Walking Light Quotes

“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.”
― Stephen Dunn, Walking Light

“Originality, of course, is what occurs when something new arises out of what's already been done.”
― Stephen Dunn, Walking Light

“Your poem effectively begins at the first moment you’ve surprised or startled yourself. Throw away everything that preceded that moment, and begin with that moment.”
― Stephen Dunn, Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry

“Poets who remain poets have, presumably, worked through the terrors of influence, and are willing to acknowledge their debts by using them in order to go their own way. They’ve learned what Thomas Mann knew: “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
― Stephen Dunn, Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry

“Donald Justice’s admonition that a good poem should exhibit “that maximum amount of wildness that the form can bear” is also relevant, though again it’s equally useful to think of expanding the notion of form to accommodate even more of the wild.”
― Stephen Dunn, Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry

“Flaubert said — I assume about the balance between repression and freedom — “Be regular and orderly in your daily life, so you can be violent and original in your work.”
― Stephen Dunn, Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry

“How to survive as an other? The small town may be a paradigm of how boundaries can permit generosity, but it is also a place where people on the fringe, say homosexuals or intellectuals or African-Americans, develop a hunger for larger and more hospitable boundaries, those offered by cities, or, in another sense, by poems. There may be implications here for open and closed forms. That aside, true community — beyond physical parameters — often arises when you realize that everything you’ve thought peculiar to yourself has been thought or even lived by someone else. This is how poetry, not to mention literature in general, manifests some of its most exquisite manners; in the course of being true to itself it makes a gesture to others.”
― Stephen Dunn, Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry

“Arnold said, “Poetry should be a criticism of life,” and I think it should be, too. I also think it should be an elucidation of life, a celebration of life, an addition to life, an emblem of the mysteries of life, etc.”
― Stephen Dunn, Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry

“Arnold said, “Poetry should be a criticism of life,”
― Stephen Dunn, Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry

“A man’s mistakes (if I may lecture you), his worst acts, aren’t out of character, as he’d like to think, are not put on him by power or stress or too much to drink, but simply a worse self he consents to be.”
― Stephen Dunn, Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry

“Surely those folks who play their lives and their work eminently safe don’t often put themselves in the position where they can be startled or enlarged. Don’t put themselves near enough to the realm of the unknown where discovery resides, and joy has been rumored to appear.”
― Stephen Dunn, Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry

“The good poem simultaneously reveals and conceals. It is in this sense that it is mysterious. The not so good poem is often mysterious only by virtue of its concealment. Or it wears exotic clothing to hide its essential plainness.”
― Stephen Dunn, Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry

“The good poem allows us to believe we have a soul. In the presence of a good poem we remember/discover the soul has an appetite, and that appetite is for emotional veracity and for the unsayable. The general condition of the soul, therefore, is stoic hunger, stoic loneliness. Paul Eluard wrote, “There is another world, and it is in this one.” The not so good poem isn’t able to startle us into consideration of that world. The soul is never pricked into wakefulness.”
― Stephen Dunn, Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry

“The good poem is implicitly philosophical. The not so good poem, conversely, may exquisitely describe a tree or loneliness, but if the description does not suggest an attitude toward nature, or human nature, we are left with a kind of dentist office art — devoted to decoration and the status quo.”
― Stephen Dunn, Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry

“I like the word “only” in the last sentence: “…you are only a troubled guest / on the dark earth.” The “only” suggests that to be a troubled guest is a normal condition, and that you might have many other identities at the same time. But to be only a troubled guest is of course a particularly sad identity.”
― Stephen Dunn, Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry