Here and Now: Poems

Nothing can save us, nor do we wish to be saved. Let night come with its austere grandeur, ancient superstitions and fears. It can do us no harm.

We'll put some music on, open the curtains, let things darken as they will. She pressed her lips to mind. Pheromones, newly born, were floating between us. There was hardly any air. She kissed me again, reaching that place that sends messages to toes and fingertips, then all the way to something like home. Cavendish and the Dancer.

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Cavendish desired the man in the fedora who danced the tarantella without regard for who might care. It happens first to the poet, and in the course of writing, the poet eventually makes something, a little machine, one that for the reader produces discoveries, connections, glimmers of expression. Whatever it does it can do again and again, as many times as we need it.

The poem makes this happen for us by placing our mind as we read or listen in consonance with the associations being made by the poem: If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way? Her definition is functional and empirical, passionate and subjective: How poetry creates the poetic state of mind in a reader is the central question of this book.

It happens through the form of the poem, which guides the mind of a reader. It happens through leaps of association. And it happens as the poem explores and activates and plays with the nature of language itself. Poems exist to create a space for the possibilities of language as material. That is what distinguishes them from all other forms of writing.

Poems allow language its inherent provisionality, uncertainty, and slippages. They also give space for its physicality—the way it sounds, looks, feels in the mouth—to itself make meaning. And poems also remind us of something we almost always take for granted: The elusive, quick-silver, provisional nature of language is by necessity suppressed in ordinary conversation, as well as in most other writing.

What makes a poem different from any other use of language is that it remains the sole place designed expressly to make available those connections that are hidden when language is being used for another purpose. Language waits to be released in poetry.

Poetry enacts the possibilities and powers that lie dormant in the nature of language itself. Poems are where contradictions and possibilities of the material of this meaning-making system are deliberately brought forth and celebrated, ultimately undistracted by any other overriding purpose. Unlike other forms of writing, poetry takes as its primary task to insist and depend upon and celebrate the troubled relation of the word to what it represents.

To ask other readers questions about Here and Now , please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. May 27, Nathan rated it it was amazing. Of course, I don't know anything. But, I'd like to go on record saying that I considered this book from Dunn, upon closing it and putting it down on the table, to have been one of the best books of poetry I've ever read.

I read poetry every day. I have for over 20 years. And a shocking percentage of it is complete crap If I grabbed one book before I ran to the closet for the coming tornado, this would be the one.

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4. Typologische Aspekte der Medizinischen Versorgungszentren unter der gesundheitsökonomischen Perspektive (German Edition).

So, on those ne Ok So, on those negative reviews? Maybe try a different coffee or something In preparation for his latest collection Whereas , I decided to catch up with Dunn's s output put by reading his last two collections. Before reading Here and Now I was mostly familiar with Dunn's work from the 90s and early s.

Although many of today's poets can lose their sparks of inspiration under unnecessarily large dollops of overly erudite language and allusions, but I have always been impressed with how Dunn manages to deftly combine his vast intellect with a vital clarity of thoug In preparation for his latest collection Whereas , I decided to catch up with Dunn's s output put by reading his last two collections.

Although many of today's poets can lose their sparks of inspiration under unnecessarily large dollops of overly erudite language and allusions, but I have always been impressed with how Dunn manages to deftly combine his vast intellect with a vital clarity of thought. Fortunately, Here and Now continues to confirm Dunn's prowess as a masterful poet and one of my personal favorite writers.

Comprised of poems written in while Dunn was in his late sixties and early seventies, Here and Now contains many poems that focus on Dunn's life as a content, married man. While this does not necessarily sound like it could make for engaging poetry especially for a young twenty-something like this reviewer , Dunn's sharp observations about his marriage transcend his autobiographical specificities in favor of revealing truths about human relationships as a whole.

Poems like "The Imagined" provides an honest look inside of the mind of a speaker who has long been in a committed relationship: And yours not entirely self-serving? The hidden idea always in the depths of the mind. This is a prime example of the evocative lines that are consistently hallmarks of Dunn's work. He always finds the most direct way to express the unspoken truths of our inner lives. In "Connubial", Dunn articulates the main reason why, despite the imagined women and men of our inner lives, we stay with the real ones from our actual lives: Reading the last sentence aloud, I am comparing myself to Dunn's clarity and directness.

I am paling in that comparison. Regardless, anybody - even readers who do not always like poetry - shoudl find something to love in Dunn's work.

• Here and Now: Poems by Stephen Dunn?
• I miei ventanni (Italian Edition).
• Eleanore Wont Share (Little Boost).
• Here and Now by Stephen Dunn - Poems | Academy of American Poets.
• Here and Now | W. W. Norton & Company.

Sep 16, Jsavett1 rated it it was ok. I was really disappointed by this collection. Many, if not most, of these poems are devoid of any original or memorable concrete sensory imagerythe stuff by which good poetry is defined.

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Many of the poems here read as penned by an aging, wealthy hippy, mildly uncomfortable with his own success, but as self-indulgent as baby boomers tend to be. Dunn is at the center of poems he's not even I was really disappointed by this collection. Dunn is at the center of poems he's not even in, so unwilling is he to point the camera at someone or something else and let us forget that he's the one doing the recording. The personae on these pages are often unlikable.

Dunn does not withhold from the page, and this commitment to authenticity makes the collection one I'll keep in my library. Many of the poems feel too calculated, too in-tune with the author's own cleverness, but instead of distancing me, that humanness makes me connect to an author I've too often put on a pedestal.