Matthew Paris
Robert Dunn
Robert Dunn grew up in Rego Park, Queens. He must have been a formal, earnest kid with a waggish strain. I doubly whether was ever casually amiable in a street way or as they says, one of the boys. There was nobody in his family who had a life or career in the creative world. Robert was a middle class kid. Both he and his brother Jacob were always overweight to a severe degree, Even in youth both had the heft and heavy breathing of people who were enormously chubby.. They weren't bad looking.
Both the Dunns were six feet tall, wide shouldered men who had a ruggedness and substantial physical presence their mother was tiny and didn't seem as if she was ever more than mildly plump. I never met their father. He was dead by the 80s. The Dunns were a Queens Jewish family with an Irish name that must have confused the world they lived in. I think Robert told me his father had been working class. If he was, he made enough money in the 50s to live in a well off part of Queens. Between the two brothers Robert was the smart, dapper one. Jacob had a heavy quality; Robert for all his weight was even mercurial
Of the five boroughs of New York City Queens is less than Staten Island a refuge from the three more urban boroughs: Manhattan, Bro0okyn and the Bronx. People who were brought up in Queens were more suburban and laid back than anyone growing up in the three central boroughs. Queens had been along with Brooklyn and the Bronx a series of small towns that had been amalgamated on a late 19th century day by the top politicos in the borough. One could still see in much of Queens the main streets of the old villages ..
It might have been tough for both of the young Dunns as kids given their adipose condition. Jacob became a bus driver for the MTA. He died of a heart attack at 37. Robert was not as fat as Jacob. He did go through periods when he was relatively less portly, going on long strict diets. I suspect Robert's weight did give him a sense that he was presumptively not physically attractive to women. I think he himself was attracted to the wrong women. Many a woman would have found Robert very good to have in their life. he was honest, honorable, competent in a thousand ways, and as much as he had it, family oriented. It might have occurred to him that if he as a powerful wheeler dealer in the poetry world he might have seemed more fetching to the eccentrics in it; that is mere conjecture. There are plenty of fat people after all who've never tried to be that powerful. Yet it is sometimes the intent of people who feel for one reason or another they aren't good looking to find ways when they are intelligent and armed with mature skills as Robert was to make themselves more intriguing as lovers than they might be otherwise. Robert wasn't a narcissist. If anything he was self critical to a fault If any woman wanted virtue and honor in a man they didn't have to look further than Robert.
Robert had unlike his more transparent brother Jacob a kind of detachment that protected him. He was very smart and very familiar with all the conventional icons of his time. There was nothing intellectual about Jacob. Robert- one always called him Robert at his insistence- never wanted to be known as Bob. He wasn't a populist. He was a philosophic Tory. I think he was politically quite Conservative. He sang and palyed the mandolin. He was in the poetry world something of a singularity. His model , he said, was Samuel Hoffenstein. He admired Dorthy Parker and FPA of the New York World of the 1920s. He had some of their sardonic swagger. Like them Robert was never sentimental, had a tendency to take up parody, deflation of notions he found fashionable but venomous to the intelligent mind.
Robert was not only very family oriented but a good friend. When his brother Jacob died of a heart attack Robert became an active uncle to Jacob's two children. He made the career as poets of several of his friends as well as many strangers possible . He was to many people what some call an enabler. He took care of his aged mother, giving her a room in a one bedroom apartment he lived in. He slept in the living room, He was at bottom a very charitable and righteous man.
Robert took a Masters Degree in English, worked at the airlines for awhile, afterward s took a job at the Department of Buildings as an inspector. It was the perfect job for a poet. he was in the field most of the time. Robert col be on the street and on his own without supervision. It paid his bills and allowed him to be a rogue. He talked about both the airlines and Building inspector careers as something he did with competence but not with enthusiasm. For somebody original as he was Robert had a very practical side that kept him thriving in the practical world. He wasn't a Liberal aristocrat with a talent for desk work. He knew a lot about printing, computers and video making without being a severe techie. Given his great and broad intelligence there wasn't anything in the world he couldn't master as much as he need to make some craft of use to him.
