Named
He'd spent his life trying to control the names
people gave him;
oh the unfair and the accurate equally hurt.
Just recently he'd been a son-of-a-bitch
and sweetheart in the same day,
and once again knew what antonyms
love and control are, and how comforting
it must be to have a business card -
Manager, Specialist - and believe what it says.
Who, in fact, didn't want his most useful name
to enter with him,
when he entered a room, who didn't want to be
that kind of lie? A man who was a sweetheart
and a son-of-a-bitch
was also more or less every name
he'd ever been called, and when you die, he thought,
that's when it happens,
you're collected forever into a few small words.
But never to have been outrageous or exquisite,
no grand mistake
so utterly yours it causes whispers
in the peripheries of your presence - that was
his fear.
"Reckless"; he wouldn't object to such a name
if it came from the right voice with the right
amount of reverence.
Someone nearby, of course, certain to add "fool."
Commentary
I heard about Dunn through a friend and searched the Internet for some represenative poetry. I found two pieces, this and http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~richie/poetry/html/auth125.html and though the latter is definitely the better poem, this had some neat phrases (“whispers in the peripheries of your presence”) that I liked more. I analysed this poem by removing the spacing and making a paragraph out of it. The abrupt breaks that verse-form allows (“oh the unfair and the accurate…”) get laid out in starker relief that way and you wonder what value came out of calling this poetry, except the license to insert those choppy sentences. Or was the power of the important lines (“you’ve collected forever into a few small words”) only apparent because I had seen it the proper format first?
Still, Dunn’s never been submitted to Minstrels and the writing is good enough that this merits as an unfair omission. The poem’s quiet anguish for a sense of proper identity is a very fashionable question, especially in America, which is Dunn’s provenance. I itch to dismiss this sentiment as trite but Dunn’s artful arrangement of words stays my tongue.
— Sam