Stephen Dunn, 1939 - 2021

You know how, when you're reading a poem, a phrase 

or image grabs you but you keep on reading anyway, 

not really absorbing or thinking about what you're reading 

farther down the page because your thinking remains stuck 

on that earlier phrase or image until you realize, some number 

of lines on, that you haven't grasped another thing about the poem 

but just that phrase or image, which dwells in you, 

in your imagination or memory or image-making factory?

Well, this is what happened (again) this afternoon as I was reading 

a poem by Stephen Dunn, whom the New York Times reports has died

of complications from Parkinson's disease in his Maryland home,

at the age of 82, Stephen Dunn, June 24, 1939 - June 24, 2021,

an exotic bit of timing if you ask me, to die on your birthday,

they way my mother almost did, going one day short of her 98th,

especially for a poet who according to the Times "celebrated

the ordinary," and he did, celebrate the ordinary, that is,

as I learned in the mid-to-late 1980's when I first got interested

in his poetry, began looking for it in magazines and bookstores.

Not that my poetry has turned out to be anything at all like his,

which has veered off into fable, the fantastical, the romantic,

the classical, the pop, the balladic, the rhapsodic, and rarely

has achieved the celebration of the ordinary except maybe for

the occasional image of a dead fly, a fighting cardinal, a swaying

elm, a passing airplane, a pause upon a staircase, an errant

shoelace, a moment of Sunday grace, an interior space, 

a cold place, a home base, a beautiful face . . . er, maybe 

the maybe of likeness is less certain than I thought?

And maybe that's because we have called upon the same spirits

over our creative lives in poetry writing, which is to say,

Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Theodore Roethke, and agree

that it has been Roethke, "especially Roethke," whom we both

returned to and returned to for sustenance and course-correction

and reaffirmation and just general how-to in the best kind

of song for either of us, for the music, that is, for the music.

You know how that is, getting mired in that one phrase or image

in the most luxurious way that interferes with your reading?

This is what just happened as I was reading in Local Time, 

a book of Dunn's poems I bought in 1987, in Atlanta, apparently,

though I've forgotten what I was doing in Atlanta in that year,

visiting no doubt from the university in Alabama where 

I had been hired to teach on a limited but long-term contract

(i.e., no tenure offered, just work, a lot of work, doing 

the shit-work the tenured faculty didn't want to waste time doing),

the only book of Dunn's I should add that I have in my library

and which I pulled from the shelf this morning after reading

of his death in The New York Times Sunday edition, 

as I often do when a poet is remembered there, just out of respect,

opening it to the first poem, a 7-parter titled "Round Trip"

and read there these lines:

        I'm watching from the window,

the father who knows education

    is all about departures, who knows

        when things are right

nobody comes home the same

lines that changed fundamentally the way I approached teaching,

even the shit-work my more sinecured colleagues eschewed,

for the brief months that I kept teaching before giving up

and trying something different something that could buy a house

and a new car and a nest egg that I knew long before 1987,

the purchase date inscribed in black ink on the book's title page,

the university was never going to buy for me, which was this:

when things are right in the classroom, nobody comes home

the same, that that is what teaching is all about and if any one

of my students goes home even marginally recognizable 

to her family after a year, two, four at university then Mom 

and Dad and student and the university and I have all wasted 

our money our expertise our time on that student, collectively, 

a massive failure I began warning my students of on the first day 

of class and on the last before term's end as home beckoned.

Which fell, I suppose, on deaf ears or at least ears unable

to comprehend though those lines were a revelation to me,

what I'd been all about or should have been about the years

I'd spent at the head of a classroom trying to help kids

improve their chances in the world, not fully understanding 

myself that one's chances in the world requires so much

of leaving oneself behind, abandoning one version for another,

reinventing, which I soon did myself, the reinvention, so

long ago before you, Stephen Dunn, had written half the way

through the opus of poems you were eventually to create

in a career that today has been celebrated as I say in the obit

pages of The New York Times Sunday edition, and so thank you 

for the education, the poems and particularly the career.