Wednesday, February 04, 2004
So the title "Different Hours" comes from the title of a book of poetry by Stephen Dunn. I like this book a great deal. It won the pulitzer in 2000 (I think). I've been a fan of Dunn's for years. He's very human and very approachable but also lyrical. There's a poem in the book called "at the restaurant" in which he catalogs the pleasantries of a dinner out with friends, others sharing their days goings on, he admits to feeling withdrawn, the last two lines go:
"Inexcusable, the slaughter in this world.
Insufficient, the merely decent man."
It's filled with both resignation and anger. Dunn just hits that feeling of powerlessness on the head. It's the struggle, and he deals with it mightily in the book, that much of life is left to others. It's a point that I've dealt with in my writing alot, the idea that there are really no superheroes but instead a million people who who do thousands of small things that are far more essential than the occasional bouts of magnified heroism we tend to hear about because they are so much louder.
"Inexcusable, the slaughter in this world.
Insufficient, the merely decent man."
It's filled with both resignation and anger. Dunn just hits that feeling of powerlessness on the head. It's the struggle, and he deals with it mightily in the book, that much of life is left to others. It's a point that I've dealt with in my writing alot, the idea that there are really no superheroes but instead a million people who who do thousands of small things that are far more essential than the occasional bouts of magnified heroism we tend to hear about because they are so much louder.
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