Between Angels: Stephen Dunn

                                              

Today I finished Stephen’s Dunn’s 1989 poetry collection Between Angels while sitting beside a wall of windows that opened onto a street in Perrysburg, Ohio. After the final poem, “Walking the Marshland,” I closed the plastic-wrapped back cover, rested the book on my thigh, and looked out at the cars piling up at the traffic light. When the light turned, and the line began rolling forward, one woman flicking a cigarette onto the asphalt before reaching down to shift her weathered pick-up into gear, I saw two men about to cross paths while walking their dogs. As they passed, the two dogs began barking violently enough that that their heads jerked back and forth until each man jerked at his respective leash, and without so much as glancing at the other, pulled the dogs firmly apart. As the man facing me walked past, his golden retriever glancing anxiously backward, I saw he had an idle smile on his face, and I couldn’t tell if it was embarrassment at the dog’s lack of obedience, or pride in its spirit, or if he was simply a man whose lips pinched upward throughout an afternoon walk, while the sky clogged with dark clouds and spouts of rain drifted over the city in waves. And after a moment of watching the clouds swell above buildings like space expanding, I realized that all I wanted to do was watch whatever passed before my vision outside the window, be it traffic or birds or the funnel clouds that have been forming all over Ohio this week, because I was recovering from the experience of being immersed in poetry for the past two odd hours, and I was once again acclimating myself to the normal halts and strides of life.

I could break that thought down a bit more. How the ceasuras and line breaks of poetry start to resemble reality, and how after reading for a prolonged period life itself seems to have an almost, almost discernable narrative. But, suffice to say, when I started Between Angels this afternoon, I was not in this state of near-transcendence. Actually, I was sort of disgusted. Let me backtrack, and reveal a glimmer of my less attractive side.

There’s a certain genus of poetry I’ve come to dislike, and it’s not exactly a school or a movement so much as a bundle of traits that together, manage to siphon off any energy or inspiration I have, and make me generally not want to read or write so much as an email. Here’s how I would characterize the poetry that has this effect on me—the images and ideas are nebulous, the line breaks are arbitrary, and the language has no pressure or focus. Separating Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek into five word lines would make better poetry. Still, my prejudice against this type of poetry—if poetry that crumples the soul like a ball of aluminum foil is a type—is not purely aesthetic, though that certainly plays a part. I also think poetry that trades in pleasant sounding vagaries is disingenuous, too lazy for real attempts at interesting language, or honesty, as well as subconsciously (I hope) pandering.

That entire last paragraph all to say that I initially thought I had stumbled into a mire of said nebulous poetry when I began reading Between Angels. I was wrong—I now love this book—but look at the last lines of the first poem, “The Guardian Angel” and I can show you where my wild assumptions budded:

Even his lamentations are unheard,
though now
in for the long haul, trying to live

beyond despair, he believes, he needs
to believe
everything he does takes root, hums

beneath the surfaces of the world.

The shape of this poem on the page immensely appeals to me, and I think the line breaks are, for the most part, interesting—the way the word needs is poignantly emphasized, how the word hums hangs mysteriously above the white space of the page, so close to sound we can almost hear it before dropping into the last line, which punctuates the three line stanzas that have come before. All this is very nice, but as far as the content of what I had just read, I thought, “Oh, shit. And I really wanted to like Stephen Dunn.” (I had read any essay by him in the Georgia Review several years ago about sound and sense in poetry that made me think he was a poet I could get along with.) Because what’s humming beneath the surfaces of the world? Oh, you’ve forgotten? It’s everything the angel does! He believes—he needs to believe! it’s humming. Beneath the surfaces of the world. Bzzz…It’s a well-crafted but generic ending that could have been written by anyone, and probably has been, though I think simply substituting something more specific than the world would have helped.

So, one poem in, and I was already preparing for a full descent into the maudlin, waiting for Dunn to write about recognizing god in his labradoodle or how desire is like a fog or young sunshine or fill in the blank yourself with lexicons like bone, mouth, memory, or any poem in Apology for Want by Mary Jo Bang. But it never came, and as I continued reading I gradually relaxed, and instead of dreading the ending of poems I started to see the way humor interfuses Dunn’s serious view of the world, and how he attempts to live joyfully in a life plagued by sorrow. Several of the poems address the ubiquitous cruelties that spot the papers and news, from a girl tortured to death in front of her father in Argentina to a terrorist, and these are good poems, unflinching poems, and I like the way Dunn addresses them as unavoidable areas of human existence rather than simply fodder for writing, or an exercise in empathy. Consider the poem “Sadness”, for instance, where Dunn writes:

I told my artist friends who courted it
not to suffer
on purpose, not to fall in love
with sadness
because it would naturally be theirs
without assistance.

This is a graceful passage, with perfectly paced lines that add to the gestalt of the poem after each break, and it also shows how Dunn neither looks for, nor turns from, the problem of pain, acknowledging how sad stories accumulate with age while also warning artists away from obsession with it. He should have made this a personal email to Kim Addonizio. Kidding!

One poem that I stopped to reread several times, “Urgencies,” showcases the lighter side of Dunn, and also demonstrates his ability to quicken suburban moments into something profound and meaningful. It begins with Dunn waking on a rainy Saturday and getting out of bed, but he keeps thinking about his still sleeping wife, and he wants her awake as well, and he ends the poem by writing:

I wanted my wife
down here, I wanted her in some usual

place doing some usual things.
What I had to say to her
was so insignificant only she would understand.

I sat down to eat. The rain picked up.
A man could die
just like that. Or begin to slide.

I started to clank the dishes,
make some noise.

So much is happening even in these few lines—the intimacy between the narrator and his wife, his kind of endearing selfishness and obsession, and the insidious thoughts of mortality while making breakfast…to me, this is a fantastic poem. In the interest of full disclosure, I will also say I’m working for a painter this summer in northern Ohio, while far to the south, my wife is finishing teaching for the year and commuting up on the weekends, so this poem definitely overlapped with my personal experience. But, I think that’s part of the reason we love poetry. In times of heartbreak and rejection, we turn to sad poems, poems that speak to us. In times of joy, we respond to poems of lyric praise. I remember enjoying the poem “To A Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing,” by Yeats, but it didn’t stand out to me until rejections were piling up, and my work felt worthless, and then I developed a minor obsession with it. The lines Bred to a harder thing/Than Triumph echoed in my head while I walked to the bus stop, before I taught for the day, while I eavesdropped on other conversations in my office, and strangely enough, they gave me comfort. I’m not sure why. Schadenfreude?

So how do I reconcile my distaste at the beginning on the book with my slow conversion? I think it has to do with respect. By the end of Between Angels, I trusted Stephen Dunn, in his ability to illuminate ordinary moments and his direct gaze into the mystery of sorrow, which is why, in retrospect, I can overlook the ending of “Guardian Angel”, which I spent the first part of this essay bitching about, and a few other endings like it. Perhaps Dunn felt he had earned a short flight into romantic fancy. Maybe it’s simply a matter of taste. I don’t know. But when he ends “Walking the Marshland” with a reminder to Praise refuge…praise whatever you can, I know the parting words of Stephen Dunn, now written over twenty years ago, can’t be dismissed as unearned epiphany, or poetic rhetoric—instead, it’s one last desperate appeal, in a whole book of them, to live in a world where beauty is inseparable from sadness as joyfully as we can.