Dear Friend,
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn died this week at his home in Frostburg, MD on his 82nd birthday. His poems are celebrated for their immediacy and exploration of the ordinary. He won the Pulitzer in 2001 for his collection of poems Different Hours.
For decades, Stephen Dunn taught at New Jersey’s Stockton University. In retirement, he moved to western Maryland where his wife, Barbara Hurd, is a writing professor. That’s where I met him in 2017 to film a feature for State of the Arts, one of several we produced over the years.
In 2017, Stephen was already experiencing the effects of Parkinson’s disease; he walked with a cane and his voice was at times labored and shaky. But his enthusiasm and curiosity was evident and he was incredibly generous with us.
As we began the interview, I realized there was a large wooden sculpture of a male nude next to Stephen and that the statue’s phallus was distractingly prominent in the frame. It’s not something you would notice if you were in the room, but it was glaring in the video shot. When I mentioned it, Stephen laughed, was not concerned, and strategically placed his iced tea on the table to block the view.
In our interview, Stephen talked about his middle class roots, his childhood passion for books, his basketball career (which led him to college), his first real job as an advertising man, and his path to poetry. Stephen then chose to read "Propositions," a poem that explores honesty in a marriage. It ends with a line, he told us, that surprised even him when he wrote it.
At the end of the day, after 5 or 6 hours of filming, Stephen challenged me to a game of ping-pong. I knew it had long been a passion. He walked with his cane slowly to the two-car garage where there were 2 tables. He positioned himself at the end of one of them and had great fun clobbering me 20 to 5.
We join the world in mourning the loss of a great poet, artist and a generous human being.
Eric Schultz & the entire State of the Arts team
