Where It All Goes Down
If we could text this poem, our conversation might look like this:
Reader: Where r u, poem?
Poem: Dude—in class, but totes going for a ride in my car later.
Reader: Sweet! Enjoy the altar of your dashboard!
Basically, this poem starts off in a classroom. How do we know? Because there is a teacher and there are students that "fidgeted and shrank // in their chairs" (3-4). But then one brilliant, brave, insightful student speaks up and mentions his car. And for the rest of the students in class, and the speaker of the poem, the car becomes essential. As the poem unfolds, then, it moves from the classroom to the inside of a moving car with "music filling it" (12). And although we don't get much detail about the car except that the tape deck is playing, and the dashboard is described as an "altar," we know driving alone is essential to the poem because the speaker keeps returning to this location.
So what's so important about a car, anyway? Just like each stanza in the poem is like a little room that's filling up with beautiful lines of poetry, the speaker mentions the car with "music filling it." The true setting of this poem, then, becomes a private place where this sacred experience of being filled with music occurs.
Another cool trick that Dunn uses in this poem is that the setting is literally in motion. He writes about it as "the car in motion" and "how far away / a car could take him" (14-15). So, unlike setting a poem in the woods or a house, this poem is set in car that's driving down the road. That's because motion is so essential to the idea of what's sacred in this poem. The possibility of moving, getting away from it all, allows a person to be caught in the music (whether driving or reading this awesome poem aloud). That kind of retreat is central to the poem. Wanna get away? The poem argues that we absolutely, positively have to if we ever want to encounter a higher truth.