Stephen Dunn 

biografie	gedicht:	contact
	Creators, 2002

BIOGRAFIE

Stephen Dunn werd in 1939 in New York City (USA) geboren. Hij studeerde Geschiedenis en Engels aan de Hofstra Universiteit, en volgde daarna de 'New School Writing Workshops'. Hij beëindigde zijn studietijd met het behalen van een 'Mastership of Arts in 'creative writing' aan de Universiteit van Syracuse.
Hij heeft gewerkt als profbasketbalspeler, copywriter, redacteur en als professor 'creative writing'

Dunns dichtbundel Different Hours (W.W. Norton & Co., 2000) werd onderscheiden met de Pulitzer poëzieprijs 2001. Andere recente werken zijn Riffs & Reciprocities: Prose Pairs (1998), Loosestrife (1996), New and Selected Poems: 1974-1994 (1994), Landscape at the End of the Century (1991) en Between Angels (1989).
Dunns heeft naast de Pulitzer Prijs tevens de 'Academy Award for Literature', de 'James Wright Prize', en toelages van de 'National Endowment for the Arts' en de 'New Jersey State Council on the Arts' ontvangen.
Stephen Dunn is momenteel 'Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing' van het Richard Stockton College te New Jersey en woont in Port Republic, New Jersey, Verenigde Staten.
Zijn gedicht 'Creators' schreef hij na het bijwonen van de International Society of Poets Convention, in het Washingtonse Hilton Hotel, augustus 2002.

Zie ook: www2.stockton.edu/sdunn/ en raadpleeg www.google.com voor nog meer over Stephen Dunn.

bron voor de biografische gegevens: The Academy of American Poets.

CREATORS

At The Washington Zoo the animals
testified, collectively,
to the zaniness of their creator,
who made even the great Henri Rousseau
seem little more than derivative.
Clearly, though, nobody was in control.

How can you take seriously a god
who'd put in the same universe
a rhinoceros, say, and a tapir?
Or, for that matter, a man and a woman?
Or, in the same room, a passel of poets?

Back at the Washington Hilton,
at The International Poetry Conference,
people duped from all over
were seeking prizes for work
the smallest monkey in the monkey house
exceeded by merely hanging from a branch.

Granted, some of the creatures
gathered at the Hilton wanted to know
something about creation. But others
were content to make sang rhyme
with orangutan, themselves with themselves.

I was their ape, just a bigger one of them,
a consenting ape, come to read
from a few of my ape books,
which I thought were theirs as well.
But I was preceding the Marvellettes
and they were impatient with me, and noisy.

I wanted to be back at the real zoo
where the keepers bathe the elephants
and get in the water with the sea lions.
What a fool I'd been to try to act
the good ape in a world like this.
I should have leapt on their tables,
ripped their shirts off,
given them something to think about.

© Stephen Dunn, 2002