Work and Love

by Stephen Dunn

Book by Dunn, Stephen

Genres: Poetry

71 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Stephen Dunn was born in New York City in 1939. He earned a B.A. in history and English from Hofstra University, attended the New School Writing Workshops, and finished his M.A. in creative writing at Syracuse University. Dunn has worked as a professional basketball player, an advertising copywriter, and an editor, as well as a professor of creative writing.

Dunn's books of poetry include Everything Else in the World (W. W. Norton, 2006); Local Visitations (2003); Different Hours (2000), winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry; Loosestrife (1996); New and Selected Poems: 1974-1994 (1994); Landscape at the End of the Century (1991); Between Angels (1989); Local Time (1986), winner of the National Poetry Series; Not Dancing (1984); Work & Love (1981); A Circus of Needs (1978); Full of Lust and Good Usage (1976); and Looking For Holes In the Ceiling 1974. He is also the author of Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry (BOA Editions, 2001), and Riffs & Reciprocities: Prose Pairs (1998).

Dunn's other honors include the Academy Award for Literature, the James Wright Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He has taught poetry and creative writing and held residencies at Wartburg College, Wichita State University, Columbia University, University of Washington, Syracuse University, Southwest Minnesota State College, Princeton University, and University of Michigan. Dunn is currently Richard Stockton College of New Jersey Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing and lives in Port Republic, New Jersey.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Re-read -- my first copy got lost somewhere in the early Eighties, though I have a distinct memory of reading this in March 1982 (I bought it, as well as Full of Lust and Good Usage, at the same time), and of letting a girlfriend read my copy -- maybe she has it? Dunn came to Denison to read in February 1982. Work and Love was published in 1981, and on February 9, 1982, Dunn signed the copy I'm reading this morning (three days after Dunn's death) "For Paul" -- whom I'll assume is Paul Bennett, who would have been responsible for bringing Dunn to Granville, two hours south of Oberlin [where Dunn's daughter went to college in the early Nineties], perhaps on Denison's Beck Fellowship, and perhaps had already a copy of Dunn's work (I'm speculating) so sold the signed copy that ended up at a used bookstore (Ben Franklin Mindfair) in Oberlin, OH where I picked it up in 2017. Don't get me wrong; I picked it up because it was signed "For Paul 2.9.82" -- when my son and I were checking out the Conservatory. Possible, too, of course, that Bennett's only copy of Work and Love got estated after Paul's 2002 death and wound up at the Oberlin Ben Franklin 15 years later. Whatever.

Here's what bothers me about Dunn's sequence that offers so much. It reached me then and still nettles. Perhaps because, like me, Stephen Dunn was a (refrigerator, in his case) salesman's son, and wrote of the suburbs in a way unafraid to comically inflate the scope of his self-examination ("Odysseus at Rush Hour"). Writing about the impending death of a terminally ill friend (poem's dedicated to "Joe Gillon, 35, four weeks to live"), in "Letter About Myself to You," Dunn says,

Listen, I'm four years older than you
with a tennis date at five.
That's not guilt, it's another broken piece
among the puzzle's broken pieces
it's the silence that comes back
after "Why?" is shouted in an empty room.
I need to know if love's absurd
to you now. Or meaningful, perhaps,
for the first time? Your wife,
do you want to make love to her
or to everyone else?

Dunn so elegantly narrates a situation in which no game-rules apply -- and Dunn is a gambler, so he's familiar with this edge. When everything is a game you keep playing. There are moments, however, and the gambler knows them, when you must stop. A puzzle is a game, while the silence "that comes back," even amid the Homeric narrational fluency the stanzaless lines invite, is, we're tempted to say, Joe Gilon's answer to the poet's invocation of a silent room, where the game is, again, re-invoked as a series of choices that at first seem no different than accidents.

It's a book that, after rehearsals of its titular themes, becomes about death as the labor of grief, family life as the reclamation quiet makes of silence. You could catalogue the poem-types Dunn refines here: the poem about driving guiltily home [like a country and western song]; the poem about physical prowess and competition; the poem about a student whose work clarifies and chastens the master's presumption; the cracked fairy tale. All of them have their moments in subsequent volumes. The poems here that have stayed with me after all these years include "My Brother's Work," "That Saturday Without a Car," "With No Experience in Such Matters," "Coming On" and "Elementary Poem."

[Stephen Lamb · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fun synchronicity, discovering this Stephen Dunn collection I'd been saving to read today on my 42nd birthday was written while Dunn himself was 42, and published a year before I was born.

"Tonight I want to prolong all arrivals.
I want to be perpetually alive
in the tense air
that surrounded Einstein
moments before E=MC2."

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some fine poems in this book.poems that have lasted properly through various selections and anthologies, though this book shows the rough edge of Dunn's work, the push for his voice and the grounding of his best work. Poems like "Leaves" and "That Saturday Without a Car" and "In the San Bernadinos," not to mention "I Come Home Wanting to Touch Everyone" and "Essay to a Friend in Love with the Wrong Man Again," Dunn touches exquisitely on the contrary and mundane, poems that have a level of honesty that good poetry reveals to us. But a lot of other poems here seem to struggle with their contrariness,for ultimately they are posed as conceit, not discovery. But shouldn't we all have such struggles early in our careers?

[UM-Flint · Rating 4 out of 5]

An early collection of Dunn's poems, in which he is still discovering his voice. It is charming, touching the contrary and mundane.