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Different Hours: Poems
A wise and graceful new collection by one of our "major, indispensable poets" (Sidney Lea). The mysteries of Eros and Thanatos, the stubborn endurance of mind and body in the face of diminishment--these are the undercurrents of Stephen Dunn's eleventh volume. "I am interested in exploring the 'different' hours," he says, "not only of one's life, but also of the larger historical and philosophical life beyond the personal."
128 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 2000
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About the author
Stephen Dunn
94 books132 followersStephen Dunn was born in New York City in 1939. He earned a B.A. in history and English from Hofstra University, attended the New School Writing Workshops, and finished his M.A. in creative writing at Syracuse University. Dunn has worked as a professional basketball player, an advertising copywriter, and an editor, as well as a professor of creative writing.
Dunn's books of poetry include Everything Else in the World (W. W. Norton, 2006); Local Visitations (2003); Different Hours (2000), winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry; Loosestrife (1996); New and Selected Poems: 1974-1994 (1994); Landscape at the End of the Century (1991); Between Angels (1989); Local Time (1986), winner of the National Poetry Series; Not Dancing (1984); Work & Love (1981); A Circus of Needs (1978); Full of Lust and Good Usage (1976); and Looking For Holes In the Ceiling 1974. He is also the author of Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry (BOA Editions, 2001), and Riffs & Reciprocities: Prose Pairs (1998).
Dunn's other honors include the Academy Award for Literature, the James Wright Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He has taught poetry and creative writing and held residencies at Wartburg College, Wichita State University, Columbia University, University of Washington, Syracuse University, Southwest Minnesota State College, Princeton University, and University of Michigan. Dunn is currently Richard Stockton College of New Jersey Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing and lives in Port Republic, New Jersey.
Dunn's books of poetry include Everything Else in the World (W. W. Norton, 2006); Local Visitations (2003); Different Hours (2000), winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry; Loosestrife (1996); New and Selected Poems: 1974-1994 (1994); Landscape at the End of the Century (1991); Between Angels (1989); Local Time (1986), winner of the National Poetry Series; Not Dancing (1984); Work & Love (1981); A Circus of Needs (1978); Full of Lust and Good Usage (1976); and Looking For Holes In the Ceiling 1974. He is also the author of Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry (BOA Editions, 2001), and Riffs & Reciprocities: Prose Pairs (1998).
Dunn's other honors include the Academy Award for Literature, the James Wright Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He has taught poetry and creative writing and held residencies at Wartburg College, Wichita State University, Columbia University, University of Washington, Syracuse University, Southwest Minnesota State College, Princeton University, and University of Michigan. Dunn is currently Richard Stockton College of New Jersey Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing and lives in Port Republic, New Jersey.
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June 28, 2023
“The reverse side also has a reversed side” -A JAPANESE PROVERB
Stephen Dunn won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for this 2001 collection, Different Hours.
And this different hour, fell into my lap in a diverging hour, last year, when Sun rays were diverging from the horizon, near sunset time, after a black patch of gloomy cloud just passed through it. With my commitment to myself that I will consume ‘an enormous amount’ of English poetry this year, which I completely failed to achieve last year, I will begin with this. Last year I had decided that I will read at least a good number of major contemporary poets in English, but I ended up with only two. Mary Oliver and Louise Gluck!
And the interesting thing is that the first poem of this collection is “before the sky darkens” and this auspice, converted my sudden selection of this book to a purposeful hand-pick when sun rays kept diverging outside my window.
“Sunsets, incipient storms, the tableau
of melancholy- maybe these are the
Saturdays- night events
To take your best girl to.”
You need a certain temperament to read poetry. Because it’s succinct in structure yet the range is vast. So if you miss a critical line, the entire essence of a poem written in one page may slip out of hand. And the person, like me, who is badly off with regard to contemporary English poetry, extra effort was required. I think I know sweet Fanny Adams about contemporary English poems!
When I started reading them, I was wondering, does not anyone write in rhymes these days? I had no answer. A poem like “Androgyne” sailed me through. He talked about his lost love in that poem. There is an emotional poem on parents also.
“Our parents died at least twice,
The second time when we forgot their stories,
Or could not imagine how often they craved love,
Or felt useless or yearned some justice
in this world.”
In the poem Different hours, he writes so beautifully the normal things around him,
“A dazed rabbit sits on a dewy grass
The clamatis has no aspirations
As it climbs its trestles.
I pour myself an orange juice, Homestyle.
I say the hell with low fat cream cheese
And slather the good stuff on my bagel.”
John and Mary is another poem, I liked, it’s a story about two people who never met,
“They were like gazelles who occupied different
grassy plains, running in opposite directions
from different lions. They were like postal clerks
in different zip codes, with different vacation time,
their bosses adamant and clock-driven.
How could they get together?”
Among some other poems, Chokecherry, and 'Death of the God', 'Oklahoma City' are also good. His poetry in this book is filled with wisdom, the routine things are sketched in flowery language, and his aesthetics are graceful and elegant. Human relations, nature, and philosophy, everything you will find in this collection! Lots of cats, and dogs too! And small stories have been written in beautiful poems. Art, spiritual woman, and the sexual revolution are some other themes through poems, he has beautifully explored.