Robert surfaced publicly as a poet in the early 80 as a reader in The Centerfold. it was the premiere West Side spa for reading verse on a Friday night. That's where I met him. He was like nobody else in this posh Upper West Side agora but didn't seem to notice he was very different than the other poets who frequented this refuge in a stone temple on 88th Street, looking like a Roman sacred edifice near the Hudson River. Robert never showed any signs of being iconic among this crowd. They didn't know what to make of him He was a comic writer of light verse among poets who as often as not weren't aiming to produce comedy or anything light and urbane.
During this time Robert hooked up with Bob Abramson of the New Press. As Robert waggishly put it, the New Press was the only poetry magazine to be founded n an insane asylum. Bob Abraham had indeed been committed to a Manhattan Lower West Side loony bin for mild schizophrenia and was also some kind of Christian Holy Roller. Bob Abramson decided while sitting in this receptacle for lunatics that if he ran poetry readings at odd bars in Queens he could garner a slice of the receipts and pay for his tastes in food while never leaving his father's basement. Bob was a Millennial before the generation existed. As Robert described him, he had no other reason to get intermediaries to run this improbable events in deep Ridge wood and beyond. They were very quiet places in which nobody had ever heard of a poetry reading. They were more familiar with drinking. One of them The Wine Gallery, in Forest Hills had a pathway to the men's room that everybody took after drinking the liquors at the bar while the readings were gong on.
. Bob , the eminence gris living in the cellar off his father's house in queens,took his slice.. He was gimpy, bald, and very eccentric. He had an echoing booming voice like an old radio announcer. He didn't seem crazy and delusional in conversation as much as rigid and lacking in any nuance in his thinking. He was sort of a crank. Yet he seemed sure of his heard edged ideas. His family didn't know what to make of him. He definitely want going to make any money. I would imagine Robert worked in the New Press initially because he wanted to learn the poetry business and liked to fill a role doing it at an inept but real organization. As it turned out it was a point of departure for them.
Yet he stuck with it for several years. For those same several years one heard form Robert at length how crazy and inept “Abramson” was. Considering that Bob Abramson was a certified lunatic that was hardly a surprise. Robert's criticism of Bob was fundamentally that he didn't know how to run anything. They had many an imbroglio yet Bob's ineptitude gave Robert a chance to learn the business of running a magazine and having some outreach in poetry readings he wouldn't have had were Bob less ineffectual than he was. For a time these two were in grudging symbiosis with each other.
However the New Press when Robert finally took it over was a magazine and movement far beyond anything Bob Abramson could have imagined. Robert made it a base for his video program Poet to Poet. He actually traveled to bases and spas as far as Delaware to do a television show. Poet to Poet featured Robert the way the Tonight Show was centered around the iconic image of Johnny Carson. Many poets including myself were on the show but were at times asks to be straight men for Robert's raucous humor. Of course they were glad to get any attention from anyone at all. One can't blame Robert for featuring himself on a show he had produced from scratch. he would have been the first to say he was promoting himself, the last to mention his natural generosity. Besides that, Robert was genuinely funny. His guests were free to start their own television program if they wanted to do it
Robert's confederates in this Queens movement were Thomas “Pepper' Patterson, Anthony Scarpantonio , Lorrissa Smailo and Leigh Harrison among others. Alter he had Harry Ellison on the editorial board. They were all different. They ahd a place in Robert's poetic phalanxes. Pepper was a singular likable rogue with a Don Juan flair and a sense of being a tough guy and a poet. He was short, stubby and slightly hunched over. He grew up in a neighborhood in which he had to be able to fight . He had had amputated legs and could barely walk. He was a particularly amusing talker. There were many very talented Queens poets who were happy to work with Robert. If Poet to Poet featured Robert as a television comedian more than poetry, he was good at it.
Off the screen Robert was very bitter abut lack of support of others in his fie. He vilified Bob Abramson and Karen Horne in extended critiques I suspect were motivated by deeper feelings about his absence of help from others in an existence that was more solitary than he wanted it to be. Karen Horne,a very nice lady, was not one whom Robert should have been interested in character logically. She was a practicing witch, had a large collection of pet rats in her Bronx apartment and was in all ways quite an eccentric. She was a very intelligent woman with strong talent for poetry as well. Yet she had qualities that were completely outside the range of Robert's understanding of the margins of human action much less his interests. The odor of the pet rats alone and their intimate amiability when one divisive her apartment should have suggested to him he was in territory in which he was never going to be at home. Actually Karen' rats were quite charming if one didn't mind the stink of the place. She was pretty, lithe and blonde, all qualities which might have clouded his judgment. One couldn't imagine Robert hanging out casually with these rats.
