Finding a reason for living in the face of hurting is a conflict most human beings have had to endure. One of the hardest things in life to do is live. Finding the things that make life worth living is even harder, because those things that make life beautiful are also the things that make it hard to live without. Stephen Dunn, I feel knows this and expresses it more than once in his writings. For example in The Vanishing, "how you felt when you were overwhelmed by her...or when you heard the news of his death..." seem to conflict with one other, one a feeling of passion and utter happiness, the other a feeling of shock and utter sadness, yet one emotion cannot exist without the other. The overwhelming, happy emotions are

Stephen Dunn's poems all seem to have the theme of memories, pain, and pleasures of all sorts. What would life be without them? "You understand and therefore hate because you hate the passivity of understanding that your worst rage and finest private gesture will flatten and collapse into history, become invisible like a defeats inside houses." (The Vanishing) Although you may hate the fact that your life may be forgotten, or even meaningless, it is an essential emotion to survive. You find other things to make your life worth living. "A son without a father, but with this one briefcase carrying a replica comfortably into the future" (Briefcase). You find yourself living so that your father somehow will live forever, a legacy. Then there are some days where "...so much that is human is alien to me..." (Having Lost All Capacity), and all you want to do is run mad killing and hurting all the stupid people in the world, ruining the life you want to live.

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Approximate Word count = 652
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)