October 6, 2012
Because I've read this book over and over for a year back in 2007, and because I've looked for it everywhere. Because I wouldn't have it any other way.
Sixty
Stephen Dunn
Because in my family the heart goes first
and hardly anybody makes it out of his fifties,
I think I'll stay up late with a few bandits
of my choice and resist good advice.
I'll invent a secret scroll lost by Egyptians
and reveal its contents: the directions
to your house, recipes for forgiveness.
History says that my ventricles are stone alleys,
my heart itself a city with a terrorist
holed up in the mayor's office.
I'm in the mood to punctuate
only with that maker of promises, the colon:
next, next, next, it says, God bless it.
As Garcia Lorca may have written: some people
forget to live as if a great arsenic lobster
could fall on their heads at any moment.
My sixtieth birthday is tomorrow.
Come, play poker with me,
I want to be taken to the cleaners.
I've had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches.
A heart is to be spent. As for me, I'll share
my mulcher with anyone who needs to mulch.
It's time to give up search for the invisible.
On the best of days there's little more
than the faintest intimations. The millenium,
my dear, is sure to disappoint us.
I think I'll keep on describing things
to ensure that they really happened.
November 21, 2015
If, "Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace." then Stephen Dunn is among the great minds of our era. He has a gift for making the ordinary memorable. I don't have favorite selection but here is a fine one: Phantom
It's the last hour of a final day
in June, my wife sleeping.
Bob Dylan going ninety miles an hour
down a dead-end street,
and moments ago --- bless the mind
that works against itself ---
Hegel conceding that philosophy
always arrives too late.
Through his cat door
here comes our orange cat,
empty-mouthed, looking bereft.
Voles and mice, don't dare relax.
Loners and dreamers, time to test
the dark, visit the haunts.
I'm waiting for that click
of the tape deck or the chapter's end,
whichever comes first --- one of those
deals you make with yourself.
It's the click. Now I'll take to bed
this body and the phantom
of what it once was, inseparable
as they are these days, smoke
rising from a stubborn fire.
Night light, be my guide.
I can feel my way just so far.
It's the last hour of a final day
in June, my wife sleeping.
Bob Dylan going ninety miles an hour
down a dead-end street,
and moments ago --- bless the mind
that works against itself ---
Hegel conceding that philosophy
always arrives too late.
Through his cat door
here comes our orange cat,
empty-mouthed, looking bereft.
Voles and mice, don't dare relax.
Loners and dreamers, time to test
the dark, visit the haunts.
I'm waiting for that click
of the tape deck or the chapter's end,
whichever comes first --- one of those
deals you make with yourself.
It's the click. Now I'll take to bed
this body and the phantom
of what it once was, inseparable
as they are these days, smoke
rising from a stubborn fire.
Night light, be my guide.
I can feel my way just so far.
May 28, 2015
At The Restaurant
Six people are too many
and a public place the wrong place
for what you're thinking--
stop this now.
Who do you think you are?
The duck a l'orange is spectacular,
the flan the best in town.
But there among your friends
is the unspoken, as ever,
chatter and gaiety its familiar song.
And there's your chronic emptiness
spiraling upward in search of words
you'll dare not say
without irony
You should have stayed at home.
It's part of the social contract
to seem to be where your body is,
And you've been elsewhere like this,
for Christ's sake, countless times;
behave, feign.
Certainly you believe a part of decency
is to overlook, to let pass?
Praise the Caesar salad. Praise Susan's
black dress, Paul's promotion and raise.
Inexcusable, the slaughter in this world.
Insufficient, the merely decent man.
Six people are too many
and a public place the wrong place
for what you're thinking--
stop this now.
Who do you think you are?
The duck a l'orange is spectacular,
the flan the best in town.
But there among your friends
is the unspoken, as ever,
chatter and gaiety its familiar song.
And there's your chronic emptiness
spiraling upward in search of words
you'll dare not say
without irony
You should have stayed at home.
It's part of the social contract
to seem to be where your body is,
And you've been elsewhere like this,
for Christ's sake, countless times;
behave, feign.
Certainly you believe a part of decency
is to overlook, to let pass?
Praise the Caesar salad. Praise Susan's
black dress, Paul's promotion and raise.
Inexcusable, the slaughter in this world.
Insufficient, the merely decent man.
