Poetry for Prisoners of the Cave

Those who are close to me know that I have a special place in my life for poets. For Day 23 of the @BestSelfCo Edison Deck challenge, I hunted for a card that would allow me to delve into the place I hold for poems and poets. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that poetry has no blatant call out in this “everyday” idea deck. So, I repurposed the experience card that asks, “What have you bought that you love so much you would happily buy it again?” Ignoring the implicit bias and commercialism that this question holds with its assumption that love and/or happiness can be bought, my answer offers a tinge of poetic justice. I would happily buy again poet Stephen Dunn’s collection, Landscape at the End of the Century, published in 1991. His sardonic wit, honest introspection and self-witnessing, and compassion for his imperfect acts and an imperfect world are part of what has made this collection of poetry a well-loved talisman. I keep it accessible for any major set-back, loss, crossroad, and most importantly for emotional companionship.

The random intersection of moments in our lives are put there testing our attention and intention. In 1996, I heard Stephen Dunn on NPR talking about this collection. I had not read anything by Dunn, but in that moment, he captured my attention. I sought out his book and discovered he could write as passionately about the game of basketball in a stanza as he could about the thrill of shifting a car from second to third, describe his favorite hour before dinner or the many pleasures hidden in a stolen kiss. He put into his poems what we experience, think, and rarely have the courage to give testament. The final poem of the collection, “Loves,” is the one that I read when life seems unbearable,

Once in Chicago at the Hilton I slipped

an "I quit" note under my boss' door,

took a night flight home.

Whatever I love about my life

started there.

or when my introvert’s inability to suffer fools is irrepressible,

I love that the shy ones

sometimes grow wings,

and that the peacocks disappoint

when they begin to speak.

or when I need to hear a man deem Emily Dickinson a hero. “Loves” is a long poem, and it always feels like a cleansing when I wrap myself in it and find my way to the other side. Giving love the final word in a teetering world of hypocrisy always gives me hope.

The collection starts with “Allegory of the Cave” a short 20th century update of Plato’s treatise and I found so apropos during the Trump presidency, the pandemic, and current political divisions. The prisoners in the cave would rather believe in the shadows that they built a belief system around, choosing to continue to stare at the dark cave walls rather than turn to face the light that illuminates truth.

“So from the cave’s upper reaches, removed from harm, he called out

the disturbing news. What lovely echoes, the prisoners said, what a fine musical place to live.”

What follows is a series of poems that speak to the modern world post-Plato including “Update” whose final lines speak to the end of the 1990’s as much as today,

“It’s the end of the century; almost everyone dreams of money or revenge.”

The collection ranges from a rant at artistic bureaucracy in “What They Wanted” to a wry painting of a “Landscape at the End of the Century” that wishes for a nude, a wild tiger, and

“. . . tattered mute angels that no one has called upon in years.”

Dunn was born in 1939, the same year as my mother. I wish my mother had been granted the same freedom of expression and industry as the men of her era. I know she would have had a thing or two to add to the dichotomy of life that Dunn so vulnerably set to poems. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his collection, Different Hours. I loved Landscape . . . so much, I didn’t delve into his further collections. I was afraid it would be like bad movie sequels, spoiling what I loved about my well-worn first edition. Yet, a poet rarely writes for approval, for readers, or for others’ disappointment. A poet writes to capture a moment, a feeling, a state of being. It is time to surround myself with his other work. He wrote an essay for Sports Blog Nation called “Basketball and Poetry.”

“One of the points that I make in the essay,” he told NPR’s Weekend Edition in 2013, “is the similarity between poetry and basketball, is a chance to be better than yourself, to transcend yourself, if you’re hot that day. And that happens in writing in our best moments, where we find ourselves saying what we didn’t know we knew or couldn’t have said in any other circumstance.”

Dunn passed away on June 24, 2021, on his 82nd birthday. It was the same day I was making yet another life transition, with Landscape at the End of the Century in hand. His final collection of poetry, The Not Yet Fallen World,” is set to be published in 2022. In addition to purchasing a second copy of Landscape at the End of the Century, I’ll happily fall in love with his final treatise on life, because in his own words,

“I love how we go on.”