Dog-Ear: Stephen Dunn's Different Hours

Stephen Dunn is a master of the obvious. Not in the pejorative sense, rather in the sense that he skillfully presents the objects, the ghosts and the qualities of the mundane & the everyday in a way that makes them universally personal. It is no mystery that most of us have hands, that we wake, sleep and wake again; Dunn takes these events, these facts, and weaves them into stories intimate & immediate. Where so much amateur poetry fails, Dunn succeeds in elevating the boring & personal. However, such a formula will yield its fair share of weak poems & failures. Sometimes the ordinary is just ordinary.

Dunn’s best poems use simple language and gripping images to paint a convincing portrait. In “Losing Steps,” the poem addresses a “you” who is aging, not as quick on the basketball court as in years past: “you’re like the Southern Pacific / the first time a car kept up with it.” But the poem is not just about physically aging, not being able to keep up with younger folks on a basketball court; Dunn successfully renders a psychological portrait without forcing the issue, painting the mental with action. In the second section, the protagonist is playing defense, unfooled by the fakes to the left and the right but his moves (“another step / leaves you like a wire / burned out in a radio”) are not what they used be and so his opponent passes him & scores. Trying despite the odds is a common & understood trait of aging, a hackneyed trope in sports. This same trope is magnified with the use of a favorite cliché, “the value of experience”. In the third and last section, Dunn ups the ante, the fifty-year old man “walking to a schoolyard / where kids are playing full-court, / telling yourself / the value of experience, a worn down // basketball under your arm”; and here Dunn makes the poem a sad triumph of age & determination, concluding the poem with an arresting image of the man walking to the basketball court with a worn basketball, “your legs hanging from your waist / like misplaced sloths in a country / known for its cheetahs and its sunsets.”

In other instances, Dunn forgoes the power of image and depends upon an aesthetic of empathy, that quality of outreach that makes the reader say & think, Hey, I know what you mean; I’ve been there too. Sometimes it has the quality of a made-for-TV movie as if to say, Here you are and over there something terrible or wonderful is happening, and with the implicit demands for sympathy, an empathetic bond is sealed as if these things could happen to any of us no matter how unlikely. In “Simpler Times,” it is guilt that is supposed to move us, the realization that “[i]n Hungary the tanks // rolled in. In Zaire / Mobutu filled the secret, / underground jails” while the speaker is off having a good time in the Age of Aquarius. Where that trite example depends solely on the guilt of the reader or the times, “The Last Hours” appeals in a more immediate, therefore personal & engaging, way. One may not relate to a person on the corporate ladder who rejects what they have but everyone knows the feeling of not wanting, the desire to be doing something else, being elsewhere. The poem plays upon these desires and succeeds like so many cheesy movies by doing what many only think of doing: giving up a pointless job, in this case, “a life / of selling snacks, talking snack strategy, / thinking snack thoughts,” going home with a nervous joy, “an attitude finally come round, / and I say it quietly to myself, I quit, / and keep saying it, knowing I will say it, sure / of nothing else but.”

“Returning From An Artist’s Studio” is an example of language’s inadequacy in the face of the abstract, of beauty, of the invisible, especially where so much effort is put into being plain yet profound. The difficulty of describing one of those moments one might spend with nature, to “witness to some quiet carnival / of the gods, or the unrisen dead / speaking in code”, is often, at best, just as Dunn writes in “Burying the Cat,” “privacies, / inconsequential to all but us.” Dunn still falls flat in the more successful “Men in the Sky.” Where James Wright’s “Lying In A Hammock At William Duffy's Farm In Pine Island, Minnesota” succeeds with its compression & plainspoken, sudden end, Dunn makes too much (or too little, depending on how you look at it) of the boring elements around him, calling a crane “a magic long-armed machine”, making statements that do not follow as in when he asserts that it is natural for men to be in the sky the way it is commonplace “[t]o speak through wires.” True as it may be that there are plenty of planes flying full of people or telephone repairmen in cranes, it rings hollow, a kind of poor man’s profundity. All the unexciting description & action does not serve the ending at all and so, as if in a self-mocking turn, the poem ends with a thud with its unconvincing last images and ironically self-referential last line:

and spit. Now the leaves graze
their shoulders suddenly more golden
for having touched them. My phone
is ringing. It’s one of the telephone men,
the highest, the one with a sufficiency
of tools around his waist, calling to see
if everything’s all right. Everything isn’t.