July 1, 2021
Stephen Dunn died this week. He was my most important poetry teacher. I loved him. I studied with him as a summer seminar and took a night class at the college where he taught at Stockton, and then did summer workshops for two summers in a row. We kept in touch and shared work. We met for poetry readings, his and other poets. I admired his work so much. It was smart and vulnerable, honest and elegant. This is the book that won a pulitzer prize for poetry, and this is the third, fourth, or fifth time I've read it. It brings him back to me so clearly. A friend who went with me to one of his readings didn't love his poetry. I did, perhaps because I loved the poet he was, the open poet, one who felt his poem was never done until he challenged what he proposed in the poem, one who knew what equivocating we are, we humans. I cried when I heard he had died. He married a second time and moved to Maryland...we didn't write each other. But he encouraged my bravery as a poet every time he
heard it in my work. Rest in peace, dear friend. I will keep your advice, kindness and love in my heart as long as I live. Oh, please read this collection. Read his other work as well. The friend who wasn't fond of his writing...too clever? too cynical? But she love Pagan Virtues and gave it to me as a gift. Another treasure.
heard it in my work. Rest in peace, dear friend. I will keep your advice, kindness and love in my heart as long as I live. Oh, please read this collection. Read his other work as well. The friend who wasn't fond of his writing...too clever? too cynical? But she love Pagan Virtues and gave it to me as a gift. Another treasure.
August 14, 2017
I discovered this book by accident at a library book sale, and I'm so grateful I did. This is a book of heavy reckonings in ordinary moments, wrestling with aging, virtue, the ordinary moments. Yet it's thrilling and beautiful in the way that honestly facing the arc of our lives does--some of these poems took my breath away and made me cry--poems I'll probably come back to again and again.
February 24, 2019
It's seldom I encounter a book of poetry where I find myself loving every poem, but that was my experience with this book. I found myself wanting to mark nearly every poem and line. I had to exercise great constraint. I adore Riffs and Reciprocities, but this might be even better. Glad I didn't read this in college though. This book is too much about mortality for my young self to appreciate.
July 30, 2021
I enjoyed this Pulitzer Prize winning collection immensely.
I would classify Dunn’s poetry as experiential. And with his approach the observations are clearly wrought and carefully constructed.
Many memories and images came flooding through from my own life upon reading about Dunn’s experiences.
This immersive feeling is how I know when I love a book of poetry.
5 stars
I would classify Dunn’s poetry as experiential. And with his approach the observations are clearly wrought and carefully constructed.
Many memories and images came flooding through from my own life upon reading about Dunn’s experiences.
This immersive feeling is how I know when I love a book of poetry.
5 stars
December 10, 2019
This is my first contact with Stephen Dunn--reminds me somewhat of Albert Goldbarth.
The words are not quite grounded enough, too loose, too hazy, not far enough--but that is my general complaint of poetry these days. Still, Dunn it has his moments, for sure.
And, Please resist the temptation
of speaking about virtue.
The seldom-tempted are too fond
of that word, the small-
spirited, the unburdened.
The words are not quite grounded enough, too loose, too hazy, not far enough--but that is my general complaint of poetry these days. Still, Dunn it has his moments, for sure.
And, Please resist the temptation
of speaking about virtue.
The seldom-tempted are too fond
of that word, the small-
spirited, the unburdened.
January 15, 2020
I've loved him since his early books like 'Full of Lust and Good Usage.' This is one of his best.
May 17, 2023
Dunn has gorgeous language, I really enjoyed most of his pieces. My only complaint would be that it was difficult to understand the subject matter of some of the poems— but most of them were very moving and unique.
December 30, 2020
Stephen Dunn is a really wonderful poet. My favorites from Different Hours are “Optimism”, “Empathy”, and “The Metaphysicians of South Jersey”.
March 9, 2024
Favourite poems:
Evanescence
Capriccio Italien
Dog Weather
Androgyne
The Overt
A Spiritual Woman
The Metaphysicians of South Jersey
His Town
Emperors
Backwaters
A Postmortem Guide
Evanescence
Capriccio Italien
Dog Weather
Androgyne
The Overt
A Spiritual Woman
The Metaphysicians of South Jersey
His Town
Emperors
Backwaters
A Postmortem Guide
October 22, 2019
A wise collection of poems which beautifully portrays human experiences. Stephen Dunn is great with his wording and imagery and makes it very exquisite.
Read
June 29, 2024Dunn's existentialism feels so 'every day,' so intimately momentarily vulnerable; his poetry gives gravity to the small movements that interact with grand thoughts.
June 16, 2010
Stephen Dunn, I love you. Different Hours might be, I suppose, Dunn's most famous volume of poetry, as it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. It's a bit darker and a bit more somber than I expected, clearly written by a man who is aware of his aging self. He primarily looks back on his own life, at the things he did and did not do, and yet he also looks beyond his own existence to the world and its issues. One of the blurbs in the front of this book calls his word "simultaneously haunting and reassuring," which I find to be a very apt description of Dunn and this volume in particular. It's lovely, wry, heartbreaking, and buoyant. It makes me pleased to know that Dunn received the Pulitzer, not necessarily for this work, but just in general so that he could be recognized for being such a strong and necessary voice for the contemporary world.
Below are a few of my favorites from Different Hours,
"Dog Weather"
Earlier, everyone was in knee boots, collars up.
The paper boy's papers came apart
in the wind.
Now, nothing human moving.
Just a black squirrel fidgeting like Bogart
in The Caine Mutiny.
