Looking into Poems

Poetry Column for Chips, Luther College Student Newspaper

Luther College, Decorah, Iowa

By Carol Gilbertson, Dennis M. Jones Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities, 2002-04

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November 14, 2002: "Privacy Is as Essential as Companionship"

Stephen Dunn, "A Secret Life" (Landscape at the End of the Century, W. W. Norton, 1992).

Sample Section:

Everyone needs companionship and intimacy, but we all may need privacy just as much. And the deepest privacy you make for yourself, even in relationships with your closest confidant, is your own secret life. When you're living inside of your head, thoughts enter that space and even make their home there, but some are things you just don't say--not ever. No matter how much you tell your sibling what you think, no matter how open you are as you unburden your heart to your soul-mate into the night's darkness, no matter how long you've been together as friends or lovers: you still have some unspoken things, some little secrets in the mind's interior, locked treasure box.

Stephen Dunn's poem "A Secret Life" (Landscape at the End of the Century, W. W. Norton, 1992) is about that protected spot of interior privacy. He begins the poem by responding to his own title:

Why you need to have one
is not much more mysterious than
why you don't say what you think
at the birth of an ugly baby.

Okay, sometimes it would be rude to say what you think, but what about his next example, where during a really intimate moment you have your mind fixed on another--a rather self-absorbed--wish?

Or, you've just made love
and feel you'd rather have been
in a dark booth where your partner
was nodding, whispering yes, yes,
you're brilliant.

We all have times like this, says Dunn's speaker. The secret life begins to emerge from your remembered moments of childhood rejection. You build this interior world out of all the things you gradually discover others don't want to hear, especially all those just plain average, ordinary people around you:

The secret life
begins early, is kept alive
by all that's unpopular
in you, all that you know
a Baptist, say, or some other
accountant would object to.

This hidden interior world--the stuff of daydreams--eventually becomes your most precious possession, something you'd safeguard as if your life depended on it:

It becomes what you'd most protect
if the government said you can protect
one thing, all else is ours.

Sometimes you let yourselves externalize these inner meditations by writing them down--keeping a diary or journal, maybe writing a poem--and that act of writing, or the written words themselves, feels like survival, feels like the essence of life itself, feels like truth:

When you write late at night
it's like a small fire
in a clearing, it's what
radiates and what can hurt
if you get too close to it.

This private revelation is so true and so intimate that it's almost too hot to handle. You think that looking at it too closely, or revealing it to someone, might harm you. But you don't want to give it up because it's crucial to your selfhood and even to your humanity:

It's why your silence is a kind of truth.
Even when you speak to your best friend,
the one who'll never betray you,
you always leave out one thing;
a secret life is that important.

Cherish and nurture that secret life. It's important for your selfhood, and it will keep you alive.

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