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What Feeling Feels Like Over Time. An Attempt To Screw Up What Feeling Feels Like Over Time. Heartbreak And A High C.... The Often Welcome Melodic Lie.... The Soul's Undersong. The Orchestration Of Randomness, A Flirtation With The Boundaries Of Silence And Space.... A Reminder That The Self Wants To Disappear, Be Taken Away From Itself And Returned.

-Stephen Dunn

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What Feeling Feels Like

Stephen Dunn

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What Feeling Feels Like Over Time. An Attempt To Screw Up What Feeling Feels Like Over Time. Heartbreak And A High C.... The Often Welcome Melodic Lie.... The Soul's Undersong. The Orchestration Of Randomness, A Flirtation With The Boundaries Of Silence And Space.... A Reminder That The Self Wants To Disappear, Be Taken Away From Itself And Returned.

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Connubial Because With Alarming Accuracy She’d Been Identifying Patterns I Was Unaware Of—this Tic, That Tendency, Like The Way I've Mastered The Language Of Intimacy In Order To Conceal How I Felt— I Knew I Was In Danger Of Being Terribly Understood.

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Perhaps Basketball And Poetry Have Just A Few Things In Common, But The Most Important Is The Possibility Of Transcendence. The Opposite Is Labor. In Writing, Every Writer Knows When He Or She Is Laboring To Achieve An Effect. You Want To Get From Here To There, But Find Yourself Willing It, Forcing It. The Equivalent In Basketball Is Aiming Your Shot, A Kind Of Strained And Usually Ineffective Purposefulness. What You Want Is To Be In Some Kind Of Flow, Each Next Moment A Discovery.

I Don't Let A Poem Go Into The World Unless I Feel That I've Transformed The Experience In Some Way. Even Poems I've Written In The Past That Appear Very Personal Often Are Fictions Of The Personal, Which Nevertheless Reveal Concerns Of Mine. I've Always Thought Of My First-person Speaker As An Amalgam Of Selves, Maybe Of Other People's Experiences As Well.

Bring To Me, It Said, Continual Proof / You've Been Alive.

Everything I Can't See / Is At Least As Real As What I Can.

All Good Poems Are Victories Over Something.

I Make Myself Up From Everything I Am, Or Could Be. For Many Years I Was More Desire Than Fact. When I Stop Becoming, That’s When I Worry.

There Are Always The Simple Events Of Your Life That You Might Try To Convert Into Legend.

A Good Many Of My Poems Over The Years Have Alluded To Or Taken On The Political. Stevens Has A Line In One Of His Essays: "reality Exerts Pressure On The Imagination." Inevitably What Is Omnipresent In The Culture Exerts Its Pressure On Our Imaginations To Respond To It, Even If Indirectly. But In This Case The Backdrop Of 9/11, Coincident With The Breakup Of A Marriage, The Finding Of New Love, Some Kind Of Personal Cataclysm... All Of Those Were Forces Informing The Poems In Some Way.

Isn't There A Curious Elegance In How One Moment Passes Into Another?

Exaggerated Sunsets / Splashed With Rain, Odd Collisions / Of Roots, Animals, Seeds. / I Didn't Like A Thing I Saw, / So Much Effort To Be Strange.

What Feeling Feels Like Over Time. An Attempt To Screw Up What Feeling Feels Like Over Time. Heartbreak And A High C.... The Often Welcome Melodic Lie.... The Soul's Undersong. The Orchestration Of Randomness, A Flirtation With The Boundaries Of Silence And Space.... A Reminder That The Self Wants To Disappear, Be Taken Away From Itself And Returned.

Altruism Is For Those Who Can't Endure Their Desires. There's A World As Ambiguous As A Moan, A Pleasure Moan Our Earnest Neighbors Might Think A Crime. It's Where We Could Live. I'll Say I Love You, Which Will Lead, Of Course, To Disappointment, But Those Words Unsaid Poison Every Next Moment. I Will Try To Disappoint You Better Than Anyone Else Has. --mon Semblable

There's A Certain Pleasure In Violating The Strictures Of Your Education. The Trick Is, If You're Going To Explore Ideas In A Poem, To Be Suspicious Of Ideas And Suspicious Of Your Own Mind At The Same Time. It's Often A Matter Of Orchestration And Pacing. Of Shaping Some Kind Of Dialectic Flow.

I Love What's Left After Love Has Been Tested.

Oh Abstractions Are Just Abstract Until They Have An Ache In Them.

Although I Know It's Unfair, I Reveal Myself One Mask At A Time.

When I Stop Becoming, That's When I Worry.

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I've Tried To Become Someone Else For A While, Only To Discover That He, Too, Was Me.

I Will Try To Disappoint You Better Than Anyone Ever Has.

I Wrote Poetry For Seven Or Eight Years, Maybe Longer, Before I Could Say I Was A Poet. If People Asked, I'd Say I Wrote Poetry; I Wouldn't Go Further. I Was In My Mid- To Late-thirties Before I Felt That I Was A Poet, Which I Think Meant That I Had Begun To Embody My Poems In Some Way. I Wasn't Just A Writer Of Them. Hard To Say What, As A Poet, My Place In The World Is. Some Place Probably Between Recognition And Neglect.

The World Is Always Somewhat Vicious. I Take That As A Given, But At Various Times In Various Circumstances That Fact Will Be No More Than A Shadow Or An Echo Behind Some Poem. Other Times It Will Be More Manifest. I Try To Write Myself Into Articulations Of Half-felt, Half-known Feelings, Without Program. I'm Always Working Toward Getting My World And, Hopefully, The World Outside Of Me Into A Version That Makes Sense Of It. Viciousness Requires The Same Precision As Love Does.

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