Monday, February 08, 2010
Robert Dana, Iowa poet
I don't recall ever reading anything by Robert Patrick "RP" Dana, a respected Midwestern poet associated with Iowa Writers' Workshop, a teacher at Cornell College, & Iowa's Poet Laureate from 2004 through 2008, when he died on Feb. 6th. Wasn't aware he was the beloved father-in-law of former (& legendary) WFMU DJ Ericka "Wildgirl" Peterson Dana, who now lives on a farm in Iowa & rescues feral cats. I'm very fond of Ericka, for what she does now as well as for what she did at WFMU.
Reading the few Robert Dana poems online, seems he was, among many things, a poet of sophisticated, elegant page craft, from a post-WWII generation that approached a blank piece of typing paper as an open field. You could frame this stuff. It was a poetry of clackety typewriters, Royal, Underwood, Remington, Smith-Corona; conservative & avant garde poets played in the field. Dana stayed mostly on the left margin, but when he wandered away from it he did so beautifully. For many poets of my generation, seeing & writing poetry this way,with a visual component, was foundational, whether or not we kept doing it, because our teachers were of Dana's era, & the best ones wanted us to try everything.
Elegy for a Hometown
The Morning of the Red Admirals
Rapture
After the Storm
Mending Art
Those are lovely poems. Several of them bring a fond memory of a particular borrowed Smith-Corona electric portable with a manual carriage return. I was so attached to the machine that the guy I took it from was forced to buy another for himself. When that broke, he demanded mine. I replaced it with an up-to-date Smith-Corona word processor with Data Disk memory, which wasn't good for open form poems. But I was already headed back to the margin. I had finished the first version of Boardwalk, partly an homage to & parody of those poems. Editors of the poetry 'zines I favored were very patient with me, as they had to retype my wanderings across the page. I was at least thoughful enough to set consistent tabs for them, in spacings of fives. I'd also taken counsel of poet Ed Dorn when he wrote in the preface to his Collected Poems that he no longer understood how some of his earlier poems functioned; that is, he forgot how to read them.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Reading the few Robert Dana poems online, seems he was, among many things, a poet of sophisticated, elegant page craft, from a post-WWII generation that approached a blank piece of typing paper as an open field. You could frame this stuff. It was a poetry of clackety typewriters, Royal, Underwood, Remington, Smith-Corona; conservative & avant garde poets played in the field. Dana stayed mostly on the left margin, but when he wandered away from it he did so beautifully. For many poets of my generation, seeing & writing poetry this way,with a visual component, was foundational, whether or not we kept doing it, because our teachers were of Dana's era, & the best ones wanted us to try everything.
Elegy for a Hometown
The Morning of the Red Admirals
Rapture
After the Storm
Mending Art
Those are lovely poems. Several of them bring a fond memory of a particular borrowed Smith-Corona electric portable with a manual carriage return. I was so attached to the machine that the guy I took it from was forced to buy another for himself. When that broke, he demanded mine. I replaced it with an up-to-date Smith-Corona word processor with Data Disk memory, which wasn't good for open form poems. But I was already headed back to the margin. I had finished the first version of Boardwalk, partly an homage to & parody of those poems. Editors of the poetry 'zines I favored were very patient with me, as they had to retype my wanderings across the page. I was at least thoughful enough to set consistent tabs for them, in spacings of fives. I'd also taken counsel of poet Ed Dorn when he wrote in the preface to his Collected Poems that he no longer understood how some of his earlier poems functioned; that is, he forgot how to read them.
Labels: about writing, what I'm reading
