Stephen Dunn

THE POEM, ITS BURIED SUBJECT AND THE REVISIONIST READER

Behind “The Guardian Angel”

To revisit an old poem of yours is often to come to it as an interested stranger. By degree, you're more reader than author, and like all readers you bring to the poem an aesthetic and a psychology forged by personal history and your history of reading. If twenty years have elapsed since you’ve written a poem about a certain kind of spiritual endurance, and in the meantime you’ve become, say, a communist and have turned almost exclusively to reading poems for their political significance, then you’re likely that poem’s revisionist. Even if you’ve remained roughly the same, the world around you hasn’t, and inevitably provides you with a slightly different angle of regard. The good reader works hard at trying to compensate for these vicissitudes, tries to give each poem a fair trial and a fair sentence, though the writer as reader of his own poem may still be clinging – perhaps even rightly so – to some old allegiances. But one thing is sure: As author, no matter how well you’ve blended your intentions with your discoveries, the reader always completes your poem.

At first, I found this intolerable, like someone renaming my child. And, I confess, it remains intolerable much of the time. But. So much that’s instructive begins with but. Moreover, if I agree with Stendhal, and I do, “that speech was given to man to conceal his thoughts,” then I shouldn’t have been very much surprised that my poem “The Guardian Angel,” or any poem, for that matter, might have an elusive subtext. But I was surprised.

No, I hadn't become a communist, but twenty years did elapse before I revisited “The Guardian Angel,” enough time for me to witness the poem differently. Almost instantly, there it was – the buried subject -- hiding like much of the world itself, not far from the surface.

More often than not, to be wholly unaware of what's driving your poem means that you're listening to the wrong cues, and therefore likely to make poor choices. You think you’re writing about that time she left me, but fail to realize that your poem might simultaneously need to be exploring the nature of loss. You’re following the lesser drift. You need to revise, but as long as the deeper subject remains hidden you’re only thinking cosmetically, just shifting a few words around. Or, what you allow yourself to think of as subtlety is really just a kind of avoidance, an unconscious refusal to enter certain delicate territory. Or, even more typically these days, you’re in the headlong process of composing associatively, disparate image following disparate image, but never seem to arrive at the poem’s locus of concern. You’re dazzling, you’re on your way to postmodernist heaven, but you’ve yet to find a principle of selection; almost anything can be substituted for anything else. The radical entry into your subject eludes you. Your poem has taken its place among the many casualties of indulgence and unconsciousness.

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