The work of late 20th century poet Stephen Dobyns does not shy away from humor or wit. His poems often engage everyday topics, such as listening to music or having a cup of coffee, using these mundane starting points to leap into the abstract world of philosophy. Published in 1987 in Dobyns’s third collection of poetry Cemetery Nights, “Loud Music” is a good example of this pattern, opening with an image of a stepfather and stepdaughter dancing around to music, and then quickly transitioning into existential questions of identity.

Poet Biography

Stephen Dobyns was born in 1941 in Orange, New Jersey, a township on the outskirts of Newark. His family moved several times throughout his childhood, and he lived in many states including Michigan, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. He attended Shimer College in Illinois and earned his bachelor’s degree from Wayne State University in Michigan. Dobyns received his MFA from the University of Iowa in 1967. Dobyns has worked as a reporter for the Detroit News and as a teacher of poetry at several universities, including Sarah Lawrence College, Warren Wilson College, the University of Iowa, Syracuse University, and Boston University.

Dobyns has published over a dozen collections of poetry and 20 novels after breaking onto the poetry scene in 1972 with the publication of his first collection of poems, Concurring Beasts, which was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. His collections and honors are many; along with other prizes, he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and his poems have been anthologized the Best American Poems. Several of his short stories have also won awards and anthologized in Best American Short Stories. Dobyns’s collection of essays on poetry, Best Words, Best Order, dives deeply into concepts such as what it means to be a poet and where inspiration springs from.

Poem Text

Dobyns, Stephen. “Loud Music.” The Library of Congress.

Summary

“Loud Music” is a loose narrative and meditation on the concept of the loudness of music and what it feels like to be immersed in such a full, deafening sound. The speaker enters the poem in the first line, describing how he and his stepdaughter “circle round and round” (Line 1). The speaker prefers to listen to music with “the volume cranked up” (Line 4); whatever the genre of music—classical or rock—he prefers the sound vibrations to be tactile, so loud they are “like a hand smacking the gut” (Line 5). His four-year-old stepdaughter, however, prefers to listen to music at a “decorous” (Line 7) volume, quiet enough that she can speak or sing above the sound. The speaker intuits that this is because for her, being able to hear her own voice is a comforting, whereas when the music is overwhelming, “she feels she disappears” (Line 9). A four-year-old is still trying to identify what makes her a person, so losing her sense of self is frightening and unpleasant. Meanwhile, for the adult stepfather, this dissolution of the self is the desired effect: He too experiences loud music as a kind of psychic erasure, “which in fact I like” (Line 10).

At this point, the poem transforms into a whimsical meditation on what each of its two characters are most interested in observing in the world. The speaker imagines each of them holding “a sort of box with a peephole” (Line 14). When the stepdaughter looks inside, she ideally sees herself—dressed in her typical clothes, carrying the lunch box she probably brings to school. At four, she is still unsure of who she is, so what is most fascinating is figuring out her likes, dislikes, and pattern of behavior: “a proper subject / for serious study” (Lines 17-18). On the other hand, her stepfather has lived long enough to no longer find himself worthy of such intense examination. For him, the box would show an overcast, empty beach—the weather murky and possibly about to storm, with only the barest hint of life. He would imagine that a sea creature “brooded underneath” the water (Line 22), and a sense that “someone like me” had walked through there (Line 24). Unlike the stepdaughter, whom the box would show specifically herself, the stepfather refuses to picture himself in his mind’s eye. The best way he knows to accomplish this is through loud music, which creates “a landscape stripped of people and language” (Line 27).