My breath chalks the window,
gives me away to myself.
I like the intelligibility of old songs.
I prefer yesterday.
Cars pass, the asphalt's on its back
smudged with skid. It's potholed
and cracked; it's no damn good.
Anyone out without the excuse of a dog
should be handcuffed
and searched for loneliness.
My hair is thinning.
I feel like tossing the wind a stick.
The promised snow has arrived,
heavy, wet,
I remember the blizzard of...
People I don't want to be
speak like that.
I close my eyes and one
of my many unborn sons
makes a snowball
and lofts it at an unborn friend.
They've sent me an AARP card.
I'm on their list.
I can be discounted now almost anywhere.
"The Reverse Side"
The reverse side also has a reverse side.
-- A Japanese Proverb
It's why when we speak a truth
some of us instantly feel foolish
as if a deck inside us has been shuffled
and there it is --the opposite of what we said.
And perhaps why as we fall in love
we're already falling out of it.
It's why the terrified and the simple
latch onto one story,
just one version of the great mystery.
Image & afterimage, oh even
the open-minded yearn for a fiction
to rein things in--
the snapshot, the lie of a frame.
How do we not go crazy,
we who have found ourselves compelled
to live within the circle, the ellipsis, the word
not yet written.
"A Postmortem Guide"
For my eulogist, in advance
Do not praise me for my exceptional serenity.
Can't you see I've turned away
from the large excitements,
and have accepted all the troubles?
Go down to the old cemetery; you'll see
there's nothing definitive to be said.
The dead once were all kinds--
boundary breakers and scalawags,
martyrs of the flesh, and so many
dumb bunnies of duty, unbearably nice.
I've been a little of each.
And, please, resist the temptation
of speaking about virtue.
The seldom-tempted are too fond
of that word, the small-
spirited, the unburdened.
Know that I've admired in others
only the fraught straining
to be good.
Adam's my man and Eve's not to blame.
He bit in; it made no sense to stop.
Still, for accuracy's sake you might say
I often stopped,
that I rarely went as far as I dreamed.
And since you know my hardships,
understand they're mere bump and setback
against history's horror.
Remind those seated, perhaps weeping,
how obscene it is
for some of us to complain.
Tell them I had second chances.
I knew joy.
I was burned by books early
and kept sidling up to the flame.
Tell them that at the end I had no need
for God, who'd become just a story
I once loved, one of many
with concealments and late-night rescues,
high sentence and pomp. The truth is
I learned to live without hope
as well as I could, almost happily,
in the despoiled and radiant now.
You who are one of them, say that I loved
my companions most of all.
In all sincerity, say that they provided
a better way to be alone.
Below are a few of my favorites from Different Hours,
"Dog Weather"
Earlier, everyone was in knee boots, collars up.
The paper boy's papers came apart
in the wind.
Now, nothing human moving.
Just a black squirrel fidgeting like Bogart
in The Caine Mutiny.
My breath chalks the window,
gives me away to myself.
I like the intelligibility of old songs.
I prefer yesterday.
Cars pass, the asphalt's on its back
smudged with skid. It's potholed
and cracked; it's no damn good.
Anyone out without the excuse of a dog
should be handcuffed
and searched for loneliness.
My hair is thinning.
I feel like tossing the wind a stick.
The promised snow has arrived,
heavy, wet,
I remember the blizzard of...
People I don't want to be
speak like that.
I close my eyes and one
of my many unborn sons
makes a snowball
and lofts it at an unborn friend.
They've sent me an AARP card.
I'm on their list.
I can be discounted now almost anywhere.
"The Reverse Side"
The reverse side also has a reverse side.
-- A Japanese Proverb
It's why when we speak a truth
some of us instantly feel foolish
as if a deck inside us has been shuffled
and there it is --the opposite of what we said.
And perhaps why as we fall in love
we're already falling out of it.
It's why the terrified and the simple
latch onto one story,
just one version of the great mystery.
Image & afterimage, oh even
the open-minded yearn for a fiction
to rein things in--
the snapshot, the lie of a frame.
How do we not go crazy,
we who have found ourselves compelled
to live within the circle, the ellipsis, the word
not yet written.
"A Postmortem Guide"
For my eulogist, in advance
Do not praise me for my exceptional serenity.
Can't you see I've turned away
from the large excitements,
and have accepted all the troubles?
Go down to the old cemetery; you'll see
there's nothing definitive to be said.
The dead once were all kinds--
boundary breakers and scalawags,
martyrs of the flesh, and so many
dumb bunnies of duty, unbearably nice.
I've been a little of each.
And, please, resist the temptation
of speaking about virtue.
The seldom-tempted are too fond
of that word, the small-
spirited, the unburdened.
Know that I've admired in others
only the fraught straining
to be good.
Adam's my man and Eve's not to blame.
He bit in; it made no sense to stop.
Still, for accuracy's sake you might say
I often stopped,
that I rarely went as far as I dreamed.
And since you know my hardships,
understand they're mere bump and setback
against history's horror.
