A Poem for a Thursday #305

Stephen Dunn was born in New York City in 1939. He went to college on a basketball scholarship and then worked in advertising. He discussed how he switched from advertising to writing poetry in an interview with Poets and Writers.

My first job out of college was writing in-house brochures for Nabisco in New York, and I kept getting promoted. I was in danger, literally, of becoming like the men who were around me. So I quit and went to Spain to write a novel, and wrote a bad one. But I was trying to write poetry too, and those efforts seemed more promising. The rest, as they say, is history, or my history.

Because with alarming accuracy
she'd been identifying patterns
I was unaware of—this tic, that
tendency, like the way I've mastered
the language of intimacy
in order to conceal how I felt—

I knew I was in danger 
of being terribly understood.

Connubial
Stephen Dunn