Walking Light: Memoirs
and Essays on Poetry (New Expanded Edition)
Stephen Dunn
Rochester, NY: Boa, 2001
$15.00 (paperback) / ISBN 1-929918-00-3
When Stephen Dunn received the Pulitzer
Prize in 2001 for his collection of poems,
Different Hours, his position as
a major figure in contemporary American
poetry was confirmed. And as is too often
the case, some of his best work, such as
Loosestrife, Between Angels,
Local Time, and his remarkable Riffs
and Reciprocities: Prose Pairs for example,
are little known to the general reading
public, though these works are respected
and valued by poets and serious students
of poetry. Little wonder, then, that Dunn's
essays Walking Light, first published
in 1993, should be unknown to readers; the
new expanded Boa edition, however, which
both republishes and adds to this rich collection,
deserves attention for its intelligent,
accessible, and practical considerations
on poetry. I suspect that each reader will
find at least one of the nineteen essays
relevant and pertinent, considering the
range of topics across which Dunn travels,
essays in which he considers, for example,
the ways in which poetry is similar to basketball,
baseball, manners, or gambling.
"Because I teach creative writing,"
observes Stephen Dunn, "it's important
for me to remember that I'm not a creative
writer, I'm a poet." Given that only
a rare few poets in this country actually
earn a living through poetry (which is more
often than not the result of lectures, grants,
and readings rather than the result of royalty
checks), Dunn addresses the craft of poetry
as supported by a university teaching position,
the dominant survival mode for most poets
today. In his essay "The Poet as Teacher:
Vices and Virtues," Dunn states that
"In this country a poet must have another
job," and having taught for years,
both at the undergraduate and graduate level,
he considers how so few of his students
actually go on to be poets. Of course, as
a teacher, Dunn trains students to be better
readers, expands the audience for poetry,
but more so, he is "helping them to
move toward and identify the genuine,"
directly in poetry, though indirectly in
their own lives as well. As Dunn notes,
teaching poetry is an intimate teaching,
an emotionally-draining experience awash
in personal revelations, and he rightly
calls this "a large responsibility"
for wanting students "to find their
hidden subject. . . to say things they didn't
know they knew . . . to say those things
precisely and surprisingly." Further,
Dunn adds that "the best intimacy between
teacher and student occurs when the student
trusts that the teacher is some kind of
partner in helping the poem in question
to become a poem." What is suggested
here is that teaching the craft of poetry
is akin to a master and apprentice relationship,
rather than a stereotypical teacher and
student relationship.
On the topic of novice, or "incomplete"
poets, Dunn, in "Experience, Imagination,
and the Poet as Fictionist," begins
by citing two kinds of poets he encounters
in his workshops: "one who waits to
be inspired by an event, the other for whom
the act of writing is its own inspiration.
The former tends to be most wedded to personal
experience, the latter to language and its
combinations," and it is the latter
of the two which Dunn finds makes the better
poet. The poet wedded to personal experience,
first and foremost, runs two grave risks:
first, of giving in to self-centered poetry
in which the "heartfelt subject precludes
the use of the imagination," and second,
in assuming that others are interested in
their "woes and joys." In either
case, it would seem, the result tends toward
self-indulgent, second rate poetry. Thus,
Dunn argues for each poet to be a "fictionist,"
seeking to write a poem that is an "experience
made of word—not the experience behind
it," a manner of composing in which
the poet must create a "chain of interconnections
which links the poem's occurrences"
and which hints at the poem's "purpose
and design." Rather than be what Dunn
calls "literalists of the imagination,"
a role not much above transcriptionists,
journalists, or diarists, he argues not
for the reconstitution of this world, but
for the creation of new worlds to be discovered
in exploring language and its combinations.
This is not some recycled version of Stevens's
idea that poetry is the supreme fiction,
but rather Dunn's idea that poetry—or
at least the process that generates poetry—is
more akin to the crafting of fiction than
poets generally consider. After all, Dunn
reminds us, poems get to be poems in manifold
ways, and poets should feel free to employ
whatever is necessary to make a poem.
In "Bringing the Strange Home,"
Dunn, a poet who has been called a spokesman
for the suburban middle class, one who gives
dignity to the mundane, looks for ways to
locate this quality in poetry. Reminding
his readers that, as Czeslaw Milosz points
out, poetry is not very important for the
American people, largely due to capitalism's
privileging of acquisition over culture,
Dunn suggests that perhaps poetry is not
important to the American people because
they either just don't understand how to
read it, or won't work hard enough to get
at the "news" in poetry:
It's difficult sometimes to get the
news from poetry because poetry is not
just information. It's an arrangement
if you will, of experience and the world;
it speaks in metaphor, it has devices
and schemes, which suggest that a poem's
"news" is always more than
its extractable meaning.
And because poetry speaks in metaphor,
the average reader finds poetry
"strange," and therefore unimportant
and foreign in his daily life. What Dunn
ultimately argues for is an audience of
informed readers who can "bring the
strange home," an audience which will
"find and champion the poems that are
true to the ambiguity of experience"
and which will, as a result of doing so,
help us "give ourselves over as wholly
as possible to all kinds of poems, to regularly
prepare ourselves for those others which
legitimately ask more of us."
Walking Light by Stephen Dunn is
a book filled with wisdom, an oddity in
an age obsessed only with information. What
he reminds us of is that the poet's eye,
turned both upon himself and upon the world,
sees more intently than others' eyes can
see. If seeing is believing, then Dunn offers
much for us to believe in, for, as he states
in "Bringing the Strange Home,"
"we need to believe that our poetry
is for others . . . the poet asking the
troubled guests and the aloof to dance,
the troubled guests and the aloof preparing
themselves to say yes." Lovers of poetry
should say yes to this collection of wise
essays.
