm, no one wants the kind of calm I was.

When people praise a poem that I can't understand I always think they're lying.

Finally, what I want from poetry is akin to what Flaubert wanted from novels. He thought they should make us dream. I want a poem, through its precisions and accuracies, to make me remember what I know, or what I might have known if I hadn't been constrained by convention or habit.

Too many poets are insufficiently interested in story. Their poems could be improved if they gave in more to the strictures of fiction: the establishment of a clear dramatic situation, and a greater awareness that first-person narrators are also characters and must be treated as such by their authors. The true lyric poet, of course, is exempt from this. But many poets wrongly think they are lyric poets.

Your poem effectively begins at the first moment you’ve surprised or startled yourself. Throw away everything that preceded that moment, and begin with that moment.

To the members of my family who are no longer with us, I’d like to say I’m sorry. There is a quote by Stephen Dunn I’ve always loved; he says, “Our parents died at least twice, the second time when we forgot their stories.” I hope by remembering your stories, the good and the bad, you can forgive me for sharing parts of your lives you may have wished to have kept private.

Summer Nocturne" Let us love this distance, since those who do not love each other are not seperaated. --Simone Weil Night without you, and the dog barking at the silence, no doubt at what's in the silence, a deer perhaps pruning the rhododendron or that racoon with its brilliant fingers testing the garbage can lid by the shed. Night I've chosen a book to help me think about the long that's in longing, "the space across which desire reaches." Night that finally needs music to quiet the dog and whatever enormous animal night itself is, appetite without limit. Since I seem to want to be hurt a little, it's Stan Getz and "It Never Entered My Mind," and to back him up Johnnie Walker Black coming down now from the cabinet to sing of its twelve lonely years in the dark. Night of small revelations, night of odd comfort. Starting to love this distance. Starting to feel how present you are in it.

Those of us who think we know" Those of us who think we know the same secrets are silent together most of the time, for us there is eloquence in desire, and for a while when in love and exhausted it’s enough to nod like shy horses and come together in a quiet ceremony of tongues. It’s in disappointment we look for words to convince us the spaces between stars are nothing to worry about; it’s when those secrets burst in that emptiness between our hearts and the lumps in our throats. And the words we find are always insufficient, like love, though they are often lovely and all we have.

The Sudden Light and the Trees" My neighbor was a biker, a pusher, a dog and wife beater. In bad dreams I killed him and once, in the consequential light of day, I called the Humane Society about Blue, his dog. They took her away and I readied myself, a baseball bat inside my door. That night I hear his wife scream and I couldn't help it, that pathetic relief; her again, not me. It would be years before I'd understand why victims cling and forgive. I plugged in the Sleep-Sound and it crashed like the ocean all the way to sleep. One afternoon I found him on the stoop, a pistol in his hand, waiting, he said, for me. A sparrow had gotten in to our common basement. Could he have permission to shoot it? The bullets, he explained, might go through the floor. I said I'd catch it, wait, give me a few minutes and, clear-eyed, brilliantly afraid, I trapped it with a pillow. I remember how it felt when I got my hand, and how it burst that hand open when I took it outside, a strength that must have come out of hopelessness and the sudden light and the trees. And I remember the way he slapped the gun against his open palm, kept slapping it, and wouldn't speak. .

Stone Seeking Warmth Look, it's usually not a good idea to think seriously about me. I've been known to give others a hard time. I've had wives and lovers— trust that I know a little about trying to remain whole while living a divided life. I don't easily open up. If you come to me, come to me so warned. I am smooth and grayish. It's possible my soul is made of schist. But if you are not dissuaded by now, well, my door is ajar. I don't care if you're in collusion with the wind. I wouldn't mind being diminished one caress at a time. Come in, there's nothing here but solitude and me. I like to keep the house clean.

I’ve pursued things long after they were over. Always I wanted someone to stop me.

Isn’t joy a kind of stillness at the top of something, before the long falling?

Rosie, you’re the Stephen Hawking of the real estate business.

A Secret Life Why you need to have one is not much more mysterious than why you don't say what you think at the birth of an ugly baby. Or, you've just made love and feel you'd rather have been in a dark booth where your partner was nodding, whispering yes, yes, you're brilliant. The secret life begins early, is kept alive by all that's unpopular in you, all that you know a Baptist, say, or some other accountant would object to. It becomes what you'd most protect if the government said you can protect one thing, all else is ours. When you write late at night it's like a small fire in a clearing, it's what radiates and what can hurt if you get too close to it. It's why your silence is kind of truth. Even when you speak to your best friend, the one who'll never betray you, you always leave out one thing; a secret life that is important.

…She kissed me again, reaching that place that sends messages to toes and fingertips, then all the way to something like home. Some music was playing on its own. Nothing like a woman who knows to kiss the right thing at the right time, then kisses the things she’s missed…

One day he just found himself opening the door, allowing the inevitable. The world came in and filled the room. It seemed so familiar with everything.

and in the gifted air mosquitoes, dragonflies, and tattered mute angels no one has called upon in years.

I love abstractions, I love to give them a nouny place to live, a firm seat in the balcony of ideas, while music plays.

There will always be people who think suffering leads to enlightenment, who place themselves on the verge of what’s about to break, or go dangerously wrong. Let’s resist them and their thinking, you and I. Let’s not rush toward that sure thing that awaits us, which can dumb us into nonsense and pain.

historical. Outside, waiting to be seated: Illness, Boredom, Sorrow. Loneliness already seated, dining with a group.

MRS. CAVENDISH SPEAKS OF THE UNFORGIVABLE More than once I’ve permitted in myself what I wouldn’t forgive in others.

Why not just try to settle in, take your place, however undeserved, among the fortunate? Why not trust that almost everyone, even in his own house, is a troubled guest?

I still smell it, that clean, lingering scent of misfortune. It’s what keeps me alert, makes each new day bearable.

And I’ve turned corners there was no going back to, corners in the middle of a room that led to Spain or solitude. And always the thin line between corner and cornered, the good corners of bodies and those severe bodies that permit no repose, the places we retreat to, the places we can’t bear to be found.

Each of them used the same words, like people who’ve been trained in sales, and as they moved to their Miatas and Audis I noted the bare shoulders of their women were the barest shoulders I’d ever seen, as if they needed only the night as a shawl.

Arnold said, “Poetry should be a criticism of life,

Arnold said, “Poetry should be a criticism of life,” and I think it should be, too. I also think it should be an elucidation of life, a celebration of life, an addition to life, an emblem of the mysteries of life, etc.

Surely those folks who play their lives and their work eminently safe don’t often put themselves in the position where they can be startled or enlarged. Don’t put themselves near enough to the realm of the unknown where discovery resides, and joy has been rumored to appear.

A man’s mistakes (if I may lecture you), his worst acts, aren’t out of character, as he’d like to think, are not put on him by power or stress or too much to drink, but simply a worse self he consents to be.

In fact, he had become an it, and those of us who knew him noted how poorly itness suited him, his pale demeanor resembling nothing he’d been.

after Stephen Dunn" If you are sleeping when the axe buries itself in the stump outside your home, wake and walk softly through your halls. Walk softly through this house that is like your heart, built in the solace of these woods from things you claimed as your own. Touch everything. Touch it roughly, and think of the heartbeats of the trees giving their lives, each swaying wood grain a skipped beat of gasping titans beneath your hands, your careful eyes, your gentle push, the settling of these quiet things. But your hands are not in this house. Your heart is not in this house. Your love is not in this house. This house was not built from tall, certain things, but from the surest things you could find: roots, nests, not clocks but the parts hidden behind their faces, reminders of belief in always moving forward. One morning you will wake in this home that is like your heart to find that the axe, the certain and the strong, has buried itself in the wet stump outside, you will touch everything roughly, this house will sound no longer like your heart but your heart will sound like this house, built tall from imagined things, high ceilings, echoes, stopped clock pieces, empty nests, gasping roots. Your heart will feel like this house. You will burn it to the ground.

Doesn’t blood usually follow when language fails?

She was thinking a woman needed an angel for every son of a bitch she’d ever known.

She’d seen her best friends disappear into their marriages. Even when she spoke on the phone to them, they weren’t there.

Finally, though, she had to admit a penis was silly, mostly hiding, like a diphthong in a sentence you had to work too hard to figure out.

Evil always has an advantage and always succeeds until its enormous feet understep some moral chasm, or a damsel held dear by the populace cries out and is heard.

I look for those with hidden wings, and for scars that those who once had wings can’t hide.

Poets who remain poets have, presumably, worked through the terrors of influence, and are willing to acknowledge their debts by using them in order to go their own way. They’ve learned what Thomas Mann knew: “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

so many people walk up to me and tell me they’re dead, though they’re just describing their afternoons.

The good poem allows us to believe we have a soul. In the presence of a good poem we remember/discover the soul has an appetite, and that appetite is for emotional veracity and for the unsayable. The general condition of the soul, therefore, is stoic hunger, stoic loneliness. Paul Eluard wrote, “There is another world, and it is in this one.” The not so good poem isn’t able to startle us into consideration of that world. The soul is never pricked into wakefulness.

The good poem simultaneously reveals and conceals. It is in this sense that it is mysterious. The not so good poem is often mysterious only by virtue of its concealment. Or it wears exotic clothing to hide its essential plainness.

How to survive as an other? The small town may be a paradigm of how boundaries can permit generosity, but it is also a place where people on the fringe, say homosexuals or intellectuals or African-Americans, develop a hunger for larger and more hospitable boundaries, those offered by cities, or, in another sense, by poems. There may be implications here for open and closed forms. That aside, true community — beyond physical parameters — often arises when you realize that everything you’ve thought peculiar to yourself has been thought or even lived by someone else. This is how poetry, not to mention literature in general, manifests some of its most exquisite manners; in the course of being true to itself it makes a gesture to others.

Flaubert said — I assume about the balance between repression and freedom — “Be regular and orderly in your daily life, so you can be violent and original in your work.

Donald Justice’s admonition that a good poem should exhibit “that maximum amount of wildness that the form can bear” is also relevant, though again it’s equally useful to think of expanding the notion of form to accommodate even more of the wild.

I like the word “only” in the last sentence: “…you are only a troubled guest / on the dark earth.” The “only” suggests that to be a troubled guest is a normal condition, and that you might have many other identities at the same time. But to be only a troubled guest is of course a particularly sad identity.

The good poem is implicitly philosophical. The not so good poem, conversely, may exquisitely describe a tree or loneliness, but if the description does not suggest an attitude toward nature, or human nature, we are left with a kind of dentist office art — devoted to decoration and the status quo.