Murphy Writing of Stockton College Presents
This entry is part of Getaway Reads, an e-mail series curated by Taylor Coyle that features the writing of the Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway faculty.
After Making Love
by Stephen Dunn
No one should ask the other
“What were you thinking?”
No one, that is,
who doesn’t want to hear about the past
and its inhabitants,
or the strange loneliness of the present
filled, even as it may be, with pleasure,
or those snapshots
of the future, different heads
on different bodies.
Some people actually desire honesty.
They must never have broken
into their own solitary houses
after having misplaced the key,
never seen with an intruder’s eyes
what is theirs.
Sweetness
by Stephen Dunn
Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac
with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world
except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving
someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.
I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn’t leave a stain,
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet ….
Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice was low
and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief
until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough
to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don’t care
where it’s been, or what bitter road
it’s traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.
© Stephen Dunn. “After Making Love” originally published in Loosestrife: Poems, 1998. “Sweetness” from New and Selected Poems 1974-1994, 1989.
Read a recent NPR interview with Stephen, which was chosen as a staff favorite.
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Stephen Dunn is the author of eighteen volumes of poetry including his latest, Lines of Defense, published in 2014. His previous books include Different Hours, which was awarded the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Here and Now (2011), both from W.W. Norton. Stephen has received awards and fellowships from American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Magazine, NJ State Council on the Arts, Poetry Northwest, Mid-American Review and many others. A new and expanded edition of his book of essays, Walking Light, was published in 2001. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, but spends most of his time in Frostburg, Maryland, with his wife, the writer Barbara Hurd. You can read or listen to some of his poems here.
Want to study with Stephen Dunn? At the 2015 Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway, Stephen will lead three special feedback sessions of Advanced Poetry Writing. But hurry–only 3 seats are left.
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