Quotes from Stephen Dunn

All I wanted was a job like a book so good I'd be finishing it for the rest of my life.

I will try to disappoint you better than anyone else has.

Originality, of course, is what occurs when something new arises out of what's already been done.

All good poems are victories over something.

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.

He held her like a new woman and what she felt felt almost as good as love had, and each of them called it love because precision didn't matter anymore.

Where are we going? It's not an issue of here or there. And if you ever feel you can't take another step, imagine how you might feel to arrive, if not wiser, a little more aware how to inhabit the middle ground between misery and joy. Trudge on. In the higher regions, where the footing is unsure, to trudge is to survive.

Anyone out without the excuse of a dog should be handcuffed and searched for loneliness.

God knows nothing we don't know. We gave him every word he ever said.

He didn't want to be this thin man whose desires were barely covered by skin, standing absolutely still. But everytime he moved there was another place to go, and everytime sadness would arrive with its wonderful cocoon not even that would last.

I am astonished by the various kisses we're capable of. Each from different heights diminished, which is simply the law. And the big bruise from the long fall looked perfectly white in a few years. That astounded me most of all.

I don't think I'd complain if I were overrated.

Finally, what I want from poetry is akin to what Flaubert wanted from novels. He thought they should make us dream. I want a poem, through its precisions and accuracies, to make me remember what I know, or what I might have known if I hadn't been constrained by convention or habit.

When people praise a poem that I can't understand I always think they're lying.

Too many poets are insufficiently interested in story. Their poems could be improved if they gave in more to the strictures of fiction: the establishment of a clear dramatic situation, and a greater awareness that first-person narrators are also characters and must be treated as such by their authors. The true lyric poet, of course, is exempt from this. But many poets wrongly think they are lyric poets.

I was calm, no one wants the kind of calm I was.

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.