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.