On Learning that Wallace Stevens Was A Jerk

Jerk is the polite word for it, I think.  I haven't read the autobiography yet, which I plan to do, assuming the Portland library has it.  No reason for that to stop me from making my general point, which is: does it matter?  First, it matters to me, a little.  Stevens is one of my favorite poets.  Sunday Morning.  Gubbinal.  The Idea of Order at Key West.  The Poems of Our Climate.  The Man With the Blue Guitar.  Learning recently that he was an office tyrant and a messy drunk who picked fights with Auden and Hemingway dims my appreciation of what I identify as the essential spiritual element in his poetry.  What lifts his poetry from abstraction is what it aims at, a place where beauty matters more than anything.  Picking a fight with Auden?  Second, it probably shouldn't matter.  I don't need a hero.  I need great poetry to inform me and lift me and inspire me.  Messy drunks don't bother me so much.  I've known a "few", most of whom I've loved deeply. But, mean to his subordinates?  Inexcusable. Still, the poetry.  One must have a mind of winter

The Art of Poetry

In my mind, this post, even before I write, sounds like one of those annoying family Christmas letters, wind baggy and self-congratulatory, while taking occasional snipes at others. Oh well, here it goes.... It's been awhile, but the poetry empire has been very busy, twenty-two poems published over the last eighteen months, pulling two manuscripts together: 1) a chapbook of consistent, very narrative stuff; and 2) a book, more all over the place, but all these new poems.  Sending them out to contests.  If anybody has any recommendations, that would be great.

Okay, on to the meat.  It occurs to me that my aesthetic is very simple.  Try not to write poetry that sounds like pretentious poetry guy poetry: the two main traps (for me at least) being abstraction for its own sake and choosing a "poetic expression" when an ordinary one will do.  This is not so easy as it seems, because one still wants to write what the world of readers of poetry will recognize as poetry.  Think about it.   Along those lines, I put up two new poems below.  The first, The Departure Lounge (censored for the internet), fits exactly into the DMZ of my poetry.  This is a political poem.  This is my voice.  I create a persona, a situation, etc., but spend a long time making it "poetic" enough without, straying into that weird Poetry-Land that "poems" inhabit.  I think this poetry that I write is unique.  I don't see it anywhere, (and I spend a lot of time reading poetry.)  I think that my poem's novelty, if that is what it is, makes it hard for editors to get it.  Both the subject matter, and what appears to be the artlessness, could be off-putting.  Frankly, when editors kindly take the time to comment on my poems in the course of a rejection, they almost always say the same thing: we really liked it, but didn't think it was poetic enough.  Okay...  That explains the second poem, To An Anonymous Critic, a sonnet, written in iambic pentameter, that rhymes. I pay very close attention to the music of my poems, but work very hard so that music doesn't seem so carefully orchestrated or aesthete.

The Departure Lounge

A woman beats her frantic child curled

On the floor of the Ladies’ Room

At the airport in Birmingham, Alabama

With the buckle of her unloosed belt,

Screaming “Don’t you ever sass me again,

“You ****ing little wh***, you ungrateful b****,”

Herself unloosed in a blind and bitter rage.

I tell her if she doesn’t stop, I’m going to call the cops;

But she looks at me as if she doesn’t know what I mean.

Staring at me, belt in hand, glaring at me

As if I’m the one who doesn’t understand.

It makes me old again and weary,

Too old to return home on this flight,
My bones all out of joint on the vinyl chrome-armed couch,
And the earbuds of my i-pod
Drowning any wisdom or compassion out.

Instead beneath the strains of Joni Mitchell’s “Little Green”

A mass of static hisses its secret name

And, as the practiced announcement booms around me,

Echoing across the lounge: attention passengers,

We are now boarding people who need assistance

And families with small children, my attention follows

The same sniffling child dragged to the gate without resistance.

Keith Dunlap

To An Anonymous Critic

“How sad it was to envy Pyle.”  Graham Greene

When you are young and bold and full of wit,

And have graduated and found a job,

With your cleverness intact, never stoop to think

That, because you have read some books about some other books,

Your estimation of another’s work has any merit.

Because the girl to whom you cannot give your heart

Laughs with deprecation at your snarky patter,

Because like-minded friends still find you interesting,

Despite the fact you cannot write a thing

That stands alone without your description of it,

Because the one thing you cannot bear is any trace

Of any sense or feeling, you needn’t worry:

You are as silly as I am, and your confusion

As profound, and happily, you might just get the allusion.

Keith Dunlap