Jackson's Actions

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire. --Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC) <

This festival is still with me, days after it's over. There is something about poetry that is almost aphrodisiacal anyway, and when you compound it with six days of unabated exposure to the talents of major poets, it is a vertible orgy of emotion and joy.

I wanted to get down my impessions of the various other poets at the Festival. I know memories (especially at my age are fleeting, so this is more for me than you.

STEPHEN DUNN

Stephen Dunn was awarded the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his collection Different Hours. Dunn's other books of poetry include Local Visitations (2003), Riffs & Reciprocities: Prose Pairs (1998), Loosestrife (1996) New and Selected Poems: 1974-1994 (1994), Landscape at the End of the Century (1991), and Between Angels (1989). His book of essays and memoirs, Walking Light is available from BOA. Dunn's other honors include the Academy Award for Literature, the James Wright Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has taught poetry and held residencies at NYU, Columbia University, University of Washington, University of Michigan, and is Distinguished Professor of creative writing at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.


He was surprised to see me in Florida. I had just been in New Jersey, sitting in his revision class at Cape May a week before. I'm so happy he was booked at the Festival because I got a much keener sense of who he is with the additional exposure in Florida.

His Style

At 67, Stephen Dunn is still a very handsome man. His demeanor is gentle, quiet and his professorial air seems to be only a shy shield for a man whose intelligence and humor hovers, waiting for an invitation. I like everything about him. He is straight forward and honest in conversation. He wore cardigan sweaters wrapped around his shoulders, charmingly undergraduate. Late in the day, tired (as we all were) his Parkinson's would make his hand tremble, but apart from that, there was only a strong and brilliant man in our midst. He does, unlike Dorianne, exude an aura of academia, but one is not surprised, given his career and laurels.

His Craft Lecture

"Love's Artifice and Fernando Pessoa"

This experience was very different than Dorianne's energetic lecture on memorizing poetry. Dunn stepped into a donnish mode and lectured at the podium about the four levels of love poetry, establishing a hierarchy of good (level 4) to bad (level 1)poems which struck some as old fashioned and narrow minded. But given that I had not studied Fernando Pessoa nor was I familiar with many of the poems on Dunn's handout, (except for Sonnet 116 by Shakespeare, and How Do I love Thee by Browning), I gave him every benefit of the doubt. And his presentation made me appreciate how little I know about just about everything. The other poems were "Magic Spell of Rain" by Ana Blandiana, "Gifts of Love" by Yehuda Amichai, "How to Tell A True Love Story" by Sue Ellen Thompson, "True Love" by Wislawa Szyborska, and "Crossing Over" by William Meredith. The wonderful thing was that the famous William Meredith was brought into the auditorium in a wheel chair for this lecture, much to the delight of audience and all poets present. I shall include his poem below.


Stephen Dunn and Dorianne Laux
Photo by Blaise Allen

Crossing Over
by William Meredith

It was now early spring, and the river was swollen an turbulent: great cakes of floating ice were swinging heavily to and fro in the turbid waters. Owing to a pecular form of the short, on the Kentucky side, the land bending far out into the water, the ice had been lodged and detained in great quantities, and the narrow channel which swept round the bend was full of ice, piled one cake over another, thus forming a temporary barrier to the descending ice, which lodged, and formed a great undulating raft...Eliza stood, for a moment, contemplating this unfavorable aspect of things.
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe

That's what love is like. The whole river
is melting. We skim along in great peril,

having to move faster than ice goes under
and still find foothold in the soft floe.

We are one another's floe. Each displaces the weight
of his own need. I am fat as a bloodhound,

hold me up. I won't hurt you. Though I bay,
I would swim with you on my back until the cold

seeped into my heart. We are committed, we
are going across this river willy-nilly.

No one, black or white, is free in Kentucky,
old gravity owns everybody. We're weighty.

I contemplate this unfavorable aspect of things.
Where is something solid? Only you and me.

Has anyone ever been to Ohio?
Do the people there stand firmly on icebergs?

Here all we have is love, a great undulating
raft, melting steadily. We go out on it

anyhow. I love you, I love this fool's walk.
The thing we have to learn is how to walk light.

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Dorianne Laux and William Meredith 2007
Photo by Blaise Allen

His Reading

On the final night of the Festival, Dunn and Voigt did separate readings, his
being the last. I wish I had written down the titles of the poems he read because they were some of the best poems, bar none, I had ever heard. But as he read, I was lulled into ecstacy and could not think a logical thought. I only know I was counting my thanks over and over for having bought his books (at both festivals!) so that I could now privately sit with his work. I did think that I could dig out the poems once I could focus, but his huge output of work makes it almost impossible for me to find them. And indeed the "pairs" that I do remember came from a book I do not have.

However...this poem, I believe, WAS read or at least was remembered by me and many others and so I include it here:

Dog Weather
by Stephen Dunn

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 thjeir list.

I can be discounted now almost anywhere.

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Need I say more?


Stephen Dunn 2007
Photo by Beverly Jackson
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