Quotes from Stephen Dunn

Bring to me, it said, continual proof / you've been alive.

There are always the simple events of your life that you might try to convert into legend.

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

Your poem effectively begins at the first moment you've surprised or startled yourself. Throw away everything that preceded that moment, and begin with that moment.

Flaubert said — I assume about the balance between repression and freedom — "Be regular and orderly in your daily life, so you can be violent and original in your work.

Donald Justice's admonition that a good poem should exhibit "that maximum amount of wildness that the form can bear" is also relevant, though again it's equally useful to think of expanding the notion of form to accommodate even more of the wild.

and in the gifted air mosquitoes, dragonflies, and tattered mute angels no one has called upon in years.

I've pursued things long after they were over. Always I wanted someone to stop me.

Isn't joy a kind of stillness at the top of something, before the long falling?

In fact, he had become an it, and those of us who knew him noted how poorly itness suited him, his pale demeanor resembling nothing he'd been.

Each of them used the same words, like people who've been trained in sales, and as they moved to their Miatas and Audis I noted the bare shoulders of their women were the barest shoulders I'd ever seen, as if they needed only the night as a shawl.

One day he just found himself opening the door, allowing the inevitable. The world came in and filled the room. It seemed so familiar with everything.

The good poem is implicitly philosophical. The not so good poem, conversely, may exquisitely describe a tree or loneliness, but if the description does not suggest an attitude toward nature, or human nature, we are left with a kind of dentist office art — devoted to decoration and the status quo.

Doesn't blood usually follow when language fails?

She was thinking a woman needed an angel for every son of a bitch she'd ever known.

She'd seen her best friends disappear into their marriages. Even when she spoke on the phone to them, they weren't there.

I look for those with hidden wings, and for scars that those who once had wings can't hide.

Finally, though, she had to admit a penis was silly, mostly hiding, like a diphthong in a sentence you had to work too hard to figure out.

Arnold said, "Poetry should be a criticism of life

She kissed me again, reaching that place that sends messages to toes and fingertips, then all the way to something like home. Some music was playing on its own. Nothing like a woman who knows to kiss the right thing at the right time, then kisses the things she's missed…

Evil always has an advantage and always succeeds until its enormous feet understep some moral chasm, or a damsel held dear by the populace cries out and is heard.

Poets who remain poets have, presumably, worked through the terrors of influence, and are willing to acknowledge their debts by using them in order to go their own way. They've learned what Thomas Mann knew: "A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Surely those folks who play their lives and their work eminently safe don't often put themselves in the position where they can be startled or enlarged. Don't put themselves near enough to the realm of the unknown where discovery resides, and joy has been rumored to appear.

And I've turned corners there was no going back to, corners in the middle of a room that led to Spain or solitude. And always the thin line between corner and cornered, the good corners of bodies and those severe bodies that permit no repose, the places we retreat to, the places we can't bear to be found.