Stephen Dunn’s “Here and Now”: a Brainy Look at Love

Here and Now- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More

Stephen Dunn’s “Here and Now”:  a Brainy Look at Love

Stephen Dunn’s work sometimes makes a very good bridge between prosy, chatty, talk-y poem-ish words and the rich tightness or musicality of thought and language that were once required of poetry.

In “Here and Now” some short passages could easily and naturally be heard as prose, but there’s a satisfying weightiness in the content and sometimes a new twist on a familiar word, phrase, or idea. All that might be diminished if presented in cumbersome, pedestrian prose, without benefit of purposeful line breaks and white space that create additional emphasis and meaning.

Consider these lines cast as prose:  “Heaven did exist, I discovered, but was reciprocal and momentary . . . . ”  Sounds like a reflective essay, does it not?  Compare that to Dunn's versification:

                                    Heaven did exist,

            I discovered, but was reciprocal

            and momentary . . .

Now we see some hefty questions more clearly. What exactly does it mean for Heaven to be “reciprocal”?  How important is the fact that Heaven is a thing to be “discovered”—and not through Catholicism but through romantic, erotic love?  By the way, if it’s Heaven, how can it be “momentary”?  I can imagine those questions taking up a healthy hour of discussion and then keeping the participants awake that night.

It's breaking these ideas into lines that encourages us to look more carefully at each word and phrase. We pause at “reciprocal,” which makes us remember that it’s Heaven that Dunn is calling “reciprocal.”  If not presented as poetry, I suspect these big assertions would shrink, would be glossed over, cheated, buried in the endless coffin of a prose paragraph. In Dunn's fairly short lines, they dance.

Do you see other parts of the poem that might work as prose ideas but unveil themselves and breathe better as poetry? 

Here are a couple more examples from me. I'm tempted to balk at the gawky passive voice in “must be arrived at,” but as a fairly short line of poetry, it makes me wrestle with it. I have to see it and wonder about it. Maybe there's a reason for the klutzy structure.

And why the imperative in “must”?  Why must one arrive at it? Why even choose the verb “arrived at” when it requires that awkward, tacked-on preposition, “at”?  Is the meaning of "arrive" worth the clumsiness of adding "at"?  I think there are reasonable, mostly favorable responses to all these questions, and they reveal Dunn's skill in laying out his argument. 

And for sheer, perhaps dismissive playfulness in a serious poem, how about this:

                        let heaven

            go its mythy way,

Am I going too far if I say Dunn might be including, by sound-association, The Milky Way? Perhaps our galaxy is, like the old High Mass Heaven, one more thing that's secondary to love.

Well, that’s enough for now. It’s just that . . . I feel as if I’ve harped a lot here about poetry that’s too prosy, or so prosaic it’s not even poetry, and here’s an example of a memoir-y, philosophical, talk-y poem—in free verse, no less—that meets the standard of verse with room to spare.  IMHO.  At the end of the day, going forward, it’s all good. 

Here and Now- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More