Poetry highlights in honor of National Poetry Month!
Poet of the Day: Stephen Dobyns
Stephen Dobyns has published more than a dozen volumes of poetry: he is also a successful literary fiction writer, and he created the Charlie Bradford “Saratoga” mystery series. Dobyns’s essays on craft have guided many creative writing teachers. His poems are often told by narrators who may be world-weary (or human-weary) but who seem determined to make meaning out of circumstances that are painful, cruel, or deeply ironic. Retired now from an academic career, Dobyns taught many places including Sarah Lawrence, the University of Iowa, and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
This poet belongs in our classrooms because . . .
The poetry of Stephen Dobyns—and especially his Black Dog, Red Dog (1984)—belongs in our classrooms for its vivid narratives of innocence, but not humanity, lost. Often his subjects have new reckonings of who they are because of what has happened to them—or what they have done. In “The Gun,” a neighbor boy humiliates a would-be friend by showing off a pistol—and then threatening him with it, demanding that he strip. “Bleeder” describes summer campers and even their counselors becoming obsessed with the placid vulnerability of a hemophiliac boy and recognizing their desire to see him punctured. In “It Does No Good,” set in Santiago, Chile, a newly impoverished man sells his furniture on a busy street intersection and struggles to maintain dignity while his family reacts in shame. My favorites are the trilogy that end the book: “Art,” “Truth,” and “Beauty,” three stories of a journalist trying to capture something more in the sordid, violent tales he is assigned by his newspaper.

Stephen Dobyns’s Poetry collections include

Teaching Connections
One poem from Black Dog, Red Dog offers a thoughtful expansion for a unit on Greek and Roman mythology, The Odyssey or Medea— or for any critical look at heroes. “Jason at Eighty” imagines the famous Argonaut captain as a tired old man who is still certain of his own importance. He carries vanity in his pocket, a shiny battered thing that enables him to remember his glories and continue to ignore the consequences of his mistakes and bad faith.

After a youth of self-indulgence, good luck and
cheering crowds, he must have felt badly tricked
when his world collapsed just because he cheated
on Medea and broke his trust with the gods.

Dobyns’s poem reimagines Jason’s end as told by Euripides. Instead of the ancient sailor sleeping under the Argo when it collapses, this Jason plans to make a grand “gesture of self-assertion” by hanging himself from the old ship.

. . . despite hardship and all the evidence
to the contrary, Jason still thought he could escape
the world’s sentence by hurling his ego furiously
against it, like a rock through a plate-glass window.

Instead, the boat topples and crushes him, a mute answer to Jason’s many betrayals. The poem asks us to recognize that a failed hero’s false bravado offers no protection from ignominious death.


The full text of Black Dog, Red Dog is available through this internet archive (library access)

A recording of Stephen Dobyns reading “Jason at Eighty” is available from the University of Arizona Poetry Center
Laura Turchi teaches curriculum theory and English language arts methods at the University of Houston. She coedited the “Teaching Shakespeare” column for English Journal with Ann Christensen and coauthored Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centered Approach with Ayanna Thompson . For years she chaired the Education Department at Warren Wilson College, in Asheville, North Carolina, and she was inspired by readings by poets (and fiction writers) in the MFA Program for Writers there. She began her career teaching secondary English Language Arts in Tucson, Arizona, and Naperville, Illinois, and learning how the life of a poet as a human being can resonate in her students’ lives.