Remind those seated, perhaps weeping,
how obscene it is
for some of us to complain.
Tell them I had second chances.
I knew joy.
I was burned by books early
and kept sidling up to the flame.
Tell them that at the end I had no need
for God, who'd become just a story
I once loved, one of many
with concealments and late-night rescues,
high sentence and pomp. The truth is
I learned to live without hope
as well as I could, almost happily,
in the despoiled and radiant now.
You who are one of them, say that I loved
my companions most of all.
In all sincerity, say that they provided
a better way to be alone.
March 12, 2021
Magnificent.
March 29, 2020
If it's true, as Stephen Dunn says in his poem, "Burying the Cat," that "to confess/ is to say what one doesn't feel," than this poet hasn't felt much. I say that only because Dunn imbued this collection of confessional poems with a startling array of emotion, the kind of emotion one is sure to have felt throughout the Different Hours of life. Somber yet hopeful, these poems are fascinating. They acknowledge the frailties of memory, while extolling the memories of times past.
At times this collection seemed to read like vignettes out of an autobiography, which perhaps they were. The language is simple, almost blunt, and yet melodious. Dunn elevates the ordinary though his tame diction. What is ordinary is beautiful.
Partway through the book, as I was marveling at the simplicity of the poetry, it was like Dunn reminded me to be a careful reader. In "The Overt," which Dunn dedicates "For the reader," he writes:
Dunn then goes on to say,
Throughout the collection Dunn alludes to the human tendency to fabricate memories. Now, in the poem quoted above, Dunn advises us to step back from the poem and ask ourselves if this too is a fabrication. Are all of these confessions, these memories, these glimpses into the Different Hours of life artificial? Is the poet who invited us into his inner sanctum by confessing his soul to us damned? Soulless? Are we really all alone? Perhaps we are. Dunn seems to think so.
The final stanza of the final poem in the collection reads:
If we are all alone we need companions more than anything, even if those companions are not always trustworthy, not always complete. We need to make memories with the ones we love, for those are what will buoy us in tough times.
At times this collection seemed to read like vignettes out of an autobiography, which perhaps they were. The language is simple, almost blunt, and yet melodious. Dunn elevates the ordinary though his tame diction. What is ordinary is beautiful.
Partway through the book, as I was marveling at the simplicity of the poetry, it was like Dunn reminded me to be a careful reader. In "The Overt," which Dunn dedicates "For the reader," he writes:
'Though the events and dates
may remain at odds,'
I said to my host
as we walked the Ponte Vecchio,
'I'd like you to believe everything I say.'
Dunn then goes on to say,
Would you say that What I've offered here
is overt?
You must worry about trusting a man
who feels he's damned
and knows there's a certain charm
in admitting it.
Throughout the collection Dunn alludes to the human tendency to fabricate memories. Now, in the poem quoted above, Dunn advises us to step back from the poem and ask ourselves if this too is a fabrication. Are all of these confessions, these memories, these glimpses into the Different Hours of life artificial? Is the poet who invited us into his inner sanctum by confessing his soul to us damned? Soulless? Are we really all alone? Perhaps we are. Dunn seems to think so.
The final stanza of the final poem in the collection reads:
You who are one of them, say that I loved
my companions most of all.
In all sincerity, say that they provided
a better way to be alone.
If we are all alone we need companions more than anything, even if those companions are not always trustworthy, not always complete. We need to make memories with the ones we love, for those are what will buoy us in tough times.
July 29, 2008
I just reread this collection and was once again awed. Simply marvelous: clarity, thought-provoking ideas, tasteful yet stunning use of language.
Please check out all of Dunn's recent books: Local Visitations,Everything Else in the World,The Insistence of Beauty. Also see his memoir, Walking Light. This is, in my view, the best poet we have.
Please check out all of Dunn's recent books: Local Visitations,Everything Else in the World,The Insistence of Beauty. Also see his memoir, Walking Light. This is, in my view, the best poet we have.
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February 4, 2023Ех, тези американски поети.
October 24, 2023
I've gone through 90% of this book with the increasing conviction that this was a 4.0, maybe a 4.25 star collection. I sampled a few of Stephen Dunn's poems in the past and found him fantastic, and Different Hours was an affirmation of that. Many pieces were luminous, almost disquietingly so, and Dunn has a way of catching you of guard with the naked, uncomfortable truth of a moment (not as a witness, but as an accomplice, at times the victim, even the suspect herself; as if you were listening to him tell a story, only to find out he hadn't been reading from a reference or recounting a scene from memory, but describing your reflection in a mirror all along). But like I say, I reserve the 5 stars for favorites, and Different Hours may have left a strong impression, but I couldn't vouch for how long it'll last in my memory.
Then, of course, the collection closed with "A Postmortem Guide":
God. I'm not gonna be forgetting about this one for a while.
4.75 stars
Then, of course, the collection closed with "A Postmortem Guide":
[...] Go down to the old cemetery; you’ll see
there’s nothing definitive to be said.