Robert did better with male friends. Anthony Scarpantonio and Toms “Pepper Catterson were eccentrics too but they were devoted to Robert and the New Press in a way the lone gunslingers like Karen Horne never was or could be..
Robert's love life or lack of it always distressed him. For a while he was involved with Karen Horne. She was a very good poet and pretty, from Georgia, and a pagan. I don't know what they had to talk about seriously. In retrospect Robert called her “Jezebel”. Yet curiously he didn't exude passion of a sentimental nature that many woman find attractive though it often lards over character flaws he didn't have . I don't think it ever occurred to him to show such emotions if he had them. It wasn't a side of him if it existed that he wanted to offer anybody.
As he passed forty Robert tried to lose weight and solve some of his personal dilemmas with a discipline that maybe wasn't good for his health. He went on a long crash diet and worked out in gyms with weights. I suspect bad hearts ran in his family. He died after a workout in a Manhattan gym at 44.
Robert left behind him a fairly large volume of mostly light verse that wasn't appreciated much by the poetry world around him. They were people largely into free verse personal confessions. Robert didn't feel he had anything revelatory to confess.. he was a master of many poetic forms; they were often people who had never studied poetic craft. His models were amusing newspaper poets the more earnest poetry world had never heard of. Even his strong presence and formidable variety of adult human skills might have put them off. He was tolerated by these peers beyond his Queens allies because the poetry world is good at the mild dismissive turn that comes with general uncritical toleration. Underneath this acceptance is a feeling that since the whole of the interest in financially worthless it is acceptable to include anybody in the social mix.
Robert and I were friends if not quite intimates, friendly colleague rather than soul searching buddies who knew something about each other's inner lives. He was several times at my house for dinner , I was in his home and knew his mother. I accepted that Robert was too formal to offer intense intimacy,. It didn't mean that he wasn't in his way honest and transparent. He was always carefully dressed in a suit jacket even in warm weather. We were both anti-sentimental poets who were aspiring to be funny and amusing We both were musical and played various instruments fluently. I could be blue; Robert never was blue. We were both formally educated with master degrees though that was hardly by our choice the side of us anybody ever saw much of. Robert didn't like my Mouse poems because he suspected they were sentimental. Actually they were based on the speech patterns of my children. He detected in that imitation some sentimental emotion that was in fact there .I never thought of these poems as sentimental. Robert saw sentiment in them because he was protective of himself in a more severe way than I had been.
Along with Robert Bailey and Bob Holman,all natural leaders like himself with good head for effective production, the interest of promoting poetry as an element of life Americans should value Robert pushed his television show and personal apprentice outside New York as hard as anyone could. Bob Holman was a radical populist; Robert was a Conservative. Yet they both aimed for the same crowd outside the liberal aristocracy. Robert's show was modeled Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. He wanted very much to make the case for poetry in popular terms. His own verse was always intelligent, amusing and witty.
At his death at 44 Robert hadn't quite done that. Like Bob Holman he produced a very interesting show but nobody in the commercial world picked up on it. I concluded that if Robert Dunn and Bob Holman couldn't put poetry on the cultural map of America, nobody could do it..
It wasn't all that much of a leap to see for different reasons Robert or Bob Holman has very engaging popular personalities who were marketing poetry as viable entertainment. Both men did the work necessary to make this pitch. The commercial world didn't pick up on either of them. I
Robert was for all his difficulties in marketing poetry, a genuine poet and leader. He knew how to do every detail of his productions. He didn't ask anybody else to do what he could have done himself. On the other hand this lack of passion coming into his life from others focused his energies on his poetry and creation of a delivery system through the New Press for others as well as himself . Robert wasn't planning to die in his middle 40s. He certainly took the message of the value of poetry to as many people as he could, much as Bob Holman did. His achievement will be honored by anybody who appreciates his humor and singular talent.