If “Oklahoma City was America reduced / to McVeigh’s half-thought-out thoughts,” then Different Hours is American poetry plain & colloquial, occasionally great, often manufactured, evoking “a world not wholly incongruent / with the world I know,” but like the persona of “Oklahoma City”, I have “no illusions, not even hopes, that their beauty [has] anything to do with goodness.”

Dog-Ear: Stephen Dunn's Local Time

Mood invents landscape.

This line from Stephen Dunn’s “Road Trip”, the lead poem in Local Time, is a fine reinvention of the old adage “you see things as you want to see them”. It is easy to reflect on how our moods & situations commanded our opinions & interpretations in a particular space & time. It is imagination, and with at least a hint of self-preoccupation, that allows a poem to remove itself from casual observation into the spheres of empathy & culture.

As I read Dunn’s collection I kept thinking about how much mystery lies within the ordinary and the everyday. His taut, candid portraits of life offer humanistic glimpses without being voyeuristic. The “now” of each poem is “both history and [the] instant, reflexive”. The poems, built around familiar moments & locations, are revelatory in their simplicity and specificity; not so much confessional as they are reflective, the poems convey a kind of picture show of mistakes & small triumphs, leading us away from the objects & people back to our similar experiences, granting us a space in which to recreate our own mistakes & small triumphs, perhaps taking into account the lessons of the poems, if such lessons are found. In writing psychologically close-to-home poems, Dunn creates an atmosphere conducive to drawing threads between outcomes to the same situation, a way of looking at things from different angles, a hallmark of active empathy.

I find that my negative reaction to a great deal of contemporary work is founded upon what I find to be casual observation, that is, observations without any kind of turn. When there is a pivot on emotional terms it is often just to move a narrative along its determined course. I feel poetry is better served by poems that go beyond the descriptive toward a context outside of narrative or the photographic. That is not to say that narrative or portraiture is not a good thing but there is an awful lot of it already. If mood does indeed invent landscape, the current view of poetry in my eyes is a frustrated ecosystem of dangling modifiers & unpoetic narcissism. Even when a poem is instead about a flower or a bird or whatnot, what is often missing is the connective tissue of experience, of community, of history, of ideas. In some of my own work, I try to build a conduit via images & events to life-at-large; of course, the sum of my life experiences is not equal or similar to everyone else’s — my aim, for the time being, is to make a “young” poetry accessible to like-minded & like-lifed persons. Dunn succeeds on drawing from a larger & longer continuum but there is still plenty to find in my own reservoirs. I find that too many poets, especially of my age group, while still managing to create “young, early” work, cloister themselves in a writerly box rife with all the requisite waves of diction, assortments of images and poetic taxonomies; where is the poetry that attracts the desperately unpoetic, the songs that beacon in the dark recesses of disinterest & history, the words kept in wallets, jean pockets & email signatures?

David Combs, Cowboy Artist

Throughout the country, the whole world, there are many artists staking their claims, to what exactly, well, that is important to them but not for us; what is important for us is that there is art being made. Whether it is the awe of Michelangelo's restless perfections, the charm of Roy Lichtenstein's anxious portraits, the familiar & sarcastic critiques that are Cindy Sherman's video stills or the dreamy luxuriance of Monet, art has the capacity to stir new thinking, amp the imagination, provide solace & solidarity -- in other words: inspire, breathe life into. And isn't that what art is about? Along with its genuises, art, its own genius, is a vital principle, a guiding spirit, a channel of the grace & intelligence that is human. Art is more than a product but something that is created in that biblical sense we were created in, and so, with the likeness of a god, we have, for better or worse, among other things... art. Art as a manifestation of our humanity deserves more than blank stares, commidification and boredom; it is something that is to be nurtured in every sense (personally, historically, financially, educationally, et al).

A young artist that takes such a notion seriously is David Combs. Currently a resident of the (in)famous Hotel Chelsea in New York City, he may be found in the lobby or on any given city street painting scenes out of everyday life. But this is not everyone's everyday life. Then again, New York City is in many ways the American city and so, in a sense, it is all of ours; to that, Combs has, like many artists before him, offered a new way of looking at & thinking about the city and how we see. In many ways, Combs also represents the archetypical American: industrious, self-taught, resilient, individualist; he first arrived in NYC a few years ago with very little but his person, his talents, paints and ambitions. In love with the taste & wonder of the city's physical histories, he began to paint landmarks & tourist magnets, often spending over eight hours each day for weeks before completing a painting. These paintings reflect not only his character with humor & precision but also offer the viewer a present-day city, thoughtful snapshots through a surrealistic lens at once immediate & oblique.

Like the self-taught musician who listens & masters techniques, songs, even entire genres, in a short time, Combs's masterful painting comes from years of sitting down & just working at it. Such dedicated work to craft while keeping a close watch on history (visual or otherwise) is something woefully lost on the many artists we find in our galleries & studios today; I am not saying they are all bad but they are not all good either. Viewing his work online will give you notice of a personal style that I like to think of as informed sui generis. I say this because it is deceptively clear and may lead one to believe that they may pinpoint his influences & techniques. But this is far from the truth. It is not my place to speculate what all this may be the product of and I dread the word postmodern yet it is the seamless collusion of those fragments of art history's greatest hits that make the paintings of Combs genius. Now, I had said viewing the work will give one notice, even pause; as with any art, there is no substitute for seeing the work in person.

The fine detail such as cracks in individual bricks, freckles on pedestrians, the fluid fixity of clouds, gives each painting a degree of hyper-reality not unlike work by Gerard Richter, Carl Rice Embrey or Chuck Close. This high degree of realism with its deliberate imperfections & calculated effects can also be traced to artists that Combs holds in high regard such as Parmigianino, Jan van Eyck and Vermeer. At the risk of conjuring wrong-headed comparisons, his paintings evoke a brand of magic realism, recalling Dali, Remedios Varo, short story writer & pianist Felisberto Hernandez and M.C. Escher. The abstractions & textures found in Combs' paintings possess many of the best qualities of both the Impressionists and the (Abstract) Expressionists. To return to what makes art great & important, let me draw attention to what I considered the best quality of the paintings: light. Whether it is a fantastic scene, a circle of skyscrapers or within a great hall, light commands a primary role: light as source (of life), as vision, as menace - the sublime. I suspect it was not on purpose because such things seem to come to him naturally. Even with the hours of careful rendering, there is a spontaneity in the movements of objects, a delight in sight, confirming skyscrapers as cathedrals, each painting placing you in the middle of things as if to say, "Here you are! See?"

This melding of intimacy, the sublime, the beautiful, photorealism and surreality is more than we ask any given work of art and to find them contained in the collection of a contemporary working artist is all the more rare & magnificent.

Check out the work of David Combs online. If you are in Manhattan within the next 3 months (1 November MMV - 31 January MMVI), be sure to see his exhibit at the Manhattan Athletic Club (277 Park Avenue @ 48th Street; additional entrance on 48th & Lexington).

A Short Essay on Poetry by David Schubert

A Short Essay On Poetry by David Schubert


A poet who observes his own poetry ends up, in spite of it, by finding nothing to observe, just as a man who pays too much attention to the way he walks, finds his legs walking off from under him. Nevertheless, poets must sometimes look at themselves in order to remember what they are risking. What I see as poetry is a sample of the human scene, its incurably acute melancholia redeemed only by affection. This sample of endurance is innocent and gay: the music of vowel and consonant is the the happy-go-lucky echo of time itself. Without this music there is simply no poem. It borrows further gayety by contrast with the burden it carries -- for this exquisite lilt, this dance of sound, must be married to a responsible intelligence before there can occur the poem. Naturally, they are one: meanings and music, metaphor and thought. In the course of poetry's career, perhaps new awarenesses discovered, really new awarenesses and not verbal combinations brought together in any old way. This rather unimportant novelty is sometimes a play of possibility and sometimes a genuinely new insight: like Tristram Shandy, they add something to this Fragment of Life.


[from Five Young American Poets (second series, 1941), New Directions]