This week, I've finally gotten around to Stephen Dunn's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Different Hours. I've probably had this collection since 2005, back when I bought poetry collections once a year around the time Pulitzer awards were announced, and I go to the bookstore and find a few I didn't have, and buy them. I didn't read them. I went to keep the spark alive, to tell myself that poetry was still a part of me.
Someone on Book-Tok or Instagram, maybe it was a reel my wife sent me, said something to the effect that books are like bottles of wine waiting for you to be in the mood to open and drink them.
When I saw Naomi Shihab Nye read in Santa Barbara recently, she talked about Stephen, about some of her personal memories with him, and then a few weeks later, someone else mentioned Stephen and afterwards, I spotted his collection on my shelf while on a zoom meeting for work where I wasn't really there at all. At least in my head. I disassociate a lot. Drives my wife crazy.
And maybe it's because I've developed a fondness for Portugal and Pessoa, maybe it's because I've been thinking about the "nice guy" epidemic on social media and what it means to be a "good man" because people keep telling me I'm a good man when I'm not really, or maybe it's because I struggle to be in the present—here with you, or my wife, anyone really—that this poem felt like a punch to the fucking dick.
At The Restaurant
if we made ourselves conscious of it.
Six people are too many people
and a public place the wrong place
for what you’re thinking—
stop this now.
Who do you think you are?
The duck à l’orange is spectacular,
the flan the best in town.
But there among your friends
is the unspoken, as ever,
chatter and gaiety its familiar song.
And there’s your chronic emptiness
spiraling upward in search of words
you’ll dare not say
without irony.
You should have stayed at home.
It’s part of the social contract
to seem to be where your body is,
and you’ve been elsewhere like this,
for Christ’s sake, countless times;
behave, feign.
Certainly you believe a part of decency
is to overlook, to let pass?
Praise the Caesar salad. Praise Susan’s
black dress, Paul’s promotion and raise.
Inexcusable, the slaughter in this world.
Insufficient, the merely decent man.
And there's your chronic emptiness spiraling upward...
Behave, feign...
Insufficient, the merely decent man.
Whenever I read a poem that hits me so hard, I go to the Poetry Foundation to look the poet up and this was the blurb I read.
Poet Stephen Dunn was born on June 24, 1939 in New York City. The first of his family to go to college, Dunn earned a BA from Hofstra University on a basketball scholarship and later worked in advertising. In an interview with Poets and Writers, Dunn discussed the leap from working in advertising to writing poetry: “My first job out of college was writing in-house brochures for Nabisco in New York, and I kept getting promoted. I was in danger, literally, of becoming like the men who were around me. So I quit and went to Spain to write a novel, and wrote a bad one. But I was trying to write poetry too, and those efforts seemed more promising. The rest, as they say, is history, or my history.”
I think I'm the first person on my Dad's side of the family to go to college (my brother is the first to get an advanced degree). Advertising during the time Stephen worked was a hot-shit industry like tech, in New York no less. I've also written a bad novel.
Sure these are all coincidences and don't mean anything, except that my future history could look more like Stephen Dunn and less like another VP at another tech company. And I have to remember that, have to remember that not making a choice is still a choice, so I need to actively choose because I'm choosing either way.
