Poetry Magazine
Plaisir
Diarrhea: what nobody likes,
though a word the French love to pronounce.
They surround it with lips and tongue;
it pleases, like saying cellar door does.
Once I gave a pair of tweezers
to an au pair girl who couldn’t extract
a splinter from her foot. It was a pleasure
for both of us to see that little thing come out.
Source: Poetry (July/August 2008).
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 . . .
Poems by Stephen Dunn
Poem Categorization
SUBJECT Arts & Sciences, Humor & Satire
POET’S REGION U.S., Mid-Atlantic
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