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?
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?
posted by Ismael Ricardo Archbold at 10/26/2005 09:28:00 PM
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