a conversation with poet Robert Dunn, founder of the Portsmouth Poetry Hoot
It’s hard to imagine downtown Portsmouth without the imagery of Robert Dunn. Best known as the city’s second poet laureate (1999-2001), he’s also the originator of the Portsmouth Poetry Hoot. The Hoot returns from summer break for its seventh season on Wednesday, Sept. 6, at 7 p.m. at Café Espresso. Featured poets are Richard Cambridge and Askia Toure.

Dunn himself is a consistent sight in downtown Portsmouth, and has been known to share his work—and his quiet wit—with those he meets on his walks. For several generations, he’s been observing the seeming constants of the community, encapsulating them in tiny little pods of deceptively simple poems that seem to disperse in the air as he speaks them, seeds for the imagination. One thing that constantly resurfaces in his work is the idea that what seems constant never is.

“Portsmouth has changed in a very strange way, actually. Walking through downtown Portsmouth, you get the feeling it’s always been this way, even though it changes constantly. There is somehow a feeling a permanence about it, but I don’t know quite how that arises,” he says.

When he moved to town, Portsmouth was more working class, and more of an artists’ community, as people of modest means could still afford to live here. He recalls an accountant moving in next door and thinking to himself, “There goes the neighborhood.”

Throughout all the changes in town, Dunn and his fellow writers worked to make poetry more visible. Before the hoot, the scene “came and went,” Dunn says. “There were readings every now and then. There were a bunch of poets around and we tended to know each other. The Portsmouth Poet Laureate Program was a catalyst for what was already there. I think, in a way, it was largely a matter of timing that pulled it off. Momentum was building up and a lot of things were waiting to happen. All we had to do was ride the wave.”

A group of local writers and arts organizers launched the program in 1997, and Dunn started the Poetry Hoot in 1999. From the start, it was a hit, attracting poets from up to an hour away to enjoy two featured readers, followed by an open mike.
“We said, ‘Let’s see how it goes.’ The little coffee shop where it was held could hold 25 people, and 45 showed up,” Dunn says.

The format hasn’t changed. Though Just Brew It is now closed, the Hoot still meets the first Wednesday of every month, now at Café Espresso, 800 Islington St.

The hoot is a success now, but Dunn wasn’t at all sure of his path as the city’s second poet laureate, especially following in the footsteps of the charismatic and beloved Esther Buffler.

“Each person serves for two years. You have to undertake at least one project for the city. You decide what the project is. I think most people have done more. People who are chosen are usually not interested in empty honors. It’s a chance to make things happen,” Dunn says.

Dunn started the Poetry Hoot, offered a Poetry Festival one spring and put up poetry in public places, such as the Hanover Street municipal parking garage. Then there was World Poetry Day.

“We had a forum of four different poets from around the world,” he explains. “From Russia, Haiti, Belgium and Turkey. It worked out very well. I was a bit worried because sometimes we get rather self-involved around Portsmouth. What’s happening in town is what’s happening, period. It was good to be reminded that there’s a world out there.”

Asked what those poets brought to light, he recalls the intellectual discourse, then, typically, hones in on an image of a local icon.

“The Turkish poet was interesting because I had no idea what it would be like. The poet from Belgium had had a difficult life. It was interesting to see how it worked into her poetry. The Russian poet read in the Russian manner, so he bellowed the poems. Esther managed to doze off while he was bellowing forth, which was a rare achievement. We had 80 people come to it. Other places get 15 people. Portsmouth never lets us down.”

Dunn, 63, grew up in Meredith, graduated from the University of New Hampshire, spent time in New York’s Lower East Side between 1970 and ’71, and ultimately settled in Portsmouth in 1978. He once worked at the Portsmouth Athenaeum, but is now retired. “I still volunteer one afternoon a month, a very arduous schedule,” he says. He’s been politically involved over the years, in protests against the Vietnam War and with the Seacoast Anti-Pollution League, among others. He admires this streak in other poets.

“I remember a meeting once with assorted poet laureates and they were all talking in grand terms about building community and all of that. Grace Paley, poet laureate of Vermont, got up and said, ‘This is all very well, but what are we going to do about those sons of bitches in Washington?’”

But his poetry is, in his words, “about more inconsequential things.”

“Using a poem to drive home a point is a bit like using a violin for a hammer. It wouldn’t make a good hammer, but afterwards it wouldn’t be a good violin, either. That’s why I avoid didactic poetry.”

He’s been writing since he was 15 years old.

“I put marks on paper every day, but they generally wind up in the wastebasket. A wastebasket is a great resource for a writer, I think.”

Dunn’s work is informed by his rural upbringing and how it compares to the relative urbanity of Portsmouth. He says of his childhood, “I can hardly remember. Maybe I’m trying not to remember.  Living in the country is very different. There are moments when it comes back to me, when I see a particular bird or plant and I know the name of it. Walking out the door here there’s a little graveyard, and somehow knowing the bird that sits there is a mourning dove adds a bit to a pleasure.”

Prologue
They say you can’t possibly
be swallowed by a whale
but it’s hard to tell—
it’s awfully dark in here.

Rumors
I hear you can tell the trees apart
by the sound of the wind in their branches:
The sighing of pines is nothing
at all like the wind in the willows.
Elms in full foliage gently
rustle, aspen are easily rattled.
All under the leaves of life they tend:
Oaks to creak at a higher pitch
and maples more apt to tap
imperiously at your window.
And I have heard the news and so have you,
so let us talk of things indifferent.
And the wind will tell the trees apart
by the rumors passing through.
 
both of these poems are from “I Hear America Singing: Sometimes It Troubles Me,” by Robert Dunn, published by Oyster River Press, as part of the “Walking to Windward: Poets of New England” series, available at RiverRun Bookstore.