Acts of Clarifications: A Conversation with Stephen Dunn About Process and Poetry

AN INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN DUNN Stephen Dunn ACTS OF CLARIFICATIONS: A CONVERSATION WITH STEPHEN DUNN ABOUT PROCESS AND POETRY / Sanford Pinsker Stephen Dunn is Poet-in-Residence at Stockton State College in Pomona, New Jersey, a setting replete with God's plenty of the sylvan and a mere twenty minutes from the gaming tables ofAtlantic City. In short, South Jersey seems to suit, although one would be hard presssed to imagine Dunn a moody guest wherever he happened to be sitting at life's feast. The very moods of his work—sometimes side-splitting, sometimes meditative, often a combination of the two—suggest that what he sees is only a jumping-off point. For Dunn, poetry is a continual process ofclarification. Andfor all his quiet humor (much of which must be chalked up to a New York City upbringing) and sly self-deprecation, he is turning, before our very eyes, into a wise poet. We talked on July 23, 1982, a morning sandwiched (significantly, I think) between a tennis tournament just over (Dunn competed in the "over-forty" class—he is forty-three—and walked off with a second place trophy) and the Artist-Teachers Institute (Dunn teaches a poetry workshop in this summer progam that brings poets, dancers, painters and sculptors to Stockton) about to begin. But a third element—namely, that Dunn had spent the better part ofJune at Yaddo, where he completed his fifth collection of poems—was the most important of all. As the gamblers like to put it, "Steve's on a hot roll." That's what we tried to capture in our interview. Pinsker: Would I be wrong if I thought of "Toward a Common Prayer" as a manifesto poem, or at least one that points to abiding concerns in your poetry? Tm thinking especially of lines like: Let the woman in this prayer be you, a survivor of her own worst thoughts, unimmaculate , a key to my door. Whatever our sorrows, let them turn into muscle around the heart. Dunn: I hadn't thought of the poem that way. But I was at Yaddo recently and Larry Raab also picked this poem out as being "different" from the others. Maybe he was speaking about style. At any rate, the poem came about as a response to a scene in John Cheever's novel Bullet Park, in which a local guru is called in to see what he can do with an almost catatonic boy. If this poem is central in any way, it's that I wish to acknowledge what's difficult, what's hard about living. I don't want to bemoan it; I don't want to take the simple stance that insists "Isn't this The Missouri Review · 59 terrible." Rather, I'm interested in finding ways of living within the world. In Bullet Park, the guru (without irony on Cheever's part) gets the catatonic boy to identify and praise what's in his room. The boy isn't cured as a result of this. He's just a little better. Pinsker: "Survival," then, is an important word for you? Dunn: Yes. The trick is how to live in the world as we know it, when so much we know about it is negative. Eliot once wrote: "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" My problem has always been how to live with that knowledge. The title poem of the book I've just finished is called "The Festivals After Dark," and it ends with these lines: "How necessary it is to imagine/ more than ever before/ and in spite of everything/ the festivals after dark." If my recent poems have a direction, you'll find it in these lines. Pinsker: Since you've already mentioned Cheever as an "influence" or, perhaps more accurately, as a piece of reading that set a poem into motion, I wonder if you'd comment on the last lines of "As It Moves"— Look, nothing's simple. It was almost dusk. I was thinking the seagull is a comic, filthy bird magnificent as it moves upward in imperfect air. They strike me as a wonderful inversion of the lines that end Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning...