NJPoets Index

Great NJ Poet's Portraits

NJ Fiction

NJ Reviews

NJ Contest Winners

NJPoets News

Gioseffi.com

PoetsUSA.com
(Wise Women's Web)

Italian American Writers.com

NJ Past Events

Warren County Poet, BJ WARD'S
INTRODUCTION TO STEPHEN DUNN
for the Skylands Wrtiters & Artists Association
CELEBRATING LITERARY NJ SERIES,
Hosted by Daniela Gioseffi
at Centenary College November 9, 1997

Click here to read 3 poems of Stephen Dunn

Stephen Dunn is a Trustee Fellow in the Arts and Professor of Creative Writing at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. He is the author of ten books of poetry including Local Time, published as part of the National Poetry Series in 1986, New & Selected Poems: 1974-1994, and most recently Loosestrife, one of five finalists earlier this year for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In the spring of 1998, a collection of prose poems, entitled Riffs & Reciprocities, will be released by W.W. Norton. A book of his prose, Walking Light: Essays & Memoirs, was published in 1993. He is the recipient of the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Levinson & Oscar Blumenthal Prizes from the journal, Poetry, the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest, the James Wright Prize from Mid-Atlantic Review, the Mary Elinor Smith Prize from The American Scholar, and many others. He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

And none of this matters to me. These accolades are not why I repeatedly turn to a writer whose work I love, in this case Stephen Dunn. Rather, I relish his greater albeit quieter successes--those on the page that may indeed be reflected by these external accomplishments but are grounded internally. Permit me to posit a notion: that one of the key differences between an artist and an entertainer lies in the conception of audience--that an entertainer works to appease the demands of an outside audience whereas an artist is primarily concerned with appeasing the demands that he or she places on himself or herself. I believe it was George Bernard Shaw who said, "If you want to see your face, look at a mirror. If you want to see your soul, look at your art." When one reads King Lear or listens to Beethoven's 9th Symphony, one is aware of the great examination involved in the composition, of the internal audience for which the work is composed. My money says it is a different audience than the choreographer of the Macarena probably had in mind. Certainly Jim Carrey, while a funny entertainer, isn't doing work of the soul when bendingover and pretending to speak with his butt. Which leads to many of the poets I've read in the last few years, whose work I would classify as entertainment, whose initial effect is the greatest effect while each subsequent return to the work always invokes a diminishment of its force. The work of Stephen Dunn, however, is the work of an artist. To return to his work is to discover nuances and shadings, artful skips of the pen across the lake of the page.

I bring up the distinction between artist and entertainer because I once read a review of Stephen's work in which the reviewer called his poetry "accessible." In truth, I agree. His work is accessible. For the willing and intelligent audience, great art always is. However, I am aware that, for some, the word carries baggage--an implication that the work is simple. For some, to classify a work as accessible is to diminish its importance. In fact, Stephen Dunn writes of some of the most complicated issues I've seen a poet tackle, be it a sympathetic, uncompromised, and knowingly-ineffective offering to a terrorist, the arrival at a recognition that need surpasses obligations--even those associated with family--or an accounting of "the places we can't bear to be found." He handles these subjects without diminishing them or easing into any pedantic offerings. He takes a hard road to the small truths we build our lives on. As C.K. Williams has said, "Stephen Dunn is writing the poetry that James Wright once called for: the poetry of an adult." These are poems of consequence, poems that say life is never fully answered, fully defined. And through an unrelenting digging at his own many lives within this life, Stephen has forged a body of work marked by a voice that is unique in its candor, among the most truthful in contemporary poetry. As Stephen Dobyns proclaimed in The New York Times, "Stephen Dunn is one of the strongest voices of his generation."

And so the work of the artist may be internal in nature, yes, but the great artists I believe know how to bring great audiences along. Throughout his body of work, it is evident that Stephen Dunn does not compromise that internal audience but rather excavates his own backyard, pulling up all sorts of bones and treasures that he may not have known were so deep in his own property, bringing them into the sunlight of his own gaze for a careful examination and reflection. All the while, he has let me, the reader, look over the backyard fence, make those discoveries with him. I know he doesn't do this digging for me--the primary rewards of such uncoverings surely are for himself--but he is skilled enough to carry the weight of a reader on his shoulders as he claws through the dirt, adept enough to turn his body just so, so as to give the reader a chance to view what he unearths. Accessible--yes. Simple--never.

So again, the reason I turn to Stephen Dunn's work has nothing to do with the awards he has garnered in his career but rather with the rewards I have garnered as a careful reader of his work. It has to do with one of his books open on my kitchen table on a quiet evening or rainy morning or the nebula between midnight and day when something is tweeking my life enough for me to turn to poetry and there are his words forming his poetry in me like the sky freeforms over Louisiana or the milk bounces from the bottoms of coffeemugs and mushroom-clouds through the caffeine. His poetry forms in my kitchen and, in turn, in me like a dancer who surprises me with every move, like the place a river meets an ocean and leaves silt like a sculptor. His poetry causes deep images in me like something causes jewelry in an old cave before it is bent into the label of "jewelry." It does to my head what the wind does to trees, the pines of the earth being shaped with each cool front and thunderhead like our desires being shut down or opened up by our betrothed's response-- his poetry opens me up like the carburetor of a `67 Ford in Route 46 air--and when I hear the other poets spit out their propaganda about love and loss there is Stephen Dunn caressing truth out of ink, truths I carry with me on the byways & backroads of New Jersey and the woods are suddenly a metaphor for my darker intentions and the poetry is suddenly not a metaphor at all but a large part of the soundtrack of my life which is violently blooming out of the book on my kitchen table in the ribs of New Jersey and everything's exactly as I never know it was but I recognize it still--this is what Stephen has given me and how his work has changed my life.

A member of the audience today, Ed Romond, introduced me to Stephen's work in 1982. It is appropriate that he is here today as I introduce Stephen's work to some of you who may never have experienced it before. Please join me in welcoming to the Skylands Writers & Artists Association the cage-rattler, the bone-shaker, the artist--Stephen Dunn.

[Spoken by B. J. Ward, November 1997, Hackettstown.]

[Stephen Dunn read to a large and satisfied audience in the Front Parlors at Centenary College, November 9, 1997, hosted by The Skylands Writers Assocaition, Inc. The following is a small sampling of Dunn's poetry from his New & Selected Poems 1974-1994. , W.W. Norton, Copyrighted ©, 1994 by Stepehn Dunn. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the poet. These poems cannot be reprinted without expressed permission of the author.]

[Back to Top]