Farewell to a Poet, a Professor, a Friend

The poet Robert Dana died this month, at the age of 80. For 40 of those years, he was on the faculty at Cornell College, in Mount Vernon, Iowa. In his work there, he taught thousands of students, worked on countless committees, served his department and his school, and saw new colleagues come and go.
   
He also published 10 full-length books of poetry, two books of prose, and a variety of other works. Two of his books are forthcoming posthumously. After his retirement from Cornell, he continued to write, give readings, travel, and meet with his former students and colleagues all over the country and around the world. In 2004-6 he was Iowa’s honorary poet laureate.
   
Robert Dana was the kind of small-college professor the academy is losing quickly, much to our hurt. An extraordinarily accomplished writer, he chose to remain at Cornell, to work with its students and enjoy the life it provided, rather than pursue the greener grass of some better-known institution, with a lighter teaching load but more pressure to publish and a more competitive professional environment. In the process he became a legend for generations of Cornell College students and colleagues, a mentor, teacher, and friend. 
   
He told me, more than once, that every fall, when the year was about to begin, he would say to himself, “This is my last year at the college.” When he retired, he said, “Damn, I said that every year for 40 years, and here I am.” We had many talks about how to develop a relationship with one’s institution that one could live with—find the things you’ve got to do and do them well; and determine the things that are not important to you and don’t really contribute to the institution’s fundamental mission, then avoid the frustration of dealing with them. “Find your spot to thrive,” he said, and when you find it, “do your best and don’t look back.”
   
A lot of his colleagues didn’t appreciate this sentiment. But the fact is, Robert Dana was an exceptionally effective faculty member where it really counted—helping students to learn and be successful, to find their voices as writers or simply as citizens. As for the rest, in one poem he wrote, “These are the committees that grind the heart to powder,” a line permanently engraved in my consciousness as I do my administrative work.
   
Somewhat rakish, with a look reminiscent of an exceptionally clean and well-groomed beatnik, Robert Dana could be gruff and sometimes uncompromising. His love of Hemingway, and his general allegiance to high-modernist mode, led some colleagues to think he was a bit of a sexist. Yet his record showed steady and powerful support for improving the lot of female students and faculty members at Cornell, much more than many of his compatriots who talked a better game.
   
As a writer, he shows us life in Iowa, and how to navigate that life, with a kind of muscular grace that bears a striking resemblance to the man himself. Not gentle like Ted Kooser, Robert Dana was nonetheless a kind and honorable man whose tenderness was easy to miss but very real to those who knew him. The title poem in one of his books meditates on the view out his Mount Vernon window as he watched the children walking to school through the snow, “starting out for the difficult world”–a line that captures Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” in nine syllables. He was his own kind of master.
   
The profession has moved on, and I don’t think there’s much space anymore for professors like Robert Dana. The loss to future generations is incalculable and a terrible shame.
   
Hail and farewell, RP.