Stephen Dunn, poet extraordinaire. Among my favorites, a riff on the Leviticus scapegoat. It’s a prose poem in which God sympathizes with the goat and calls this method of atonement yet another human sin. I’d love to write it out for you here but haven’t asked permission. Do check it out yourself (I bought What Goes On, in which it’s featured with other best and selected of Dunn’s poetry). I got to hear SD read twice(!) at the AWP conference this past week, once during a tribute to him (great presentations by all — thanks, Kathleen Graber, for the Deadwood recommendation!) in which I learned that he never ever pointed his shotgun at a student, but he did blast bad poems out of the air over the campus pond. I’m off to practice my shot.
