Big Promotion

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn will read at a special arts event at Middlesex County College in Edison, Oct. 28.

By: Susan Van Dongen
   Since he won the Pulitzer Prize last May, poet Stephen Dunn has been invited to make television and radio appearances and do countless readings of his works. The most curious invitation, however, did not come from the academic or literary worlds, but from the domain of business and commerce.
   "The editor of Harvard Business School’s magazine called me," says Mr. Dunn from his home near Atlantic City. "She runs a conference for corporate executives on Cape Cod every spring. She wanted me to come speak and do a reading, which I agreed to do next May."

"My work gets more attention," says Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn. "I get about the same amount of invitations, but for more money now."

   Mr. Dunn says the editor was interested in having him meet the businessmen because the poet was once a "company man" — or was in danger of becoming one — until he made the decision to try his hand at writing and teaching.
   "One of my poems, ‘Last Hours,’ describes my brief corporate life, so she thought I might have something to say to the executives. Although I assured her I had nothing to say to them," he says with a chuckle.
   One of the stops on Mr. Dunn’s busy itinerary will be at a special arts event at Middlesex County College in Edison, Oct. 28. The event, co-sponsored by the Arts and Education Council of Greater Middlesex County and the N.J. Council of Teachers of English, will celebrate Mr. Dunn’s career with poetry readings, an art exhibit and live music.
   The cosmos must have been especially beneficial to Mr. Dunn last spring, because he was awarded the Pulitzer almost simultaneously to being named Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Richard Stockton College in Pomona, where he has taught since 1974.
   The Pulitzer committee singled out Mr. Dunn for Different Hours (Norton), one of his 11 collections of poetry, including Loosestrife, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in 1996. He also is the author of Walking Light: Essays and Memoirs, which has just been re-issued. Mr. Dunn’s numerous awards and grants include an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of the Arts and Letters and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
   The Pulitzer Prize, he says, has changed only a few things in his life.
   "My work gets more attention," Mr. Dunn says. "I get about the same amount of invitations, but for more money now. There’s just a higher sense of regard in general."
   Known for his musings about life in southern New Jersey — and for his penchant for table games at the casinos — Mr. Dunn has been happy to remain at Stockton.
   "I’ve been offered a couple of endowed chairs, which I’ve turned down," he says. "I didn’t need to make a prestige move. I like being around my friends, I like the environment."

The Pulitzer committee singled out Mr. Dunn for Different Hours (Norton), one of his 11 collections of poetry.

   A native New Yorker, he talks about life in South Jersey, where a literary person isn’t immersed in the same creative and intellectual atmosphere as in a big city or university town, or even a region with a history of inspiring artists and writers.
   "One of the mixed blessings about being in South Jersey is that it’s a place that hasn’t been fully imagined by anybody. It’s very good virgin territory for the writer. Any of us who are thoughtful — whether we’re artists or not — are the ‘metaphysicians of South Jersey,’ " he says. This is a reference to the poem of the same name in Different Hours, the one with the great stanza "Nothing they came up with mattered/So they were free to be eclectic, and as odd/As getting to the heart of things demanded."
   One of his true gifts is his ability take an event in sports or popular culture — like the Phillies’ botched final game of the 1993 World Series, or the cat fight between Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan at the 1994 Olympics — and see something universal and poetic.
   "If I take on whatever the world is offering at that time, it becomes an aesthetic issue to me," Mr. Dunn says. "I’m really using that material to talk about concerns of mine, which I hope transcend the moment. If I do them well, I always hope the poems will resonate beyond their occasion."
   Mr. Dunn earned his bachelor’s in history and English from Hofstra University in 1962, then attended writing workshops at the New School in Manhattan from 1964-66 while working for Nabisco as a copywriter. He quit his corporate job and traveled to Spain, where he and his wife made $2,000 last a year. With a novel under his belt, he felt encouraged to do more creative writing and was accepted at Syracuse University, where he studied with Donald Justice, W.D. Snodgrass, Philip Booth and George P. Elliott.
   "I hadn’t been a serious student, although I was a serious reader," he says. "I had gone to (Hofstra) on a basketball scholarship. I didn’t have any literary models. I didn’t know how to ‘be’ anything and it took a while for me to find myself. But I got lucky at Syracuse. I had a great group of teachers."
   When confronted with his quarter-life crisis (the fad-crisis du jour), Mr. Dunn was innately intuitive enough to make the right decision, and he celebrates this pivotal event in "Last Hours."
   "It’s about quitting that job after I got a big promotion," he says. "It was, in fact, that decision that launched my writing career. I kept getting promoted and I saw myself in danger of becoming one of those people I didn’t want to be.
   "I didn’t know what I could do, but I knew what I didn’t want to do. It was a soul decision and it was an easy one for me."
A Celebration With Stephen Dunn will take place at Middlesex County College, Woodbridge Avenue, Edison, Oct. 28, 2-5 p.m., with live music, an art exhibit and poetry readings. Tickets cost $25. For information, call (732) 249-5151.