![\"stephen-dunn-whatgoeson.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/06\/stephen-dunn-whatgoeson.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\nThat man in the field staring at the sky
\nwithout the excuse of a dog
\nor rifle—there must be a reason
\nwhy I’ve put him there.
\nOnly moments ago, he didn’t exist.
\nHe might be claiming this field
\nas his own, centering himself in it
\nuntil confident he belongs. Or
\nhe could be dangerous, one of those
\nmen who doesn’t know
\nwhy he talks to God.
\nI thought of making him a flamingo
\nstanding alone on one pink leg,
\na symbol of discordancy
\nbetween object and environment.
\nBut I’ve grown so weary of inventions
\nthat startle but don’t satisfy.
\nI think he must have come to grieve
\na good friend’s death, and just wants
\nto stand there, numbly, quite sure
\nthe sky he’s looking at is vacant.
\nBut I see that he may be smiling—
\nhis friend’s death was years ago—
\nand he might be out there to savor
\nthe solitary elation of having discovered
\nwhat had eluded him until now.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nTwo years ago, I featured “Madrugada<\/a>” from Stephen Dunn<\/a>‘s Everything Else in the World<\/i><\/a> and mentioned that The New Yorker<\/i> had published a new poem, “History<\/a>,” that was not in that collection. You’ll find it in What Goes On: Selected and New Poems 1995-2009<\/i><\/a>, along with “Talk to God<\/a>” (the Poets Out Loud<\/i> website), “And So<\/a>” (How a Poem Happens<\/i>, with commentary from Dunn on the creative process!), and “Zero Hour<\/a>” (from the collection Different Hours<\/i>, republished on Beliefnet).<\/p>\n
It does not include “If a Clown<\/a>” (also published in The New Yorker<\/i>), which is a shame, because that’s a great poem. And maybe it’s a great illustration of a point Dunn made in an interview with Guernica<\/i><\/a> back in 2004: “It seems to me that no matter how perverse or private you might think your attitudes are about anything, if you speak them well there’ll always be a few others nodding,” he said. “My best experiences with literature as a reader have been when something that I thought was freaky about myself, or something odd or private that I hadn’t told anybody, got articulated or enacted in a poem or story or a novel. It simply brings us into the human fold. Literature at its best is communal in that way.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
That man in the field staring at the sky without the excuse of a dog or rifle—there must be a reason why I’ve put him there. Only moments ago, he didn’t exist. He might be claiming this field as his own, centering himself in it until confident he belongs. Or he could be dangerous, one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}