The dead once were all kinds—
boundary breakers and scalawags,
martyrs of the flesh, and so many
dumb bunnies of duty, unbearably nice.
I’ve been a little of each.
And, please, resist the temptation
of speaking about virtue.
The seldom-tempted are too fond
of that word, the small-
spirited, the unburdened.
Know that I’ve admired in others
only the fraught straining
to be good.
Adam’s my man and Eve’s not to blame.
He bit in; it made no sense to stop.
Still, for accuracy’s sake you might say
I often stopped,
that I rarely went as far as I dreamed.
[...]
Tell them I had second chances.
I knew joy.
[...]
You who are one of them, say that I loved
my companions most of all.
In all sincerity, say that they provided
a better way to be alone.
God. I'm not gonna be forgetting about this one for a while.
4.75 stars
June 5, 2021
I've cited this before, but a struggling poet (not I) once remarked that there are only two motivations, two subjects matter to all poetry: sex and death. A psychologist might say the two are really one, but I'll stamp Dunn indelibly with the death category.
In Different Hours, he bemoans the loss of a step in a pickup basketball game. The passing of a friend. Lost love. Love gone stale. In "Odysseus's Secret," in which the poet is surprised to discover the reason the voyage home took twenty years, these lines:
But by the middle years this other life/had become his life. That was Odysseus's secret/ kept even from himself.
In passages like this, Dunn has strolled down the avenue of fine poetry. He leads the reader into the grander picture of things, then points out its contradictions, its conundrums. There's not a little wit here, but sadness undergirds it. He wants to celebrate life, but his narrator is jaded; he sees the end of things, something that is endemic to a life in which the poet has succeeded in mounting the apex of his years and finds himself doing the downhill slide. Such a slide is easy, certainly not as hard as scaling the heights, but the end of the ride is in sight. In "Our Parents," he ends with:
Our parents, meanwhile, must have wanted something/ back from us. We know what it is, don't we?/We've been alive long enough.
Within each Big Picture, there are Little Ones and those are made up of even Smaller Ones. After all, what could constitute the Big Picture but an aggregation of similar parts that, perhaps, form something new, surprisingly different. Dunn won the Pulitzer for Poetry with this collection, and it's easy enough to see that this poet is a prism for experience, his art the many colors beaming from him like a lighthouse "Enjoy your life, but it won't last."
My rating: 19 of 20 stars
In Different Hours, he bemoans the loss of a step in a pickup basketball game. The passing of a friend. Lost love. Love gone stale. In "Odysseus's Secret," in which the poet is surprised to discover the reason the voyage home took twenty years, these lines:
But by the middle years this other life/had become his life. That was Odysseus's secret/ kept even from himself.
In passages like this, Dunn has strolled down the avenue of fine poetry. He leads the reader into the grander picture of things, then points out its contradictions, its conundrums. There's not a little wit here, but sadness undergirds it. He wants to celebrate life, but his narrator is jaded; he sees the end of things, something that is endemic to a life in which the poet has succeeded in mounting the apex of his years and finds himself doing the downhill slide. Such a slide is easy, certainly not as hard as scaling the heights, but the end of the ride is in sight. In "Our Parents," he ends with:
Our parents, meanwhile, must have wanted something/ back from us. We know what it is, don't we?/We've been alive long enough.
Within each Big Picture, there are Little Ones and those are made up of even Smaller Ones. After all, what could constitute the Big Picture but an aggregation of similar parts that, perhaps, form something new, surprisingly different. Dunn won the Pulitzer for Poetry with this collection, and it's easy enough to see that this poet is a prism for experience, his art the many colors beaming from him like a lighthouse "Enjoy your life, but it won't last."
My rating: 19 of 20 stars
August 2, 2017
Una poesia che non ha bisogno di fronzoli o di espedienti stilistici per colpire il lettore, ma che cerca di raccontare la vita nella maniera più onesta possibile. Semplici e mutevoli sono le cose, dice Dunn. E le persone, e le sensazioni. La luce che le illumina muta con il trascorrere del tempo e a noi non resta che camminare un passo alla volta, consapevoli che ogni cosa ha il suo opposto, e che non c'è nulla di più normale/ di una doppia o anche di una tripla vita, e che tutto ciò che non riesco a vedere/ è vero almeno quanto ciò che vedo. Non c'è spazio per la metafisica in questi versi, quello che ci rimane da fare è camminare senza maschere e lasciarsi stupire dalle cose del mondo (I metafisici del South Jersey). Mondo che è avvolto da una nebbia (le rivelazioni, dopo tutto, devono essere nascoste) che in fondo è benvenuta, perché impedisce alla realtà di manifestarsi per quello che è. Siamo tutti l'imperatore del prima o poi,/ del forse, dell'uno di questi giorni./ Impegnati, lì in mezzo da qualche parte/ a cercare di fare del nostro meglio,/ stiamo vivendo quel genere/ di storia in cui si permette tutto/ e non succede quasi niente. Nelle parole di Dunn é tempo di rinunciare a cercare l'invisibile e di descrivere le cose, ma l'impresa non è poi così semplice, perché rinunciare non è mai semplice. In estrema sintesi direi che la cifra poetica di questa raccolta nasce proprio da questo camminare sul filo, in bilico costante tra la consapevolezza dell'impossibilità di dire l'indicibile e l'umana aspirazione a cercare di farlo.
