16 pages • 32 minutes read
Stephen DobynsLoud Music
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
Published in 1987 in Dobyns’s third collection of poetry, Cemetery Nights, “Loud Music” joins other poems prominent in the ’80s and ’90s written from the perspective of the poet or an everyday speaker and using the mundane to meditate on larger philosophical subjects—as this poem contemplates the self. Often, these poems turn to literary devices such as imagery and metaphor and sometimes surrealism to balance these meditative thoughts.
Dobyns and his contemporaries engage challenging subject matter, often through an absurdist or witty lens. By tempering life’s darkness with humor, poets like Stephen Dunn and Carl Phillips address themes of loneliness, alienation, and existential commentaries about the self while using imagery, metaphors, and similes to add a fantastical, absurdist, and somewhat surrealist mood to their poetry. While Dobyns may not define himself as a surrealist poet, his tendencies towards otherworldly imagery, metaphor, and simile, and his preference for an exaggerated idea of reality are apparent in “Loud Music.” Stephen Dunn’s “Corners” is a fruitful comparison to understand how a similar topic to “Loud Music” can be written about in a dramatically different way.
Historical Context
Dobyns, who worked as a police reporter for the Detroit News and published a popular series of detective novels, is familiar with life’s darker side: crime, accidents, and misfortune.
This sense of doom often appears in his poetry: U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass described Dobyns’s poems as distrusting grace, “[going] on momentum, sometimes on fury; they’re attentive to the dark” (“Poets Choice.” The Washington Post: Nov. 17, 1996). However, Dobyns approaches dark subjects, but he approaches them with an element that allows his poems a certain levity or distance. As a New York Times review of Dobyns’s 1990 collection Body Traffic put it, “Life can be pretty grisly in Mr. Dobyns’s poems. But life isn’t a tragedy in which we are fatally mired. Instead, it is a farce we view from a certain remove” (“Stephen Dobyns.” Poetry Foundation.).
