Checklist

By Stephen Dunn b. 1939 Stephen Dunn

The housework, the factory work, the work

that takes from the body

and does not put back.

The white-collar work and the dirt

of its profits, the terrible politeness

of the office worker, the work that robs

the viscera to pay the cool

surfaces of the brain. All the work

that makes love difficult, brings on

sleep, drops the body off

at the liquor cabinet. All the work

that reaches the intestines and sprawls.

And the compulsive work after the work

is done, those unfillable spaces

of the Calvinist, or certain marriage beds.

Stephen Dunn, “Checklist” New and Selected Poems (1974-1994). Copyright © 1994 by Stephen Dunn. Reprinted with the permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. This selection may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Source: New & Selected Poems (1994)

Biography

Poet Stephen Dunn was born in 1939 in New York City. The first of his family to go to college, Dunn attended Hofstra University on a basketball scholarship and later worked in advertising. In an interview with Poets and Writers, Dunn discussed the leap from being an ad-man to poet: “My first job out of college was writing in-house brochures for Nabisco in New York, and I kept getting promoted. I was in danger, literally, of . . .

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