November 17, 2023
I saw Stephen Dunn give a reading at Baylor University in 2011. I purchased a copy of this volume and had him inscribe it for the friend who had introduced me to Dunn's work.
Something made me think of him of few weeks ago, So I looked him up and discovered that he had passed away in 2021.
This collection deals so much with the millennium. It's strange to think twenty-three years later how much hope and hesitation the start of the twenty first century inspired. Dunn's poetry is lyrical, but it is small, often domestic, and hints at regret and nostalgia in such beautiful quite ways that I just can never quite believe how much he is able to make out of seemingly so little. His temperament reminds me of Donald hall a bit, but his style is plainer, the poems shorter, more like objects.
I loves these poems. I wish their author well.
Something made me think of him of few weeks ago, So I looked him up and discovered that he had passed away in 2021.
This collection deals so much with the millennium. It's strange to think twenty-three years later how much hope and hesitation the start of the twenty first century inspired. Dunn's poetry is lyrical, but it is small, often domestic, and hints at regret and nostalgia in such beautiful quite ways that I just can never quite believe how much he is able to make out of seemingly so little. His temperament reminds me of Donald hall a bit, but his style is plainer, the poems shorter, more like objects.
I loves these poems. I wish their author well.
April 25, 2023
I'm on a Stephen Dunn-a-thon because I want every poem. I love how they walk between personal story, documentary footage, moral wondering (somehow never moralizing), and seem to exist in the world and come from his specific being.
"After" is brilliant (and might be too light if it weren't for all the rest).
"Men in the Sky" starts up, drops down, looks around, looks out, looks in. omg.
Onward.
"After" is brilliant (and might be too light if it weren't for all the rest).
"Men in the Sky" starts up, drops down, looks around, looks out, looks in. omg.
Onward.
December 3, 2012
This is my first full collection of Stephen Dunn's poetry, but not my introduction to him. Four years ago, a childhood friend of my husband-to-be read one of Dunn's poems at our wedding. The idea of choosing readings for such a monumental occasion — if not the event itself, then the long-lived memory of it — had seemed so daunting. And then the right pieces presented themselves, swiftly and softly slipping into my mind, into his as I read them aloud.
Dunn's "A Romance," the first of those pieces, is just that: full of individual peculiarities that appear graceful and delicate to affectionate eyes, pairing thoughtfulness and physicality. It's simple and complicated and ultimately unfathomable. Passion is hidden beneath the surface of the words, but never in doubt. And yet it's not without doubt: "She wondered how one becomes / a casualty of desire." (He doesn't wonder at all; he acts, moves, makes. They both name things, though: their differences.) I think I understand it better now than I did then, and I think that understanding and awareness of what I don't understand will continue to change and grow over the years, because I expect to keep reading Dunn, and learning from him. He's pretty awesome.
Different Hours won the 2001 Pulitzer for Poetry, and for good reason: it's brilliant. Clear-sighted, kind and funny, right without being righteous, melancholy and reflective and made brave by age. "I've had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches. / A heart is to be spent." It's full of disappointment and trembling, heart-rending beauty, the kind for which superlatives were invented. We get both, so let's celebrate and mourn and remember them along with Dunn.
From the start we are aware of that absence, and the meaning we find and make in spite of it. The collection opens with "Before the Sky Darkens":
Subsequent poems reveal the different paths we take with our best girl (or guy). In "What Goes On," a cuckolded man returns to his cancer-stricken wife, "who after all had only fallen / in love as anyone might who hadn't been / in love in a while". "Their Divorce" staggers with astonishment at the end of a perfect marriage: "It means no one can know what goes on / in the pale trappings of bedrooms, / in anyone's secret, harrowed heart." "John & Mary" are doomed by their connected disconnect, Odysseus and Penelope by time, for a time, in "Odysseus's Secret." "Know that I've admired in others only the fraught straining to be good." I admire this in Dunn. More than anything I'm struck by his compassion, his respect. ("How many of us / could bear a daily record / of exactly what we'd done?") Or maybe I mean empathy.
There's so much experience and self-awareness and pain beneath the surface of these poems — a lifetime's worth — that you wouldn't begrudge Dunn some judgmental passive-aggression. But it's not there. Instead of playing the cantankerous old man, he offers winking, nudging wryness: "I remember the blizzard of... / People I don't want to be / speak like that." And why not? Who wants their stories to lose potency? Dunn knows how to thread life and poetry together in a way that does both justice without forgetting that what he's crafted is necessarily imperfect, like the student who inspired "His Town" by turning midst into mists. "Story" and "Burying the Cat" provide the best examples of the intersection of fact, true and poetry in this collection. Surely feline grace and power have never been better described than in the latter:
I could keep going. I could talk about all of the underlining I did reading and re-reading these; I could quote from every poem, share one favorite after another, little masterpieces in full, lines so personal and perfect they would feel out of place in a book review. The truth is if these snippets don't make you want to rush out and add some Stephen Dunn to your life, I can't help you. But I wish I could.
