What Goes On

"Stephen Dunn was my first teacher. What Goes On is his second book of new and selected poems, but his influence on the way I think about poems extends beyond the reach of any one collection and also beyond the reach of the poems themselves. I was already in my mid-30s when I enrolled as a continuing education student in Dunn’s undergraduate class. I had a lot of big ideas that I wanted to express in poetry, or that’s as close as I can come now to whatever it was I thought I wanted to do. For a year I wrote very bad poems, consistently among the worst in the room on any given evening. Dunn’s advice, which I understood but couldn’t manage to follow, was to set aside ideas in favour of things. William Carlos Williams is so often quoted in this regard: ‘No ideas but in things.’ I think Stephen wanted me to try, ‘No ideas at all!’ Dunn is himself a very philosophical poet, and this was odd, somewhat dictatorial advice coming from someone who always mixes image with intellect, but he knew that I could think. He also knew that I couldn’t render an image. He wanted the horse before the cart, or, at least no carts without horses, as those things aren’t going to go anywhere! Every thought in Dunn’s work emerges as a direct response to experience. Hence, his ruminations, which tend to undermine our daily assumptions and comfortable moral values, feel as though they have emerged from life rather than from scholarship."