Numerous speakers shared memories of and reflections on the life and work of Robert (RP) Dana, one of Anhinga Press's favorite poets, at the 2007 AWP conference. On this page we offer some samples of these remarks.
Bob and I were both born in 1928, so we both grew up in the hard times of the Depression in families that were driven around the bend by the unexpected poverty, the collapse of the American dream. Such a background leaves a certain residue of parsimony in the head and skepticism in the heart: too many Christmases in which there was nothing we wanted and what we wanted we had to earn. Also we both had to start out for the difficult world by enlisting in the Navy right after WW II, the only way we could get a college education. This made us serious, rather than playful, about ideas. Also we grew up in a literary age that highly valued craftmanship, whether your mentor was Hemingway or Eliot.
I begin with these circumstances because they create an affinity between Bob and myself, which was one of the reasons I took on his collection Starting out for the Difficult World at Harper & Row. As it happened, much of Bob's poetry is about the natural world, which I'm ordinarily not a big fan of. But his wry use of it spoke to me. Take the title poem which begins in innocent eagerness -- school girls with their books and clarinets -- and modulates in to a marvelously compact meditation on aspiring to high art in rural Iowa.
Dana's mentality might be defined as a kind of higher quirkiness. Seldom does a strong feeling make its way through one of his poems without being rattled and leached by variations and ends often enough in the grip of a counter feeling. Take the deep-down bitterness of the poem "Blue Run." He is telling off some young well-heeled poetaster who envies Dana's life without having any idea of what he's gone through. The "gorgeous mommies" discoing in a glass box in the club they're at mutate into his blond mother, "Dietrich-faced / Dead at forty" and buried cheap. Other family pain and personal indignity and exhausted labor quickly follow; and then, by the alchemy of Dana's sarcasm and art the light from an impossible marble tombstone for his mother is picked up in the last stanza and the sentiment of the poem turns into the hard-earned gratification of a hand-cupped drink of water, "not for everyone," taken from "the blue run and / molten sunlight" of the Charles River.
Subtly joined though it is, this is a more explicit poem than most of Dana's are, whose changes of observation and feeling are generally more terse, cryptic, and frequent. His poems don't approach the reader with their arms out-stretched to embrace. But nor are they held behind the back in easy mystification. Dana's poems are about inspecting the hard truths he has come by, but telling them slant, as another highly quirky poet put it.
Slant, and almost word for word. I don't know of another poet who weighs his words more than Dana does. Reading his characteristic short, three-beat lines is a little like watching a master mosaic maker at his minute work, words of typically one to three syllables being selected and inserted for their relation, in sense and euphony, to each other as well as to the movement of the thought. A careful and fearless mind at work, a fierceness and delicacy of feeling, a great subtlety of craft, an intense localness of vision: they all come together in this poet as happily as we have come together today to honor him.
I started off this morning to tell you what RP taught me.
Isn't that odd, really, to celebrate someone by telling what he did for you? And yet, isn't this what great teachers do? They become their students. They disappear into the lives of boring people like me. They have great humility. They enter the consciousness of their students at often painfully low levels, levels where the students use the words "cool" and "like" and "whatever" as interchangeable signs for their utter lack of actual thoughts.
Then the teacher takes these ignorant souls and begins the slow process of waking them: gently nudging them to the next levels of their talents. The really great teachers -- the teachers like Robert Dana -- leave capsules in a miraculous gel that will dissolve over the years and the decades. Eras from now, when the student -- the remains of his youthful face now hidden under gray hair and inside a sallow complexion that makes him look like a piece of used-up charcoal -- will awaken to yet a higher level and say O as yet another piece of the puzzle falls, if not into place, near enough so a quick kick puts it there.
Now the creators of great art have the same humility, says I, making an enormous leap in this talk of mine.
James Joyce certainly thought so. He figured this out along with all those linguistic puzzles he's famous for.
Although Joyce was an arrogant turd in his personal life, he understood that the artist is irrelevant while the play goes on. She's off stage, paring her fingernails (I thought this to be an interesting paraphrase of what Joyce actually said).
Said another way, the songs people love don't belong to the composer; they belong to those who sing them. We all, as the Yeats of "Lapis Lazuli" put it, play our parts. Sing them, too, as a matter of fact.
Or, as Robert once told the story: when Robert asked a humble grounds keeper at the Luxemburg Garden in Paris who had created a particularly grand fountain, the grounds keeper told him "No one, Monsieur. The fountain is Art. It belongs to everyone."
Robert teaches this in his art, too, though not right away, for, like all great artists, his work achieves its timbre and its tone from circling through the flawed curves and the cracked cavities of its instrument. In real life Robert is as annoying as the other two Irishmen I mentioned earlier, but, of course, there's a difference. Dana is our Irishman. The timbre and tone of his song comes from the flaws and the cracks of our own age, a time that began in the aftermath of World War II, when Dana, probably at the behest of the gods working through his impoverished childhood, became a Navy seaman and was sent to the beaches of Guam, where the debris (and probably even the occasional body part) from the fierce battles of World War II still turned up in the sand.
Dana has written about this; he has written about the Vietnam war (in one memorable poem, he talks about the "cold tit" of the capital building) -- but he has mostly written movingly about our private lives: about the woman coming toward him on the mall at Cornell (probably his lovely wife Peg), about the Iowa school children setting out for the impossibilities of their lives, about the sweat-sour man next door.
The last man I mentioned happens to be in a poem about Iowa. The poem appeared originally in The New Yorker for the world to see, but it also was read by Robert Dana to the Iowa legislators when he became Poet Laureate of Iowa.
I heard it over my painfully slow internet connection out on the coast of California one rainy afternoon, Dana's voice speeding up and disappearing in the curves and cavities of my bad Ethernet. Maybe I just wanted to match the rain, but I cried when I heard his voice and imagined him talking to the legislators in their stiff new suits and shined shoes, legislators who probably had no idea of what they were really hearing. Not yet anyway.
Shelley thought that poets are the unacknowledged legislators, and here, that day, was a poet addressing legislators, working, I now realize, at their level, talking to them of a sweat-soured man, one of them actually, bringing them self knowledge, where all the serious wisdom of the world begins as we all, to paraphrase a title of Robert's, start out for the difficulties of the difficult world.
