Life & Wisdom Quote by Douglas Dunn

There’s a quiet defiance in Dunn’s insistence that his poems “told stories.” It pushes back against the idea of poetry as pure lyric shimmer or private riddle-box, a posture that can feel like gatekeeping dressed up as refinement. Dunn, a poet with a strong working-class consciousness and an ear for lived speech, is staking out a craft position: poems aren’t merely moods; they’re events with consequences, populated by people, tethered to time.

The phrasing matters. “I’ve always thought” makes it sound modest, even casual, but it’s also a subtle claim of continuity and conviction. Dunn isn’t converting to narrative late in life; he’s naming what he’s been doing all along, whether critics called it elegy, political witness, or domestic realism. That “always” suggests a long-running argument with literary fashion, especially the postwar prestige of abstraction and difficulty. Story becomes a way to smuggle in social texture: class, labor, intimacy, grief.

Context sharpens the stakes. Dunn’s most famous work, Elegies, is built from devastatingly clear narrative units - scenes, addresses, recollections - that refuse to aestheticize loss into prettiness. Story here isn’t plot for plot’s sake; it’s an ethical commitment to specificity. The subtext is that meaning arrives through sequence: what happened, to whom, and what it cost. In an age that often prizes the “poetic” as the vague and atmospheric, Dunn argues for poetry as a form of testimony that still knows how to sing.