Life & Wisdom Quote by Douglas Dunn

Dunn’s line cuts against the lingering fantasy that a poem is a self-contained machine: get the words right and meaning will obediently appear. By insisting that reading aloud is “gestural as much as precise,” he reframes performance as part of the poem’s apparatus, not a decorative afterthought. Precision still matters-the right word, the right stress-but gesture is the human surplus that language alone can’t fully score: breath, pause, tempo, the slight lift on an image, the glance that signals irony. Those choices don’t just deliver a poem; they interpret it in real time.

The subtext is a quiet challenge to literary authority. On the page, the poet seems to control everything. In front of an audience, control is negotiated. A line break becomes a moment of bodily timing; a metaphor becomes a facial decision. “Gestural” also nods to the social fact of the reading: the poet is not only voicing text but handling a room, gauging attention, building trust, smoothing friction. Even silence becomes a kind of statement.

Contextually, Dunn comes out of a British poetry culture where public readings are both democratic and perilous: the poem meets listeners who may not share the critic’s patience for dense ambiguity. His phrasing defends orality without romanticizing it. A good reading isn’t sloppy self-expression; it’s craft plus presence. The poem survives on paper, but it lives by being embodied.