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I love what's left after love has been tested.
Stephen Dunn -
Connubial Because with alarming accuracy she’d been identifying patterns I was unaware of—this tic, that tendency, like the way I've mastered the language of intimacy in order to conceal how I felt— I knew I was in danger of being terribly understood.
Stephen Dunn
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Everything I can't see / is at least as real as what I can.
Stephen Dunn -
Originality, of course, is what occurs when something new arises out of what's already been done.
Stephen Dunn -
If the motive of writing is for some people a kind of exercise in dirty laundry, that's one thing. I've always thought of my poems as meant to be overheard, as I think all of these poems are. It seems to me if you get experience right, even your most painful or humiliating experiences - if you get those experiences right for yourself and make discoveries as you go along and find for them some formal glue - they will be poems for others.
Stephen Dunn -
Bring to me, it said, continual proof / you've been alive.
Stephen Dunn -
There's a certain pleasure in violating the strictures of your education. The trick is, if you're going to explore ideas in a poem, to be suspicious of ideas and suspicious of your own mind at the same time. It's often a matter of orchestration and pacing. Of shaping some kind of dialectic flow.
Stephen Dunn -
I will try to disappoint you better than anyone ever has.
Stephen Dunn