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.”