Stephen Dunn

Stephen 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.

Poet Stephen Dunn's biography is largely typical of life in post-World War II America: he was raised in the suburbs, attended college, served in the armed forces, played professional sports, and worked in advertising, all before attending Syracuse to study writing with Philip Booth, Donald Justice, and W. D. Snodgrass. As a result, Dunn writes poetry that reflects the social, cultural, psychological, and philosophical territory of the American middle class; his poems are considered intelligent and given neither to postmodern pessimism nor contemporary experimental excess. In his lyrical poems, Dunn is often his own protagonist, narrating the regular episodes of his growth both as an individual and as part of a married couple. His poetry is concerned with the anxieties, fears, joys, and problems of how to co-exist in the world with all those who are part of our daily lives.

Q: Do your poems come easily? Do they start with an image or a word or an idea?

STEPHEN DUNN: All of the above. They start variously. I usually have no particular design in mind when I begin. But, yes, sometimes with an idea, sometimes with an image, and my habit of mind is to resist what I find myself saying. So often a poem progresses by a series of resistances, where I might say something... My habit of mind is every time I say something, I almost always hear its opposite. And I think my poems progress... often progress that way, where an idea or a notion is refined as I move down the page.

Dunn's poems, remarked David Baker in a review of the collection Loosestrife for Poetry magazine, are of a type "which, by lesser poets, often shakes me with tedium these days: plain-spoken, in an easy-going method of personal anecdote, homely in its formal strategies, wistful in tone. His strategies may seem initially easy to imitate. How many pale emulators are there, whose work says little more than 'Hey, I'm a guy, I understand sports, not women, and I have feelings too'?" Unlike them, however, Dunn "is wonderful at what he does," Baker commented, adding that the poet uses "powerful and astute ironies," bringing reports "from the nearly paralyzed districts of American suburbia and middle-age."

Quotes:

Although I know it's unfair I reveal myself one mask at a time."

"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."

"I think most of our lives are made up of both things visible and things interior, with a large chunk of them being interior."

"The reaction has been overwhelming, and I'm just getting used to it. I think I actually, though, could get used to it for a long time."

from "CRITICS"

Listen to their voices that’s all right,
but do not strain to hear your name.
Their job sometimes is to winnow
and omit. Yours is to go on.

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 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 2001 collection, Different Hours and has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 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.