Walking Light: Essays & Memoirs - Hardcover

Dunn, Stephen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393034887 ISBN 13: 9780393034882

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1993

Synopsis

The renowned poet presents essays exploring the mysteries of composition and the nature of poetry, as well as anecdotal memoirs on such diverse subjects as basketball, storytelling, and silence

About this title

Review:

Like his poetry, Stephen Dunn's essays on poetry (and creativity) are grounded and funny and accessible without ceding intelligence or audacity. There's no unnecessary loftiness in Walking Light. One essay addresses poetry's similarities to basketball--"Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence.... What you want to be is in some kind of flow"--while another compares the knowledge and daring of poets to that of gamblers. And yet another likens poets to ice travelers: "The farther we go in a poem or on the ice the fewer and fewer choices we have, and we would want it no other way." Throughout the essays Dunn returns again and again to the need for surprise and discovery in a poem: "Your poem effectively begins," he writes, "at the first moment you've surprised or startled yourself. Throw away everything that preceded that moment." Dunn illustrates his points with a terrific selection of poems by Goethe, Randall Jarrell, Ellen Bryant Voight, Paul Celan, and others.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Dunn, a poet with eight published collections, turns to the essay with appealing diffidence but without anything especially startling or even lovely to say. The author sticks closely to a kind of folksy revelation (``The Truth: A Memoir'' consists of the personal stories he has embellished over the years, and this essay links up with ``Artifice and Sincerity,'' in which Dunn sets up the straw man of sincerity only to knock it down with the charger of imagination) or else to the memories of his childhood in Queens, lone gentile in a neighborhood of Jewish kids, making his way into individuality by means of basketball and then poetry. Dunn's about as pure a product of the American Workshop style as you can find--and his essays have a homogenized, can-you-believe-that? approach peculiar to the poetry of this style: language at simmer, colors as dull as the Gap's, homiletics dressing up as wisdom (``To know where you are requires imagination. To move well requires skill. Behind both, optimally, should be a sense of history''; ``Lovers are unreliable witnesses, which is why reliability is not always to be desired''). The essays--many first published in AWP, the academic poets' house-journal--are nearly impossible to imagine as having been written by anyone other than a tenured American creative-writing teacher circa 1980's. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0393034887
• ISBN 13: 9780393034882
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 187