Robert Patrick Dana was born in
Boston,
Massachusetts, in 1929. At the age of seven he became an orphan, and was uprooted and moved to the western part of the state where he was raised as a foster child in the home of James Francis ("Pop") Kearney in
Haydenville, Massachusetts. He served in the South Pacific near the end of
World War II as a
US Navy radio operator, and during lulls in the action found that he loved writing poetry. After being honorably discharged in 1948, he spent a year at
Holyoke Junior College on the GI Bill, then sold his raincoat and watch to purchase a one-way bus ticket to
Des Moines, Iowa. There he attended
Drake University, studying with the poet
E. L. Mayo, while supporting himself by working as a sports writer for the
Des Moines Register. Upon graduation, he moved to far northwestern Iowa where he taught school for a year in
George, Iowa. He then moved to the other side of the state, studying with
Robert Lowell and
John Berryman at the
University of Iowa and the
Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he joined a group of noted writers including
Donald Justice,
Henri Coulette,
Jane Cooper, and
Philip Levine. He received his master's degree in 1954, and at the age of 25 was promptly hired by
Cornell College, Mount Vernon, Iowa; he remains the youngest person ever hired for a tenure-track faculty position there. He taught writing and English literature at Cornell from 1954 to 1994, eventually serving as both Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence. In 1964, Dana was responsible for the resumption of the publication of
The North American Review. This required negotiating with
Claiborne Pell, who was a
US Senator from
Rhode Island at the time and maintained that he had the rights to the magazine's publication. After successfully concluding those arrangements, Dana served as the NAR's editor until 1968. Ron Sandvik, a later managing editor of the NAR, characterized Dana's role in rescuing it from oblivion as "a huge gift", saying "there are a lot of people who are indebted to him." Dana also held teaching assignments at a number of other schools, including the
University of Florida,
Wayne State University,
University of Idaho,
Wichita State University,
Stockholm University, and
Beijing University. Dana published over a dozen collections of his poetry, wrote two prose books and edited a third. In addition, Dana's poetry, essays, and critical reviews have appeared in publications such as
The Nation,
The New Yorker,
The New York Times,
The Christian Science Monitor,
Poetry,
The American Poetry Review,
The Iowa Review and the
Sewanee Review. Dana's poetry won a number of awards. His poetry collection
Starting Out for the Difficult World was nominated for the
Pulitzer Prize in 1988. In 1989, he was the recipient of the
Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award for Poetry, given by
New York University for a poet who was "insufficiently recognized". He received the
Carl Sandburg Medal for Poetry in 1994, a
Pushcart Prize in 1996, and the
Rainer Maria Rilke Prize for Poetry. He was also the recipient of two
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1985 and 1993). In September 2004, Robert Dana was named poet laureate for the State of Iowa, serving until 2008. Fellow poet
Marvin Bell said that Dana "went about his life and work without getting caught up in the petty rivalries of the poetry world".
M.L. Rosenthal, the prominent critic and champion of poetry, felt that Dana was a "richly lyrical poet" who was "very hard on himself and on the Karma of our world, whose work this whole country would recognize itself in, if it ever started to open books of poems." Dana married twice, the first time for 22 years to Mary (Kowalke) Dana (later, Ware); the second time for 35 years to Peg (Sellen) Dana. He had three children from his first marriage: Lori Dana, Arden Dana, and Richard Dana. He answered editing questions about his forthcoming book
Paris on the Flats the day before he died of
pancreatic cancer at Mercy Hospice in Iowa City at the age of 80. ==Bibliography==