Poet explores the ordinary
After graduation, Dunn took a corporate job in New York, about which he wrote a poem, "The Last Hours," recalling "men in serious suits" and "a life of selling snacks, talking snack strategy, thinking snack thoughts."
Now a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Dunn just quit that job, and with his "happily adventuresome wife," he flew to Spain where he experimented with writing for 11 months, at which point the $2,200 they had saved was gone.
"We came home with no money at all," Dunn said by phone from his home in Frostburg, Md. "That time in Spain set the course. I wrote a novel that I threw away, and I learned I should be writing poetry."
As a poet, Dunn has seen his share of controversy, usually over religious themes. For example, during public readings of his poem, "At The Smithville Methodist Church." The poem recalls that when his 8-year-old daughter attended an arts-and-crafts week at the church, she came home singing "Jesus Loves Me."
It is that line that has caused some people to walk out.
But those who walk out don't hear the positive finish.
When Dunn went to the church to see the crafts and hear the children sing, he realized, "You can't teach disbelief to a child . . . and she was beaming. All the way home she sang the songs, occasionally standing up for Jesus."
Dunn has written 11 books of poetry, including "The Different Hours," "The Insistence of Beauty" — and a new one will be published in September, "Everything Else in the World."
While he would like to believe that the poet is in control, he concedes that it is the reader who "completes the poems. Many readers have pointed out things they've found in my poems that I didn't intend."
Dunn said his poetry is geared to his interest in "the mysteries of the ordinary."
Now 67 and retired from teaching, he enjoys doing summer workshops and visiting professorships, such as the one he just finished at New York University.
He will never retire from poetry, however. "Poetry is at its best when it articulates for me things I'd felt but didn't have the words for."
When Dunn performs a public reading he prefers no theatrical flair. "I try to be as true as possible to my own rhythms — not in a flamboyant way. I try to frame the poem so that the audience can hear it the way I heard it."
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