Dunn's "A Romance," the first of those pieces, is just that: full of individual peculiarities that appear graceful and delicate to affectionate eyes, pairing thoughtfulness and physicality. It's simple and complicated and ultimately unfathomable. Passion is hidden beneath the surface of the words, but never in doubt. And yet it's not without doubt: "She wondered how one becomes / a casualty of desire." (He doesn't wonder at all; he acts, moves, makes. They both name things, though: their differences.) I think I understand it better now than I did then, and I think that understanding and awareness of what I don't understand will continue to change and grow over the years, because I expect to keep reading Dunn, and learning from him. He's pretty awesome.
Oh the chosen gloomy beauty of a tourist town —
you've always known
what lifts you up can get you down.
(from "Capriccio Italien")
Different Hours won the 2001 Pulitzer for Poetry, and for good reason: it's brilliant. Clear-sighted, kind and funny, right without being righteous, melancholy and reflective and made brave by age. "I've had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches. / A heart is to be spent." It's full of disappointment and trembling, heart-rending beauty, the kind for which superlatives were invented. We get both, so let's celebrate and mourn and remember them along with Dunn.
Not one of us wouldn't be smiling.
There'd be drinks, irony, hidden animosities.
Something large would be missing.
But most of us would understand
something large would always be missing.
(from "Oklahoma City")
From the start we are aware of that absence, and the meaning we find and make in spite of it. The collection opens with "Before the Sky Darkens":
Sunsets, incipient storms, the tableaus
of melancholy — maybe these are
the Saturday night-events
to take your best girl to.
Subsequent poems reveal the different paths we take with our best girl (or guy). In "What Goes On," a cuckolded man returns to his cancer-stricken wife, "who after all had only fallen / in love as anyone might who hadn't been / in love in a while". "Their Divorce" staggers with astonishment at the end of a perfect marriage: "It means no one can know what goes on / in the pale trappings of bedrooms, / in anyone's secret, harrowed heart." "John & Mary" are doomed by their connected disconnect, Odysseus and Penelope by time, for a time, in "Odysseus's Secret." "Know that I've admired in others only the fraught straining to be good." I admire this in Dunn. More than anything I'm struck by his compassion, his respect. ("How many of us / could bear a daily record / of exactly what we'd done?") Or maybe I mean empathy.
It's anybody's story.
But I think for me it was the beginning
of empathy, not a large empathy
like the deeply selfless might have,
more like a leaning, like being able
to imagine a life for a spider, a maker's
life, or just some aliveness
in its wide abdomen and delicate spinnerets
so you take it outside in two paper cups
instead of stepping on it.
(from "Empathy")
There's so much experience and self-awareness and pain beneath the surface of these poems — a lifetime's worth — that you wouldn't begrudge Dunn some judgmental passive-aggression. But it's not there. Instead of playing the cantankerous old man, he offers winking, nudging wryness: "I remember the blizzard of... / People I don't want to be / speak like that." And why not? Who wants their stories to lose potency? Dunn knows how to thread life and poetry together in a way that does both justice without forgetting that what he's crafted is necessarily imperfect, like the student who inspired "His Town" by turning midst into mists. "Story" and "Burying the Cat" provide the best examples of the intersection of fact, true and poetry in this collection. Surely feline grace and power have never been better described than in the latter:
Her name was Isadora and, like all cats,
she was a machine made of rubber bands
and muscle, exemplar of crouch
and pounce, genius of leisure.
I could keep going. I could talk about all of the underlining I did reading and re-reading these; I could quote from every poem, share one favorite after another, little masterpieces in full, lines so personal and perfect they would feel out of place in a book review. The truth is if these snippets don't make you want to rush out and add some Stephen Dunn to your life, I can't help you. But I wish I could.
July 23, 2019
I heard about this poet most recently through the Writer's Almanac daily email I receive. I enjoyed having it by my bedside for a few weeks (a library book) and liked many of the poems I read, mostly about experiences of our daily lives and relationships.
August 25, 2022
Everything I would say about Different Hours and Stephen Dunn would be hyperbole. Thisp Pulitzer Prize winning selection of poetry was arresting. It made me think and took my imagination to unexplored places. I want to visit more of these astonishing dwellings.
January 10, 2024
4.5⭐️
so love this collection, often come back to it. don’t feel like i understand them all but also couldn’t pick a favourite- there are too many. i love how much attention he plays to the mundane. fulfils my desire for romanticism.
so love this collection, often come back to it. don’t feel like i understand them all but also couldn’t pick a favourite- there are too many. i love how much attention he plays to the mundane. fulfils my desire for romanticism.
December 14, 2019
Absolutely beautiful. A Spiritual Woman will forever be my favourite poem.
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