Stephen Dunn Quotes
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I don't let a poem go into the world unless I feel that I've transformed the experience in some way. Even poems I've written in the past that appear very personal often are fictions of the personal, which nevertheless reveal concerns of mine. I've always thought of my first-person speaker as an amalgam of selves, maybe of other people's experiences as well.
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I wrote poetry for seven or eight years, maybe longer, before I could say I was a poet. If people asked, I'd say I wrote poetry; I wouldn't go further. I was in my mid- to late-thirties before I felt that I was a poet, which I think meant that I had begun to embody my poems in some way. I wasn't just a writer of them. Hard to say what, as a poet, my place in the world is. Some place probably between recognition and neglect.
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Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.
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Although I know it's unfair, I reveal myself one mask at a time.
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I’ve had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches. A heart is to be spent.
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Poetry does so many different things, it's difficult to say anything definitive about its role, which of course varies from culture to culture. It can range from being stories of the tribe to the private lyric, to being as W.H. Auden said "the clear expression of mixed feelings" to nonsense verse.
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exaggerated sunsets / splashed with rain, odd collisions / of roots, animals, seeds. / I didn't like a thing I saw, / so much effort to be strange.
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All good poems are victories over something.
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Altruism is for those who can't endure their desires. There's a world as ambiguous as a moan, a pleasure moan our earnest neighbors might think a crime. It's where we could live. I'll say I love you, Which will lead, of course, to disappointment, but those words unsaid poison every next moment. I will try to disappoint you better than anyone else has. --Mon Semblable
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I've tried to become someone else for a while, only to discover that he, too, was me.
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And the words we find are always insufficient, like love, though they are often lovely and all we have.
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I think because my parents died in their early 50s, mid 50s, I always thought I would die young. And that's been both a useful thing and I suspect something that's haunted me a little bit.
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Better to be furious at one thing, become radiant with purpose. Better to love links and rhythms than all-embracing answers.
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I’ll always deny that I kissed her. I was just whispering into her mouth.
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Isn't there a curious elegance in how one moment passes into another?
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There are always the simple events of your life that you might try to convert into legend.
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Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body.
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Oh abstractions are just abstract until they have an ache in them.
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A true inner world is often revealed by style and sensibility as much as by what appears to be confession.
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A good many of my poems over the years have alluded to or taken on the political. Stevens has a line in one of his essays: "Reality exerts pressure on the imagination." Inevitably what is omnipresent in the culture exerts its pressure on our imaginations to respond to it, even if indirectly. But in this case the backdrop of 9/11, coincident with the breakup of a marriage, the finding of new love, some kind of personal cataclysm... all of those were forces informing the poems in some way.
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What feeling feels like over time. An attempt to screw up what feeling feels like over time. Heartbreak and a high C.... The often welcome melodic lie.... The soul's undersong. The orchestration of randomness, a flirtation with the boundaries of silence and space.... a reminder that the self wants to disappear, be taken away from itself and returned.
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I make myself up from everything I am, or could be. For many years I was more desire than fact. When I stop becoming, that’s when I worry.
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Everything I can't see / is at least as real as what I can.
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A moment of something between acceptance and resignation of one's smallness in the world.