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| Stephen Dunn | |
Stephen Dunn, "whose plain-spoken poems about the small things in life and the bigger things within them filled numerous collections, one of which, Different Hours, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001," died June 24, the New York Times reported. He was 82.
In an article written for the Pulitzer website, Dunn mentioned three primary influences: Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and Theodore Roethke: "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."
Beginning with Looking for Holes in the Ceiling in 1974, Dunn "specialized in poems about surviving, coping with and looking for meaning in the ordinary passages of life, or at least of the middle-class life he was familiar with.... his subject matter was of a sort that might draw a sigh or smile of familiarity from the reader," the Times wrote, citing these lines from "Aerial in the Pines":
To cut off the top branches
of the majestic pine
(once unthinkable for us)
was a bit of nature traded
for clear reception,
for what was fundamental now.
The tree looked foolish, like someone
well-dressed
with a bad haircut, but the television
had become what to do
with difficult time,
important, an antidote to speaking
if need be, company when our nerves
couldn't bear the silence
of a printed page.
Dunn's other books include Pagan Virtues; Keeper of Limits; Lines of Defense; Here and Now; What Goes On: New and Selected Poems 1995-2009; Loosestrife; Landscape at the End of the Century; Local Time; Degrees of Fidelity: Essays on Poetry and the Latitudes of the Personal; Walking Light: Essays and Memoirs; and Riffs and Reciprocities: Prose Pairs. His final book, The Not Yet Fallen World, will be published in 2022.
Yaddo, the artists colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., posted on Facebook: "All of us at Yaddo were saddened to learn of the death of the wonderful #YaddoPoet, Stephen Elliot Dunn. He won a Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim, and numerous other awards in his long career, but we remember him best for the profundity of his conversation, his stamina on the tennis court, the depth of his loyalty, and the kind twinkle with which he looked at life, even as his movements became increasingly constrained by Parkinson’s disease. We will miss him."
From Dunn's poem "Ars Poetica":
Maybe from the beginning
the issue was how to live
in a world so extravagant
it had a sky,
in bodies so breakable
we had to pray.