The Room and the World by McCullough Laura;

Author:McCullough, Laura;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Syracuse University Press

The Penumbra

Jason Schneiderman

It can be easy to think of Stephen Dunn as a sort of miniaturist in the Raymond Chandler mode, presenting, as one reviewer put it, a “regular guy cursed with an understanding of human nature more subtle than he’d prefer” (Brouwer 2009). Dunn’s self-consciously plainspoken style often allows him to play with the gap between what is being said and what is being communicated. There’s a wonderful moment in the poem “Mercy” that illustrates this technique: “My wife whispered to me / This music is better than it sounds” (WG, 180). In context, the wife is apologizing for the bad performance of a good score, but the gap is clear. This is funny because we recognize the speech act as the intended apology, but also a clear denial of reality. Dunn frequently creates ambiguity and dissonance in language that could not seem clearer or more natural, and I call this space “the penumbra.” The penumbra is that excess meaning surrounding the dense flame of the straightforward and literal that drives his poems. Hovering in the margins of Dunn’s poems, especially the poems that deal with the men and women, are wonderful contradictions and undermining implications. Dunn’s poems are not simply the recordings of a sharp observer but observations that sharp observers will call into question. It often seems like Dunn’s speaker has said all there is to say, but there is a huge amount of work remaining for the careful reader.

The poem “What Goes On” is the title poem of Dunn’s second volume of collected poems. At first it seems to tell an unpleasant story of an unpleasant marriage. The wife cheats, leaves her husband, and ends up alone. She gets cancer, the treatments become debilitating, and her husband asks her to return. They live what seems to be a marriage blanc. The husband gets back the wife he never stopped wanting; the wife is cared for in her weakness.

The poem has a plural narrator, a “we” that speaks about the marriage as it is observed from the outside. What is interesting here, what goes on in what I am calling the penumbra, is that the community is not distressed by divorce but by caretaking without passion. A divorce makes perfect sense to the community, and it is narrated as a more or less familiar situation. Similarly, to care for a lover who is ill or dying would be familiar territory. But the combination of the two—the end of passion followed by the tenderness of caretaking—is distressing and tender and poignant at the same time. Two-thirds of the way into the poem, we are told that “each of them called it love,” but the narrator both undermines this assertion and highlights the pathos: “because precision didn’t matter anymore” (ibid., 86).

This is clearly a poem about love, and yet this form of love is a deep threat to the community that watches this couple, a community that has no words for what they want to name this relationship. In

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.