About Stephen Dobyns: Stephen J. Dobyns is an American poet and novelist born in Orange, New Jersey, and residing in Westerly, RI.
These people you used to see every day, friends or acquaintances, after a while they become as distant as any stranger, people you suddenly recall late at night--you remember something they said or something silly that someone once did. For a few mom...
It was as if pain were a room he had entered and the door had been locked behind him.
The obsession was gone. We liked each other, even loved each other. And our sex was still good, but the hunger was gone. Either it just wore out or we wore each other out. A passion like that pushes everything else out of its path. You can't be marri...
Most women are more into real estate than sex. They want to own you.
One writes a poem when one is so taken up by an emotional concept that one is unable to remain silent.
Hesitancy is the surest destroyer of talent. One cannot be timorous and reticent, one must be original and loud. New metaphors, new rhythms, new expressions of emotion can only spring from unhindered gall. Nothing should interfere with that intuition...
For the past thirty years or so, much American poetry has been marked by an earnestness that rejects the comic. This has nothing to do with seriousness. The comic can be very serious. The trouble with the earnest is that it seeks to be commended. It ...
Why are doors more difficult to open as if some sadness were leaning against them? Why do windows darken and trees bend when there is no wind? You call that occasional roar the roar of a plane and I imagine a time when I might have believed that. But...
I like it to be quiet, and it usually occurs in the morning. There are three or four places in my house where I can write and I like to keep moving around. The moment I find myself falling into a necessary routine, I change it. I'd rather not accumul...
My poems always begin with a metaphor, but my way into the metaphor may be a word, an image, even a sound. And I rarely know the nature of the metaphor when I begin to write, but there is an attentiveness that a writer develops, a sudden alertness th...
I can't believe there is a poet who hasn't eagerly put down a word one day, only to erase it the next day deciding it was sheer lunacy. It's part of the process of selection.
Many of my poems try to use a comic element to reach a place that isn't comic at all. The comic element works as a surprise. It is unexpected and energizing.
