Until his notebooks can be fully viewed, calling Fred Dunn a poet will remain a bit of a stretch.
What's for sure is that he was an oddball figure who lived on the fringe of society and made pitiably small headway in life. It was his strange habits and eccentric ways (and never the poetry) that often drew the attention of local newspaper reporters.
Dunn, who died late in 2008, was the subject of several articles over the years. In the 1980s, before he truly exited the mainstream and became essentially a hermit and object of curiosity, he twice stood as candidate for Toronto mayor. A reporter came up with a priceless, fitting term for him: "the farthest out fringer of all."
Other stories described Dunn's practice of running for miles each day carrying an 80-pound log on his shoulders. The septuagenarian insisted he was training for the Olympics.
But the constant thread that runs through everything written about Fred Dunn is the poetry. The reporters seldom did more than mention it, but it was always there. A 2003 Globe and Mail profile about Dunn noted that after his release from a psychiatric hospital where he'd received shock treatments, he "started to write poetry, scribbling down lines of verse on the margins of books, in the blank space of newspapers." In a posthumous tribute this year, Joe Fiorito in the Toronto Star said that Dunn "wrote hundreds of poems in favour of peace. He wrote poems in notebooks and on the backs of envelopes, and when his eyes grew weak he wrote out loud, composing his verse in his tremulous voice."
The questions for Canadian poetry are, if the poems, so often mentioned, were to become available, might they possess literary merit? Could anything he wrote hold a place, however peripheral, in Canadian poetry?
I would argue that it is very possible that some of Dunn's body of work has value. A fragment of Dunn's recorded in one of the news clippings comes close to the real thing. Composed not long after he'd gone blind in one eye, it has a crepuscular, mystic quality:
Despite the fact my sight
Isn't what it used to be
I see many, many things
Dark, dark is the night
I'll hold my candle up high
Shedding some light
It's a stanza that, for me, brings to mind William Butler Yeats' comment about Walter De La Mare's minor poem "An Epitaph": 'There is not an original sentence in this poem, yet it will live for centuries.'
Of course it's going too far to ascribe to Dunn the kind of praise Yeats had for De La Mare. 'Live for centuries' isn't a phrase to be used lightly. Dunn's is a minor achievement at best, and it feels like poetry written by someone who may not have read much poetry, and may not have had much opportunity. Nevertheless, there's potential here, and enough potential that one is forced to wonder what would've been produced had things turned out differently.
‘Minor achievement’ is a phrase almost tailor-made to describe the career of another neglected Canadian poet to whom Dunn can perhaps be compared: Paul Potts, who lived mostly in England, from 1911 to 1990. Potts is a poet so little known, his modest body of work so long out of print, that in 2006 when the Nova Scotia publisher Breton Books decided to put out a selection of his work they deliberately omitted his name from the title. Instead they called it George Orwell’s Friend. Breton decided, with some justification, that it was the only way of drawing any interest to the book.
A truly down-and-out figure even among the penniless poets of seedy post-war London, Potts is usually remembered, if at all, for being in 1950 the last person to see George Orwell alive. A check in the index to Bernard Crick’s biography of Orwell actually shows eleven references to the British Columbia-born Potts. It’s a kind of footnote to posterity that echoes Dunn’s occasional mentions in the ephemeral daily papers of recent Canada.
But unlike Dunn, Potts had the writer’s unflagging impulse to see his name in print. He carved out an identity as a writer, albeit an indefeasibly romantic one, reading in public squares and selling his poems on "penny-each" broadsides.
Even the highlight of Potts’ writing, a book called Dante Called You Beatrice, never made him any money. But with time it has slowly risen to a level that might be said to lie somewhere below that of cult classic.
For Fred Dunn, shock treatments and protracted stays at mental hospitals probably precluded any kind of published profile in his lifetime.
Yet a few more of his poetic scraps, recorded here and there by reporters, also have the suggestion of real poetry about them and hint at what might be found in his so-far unviewed notebooks:
Long years ago I lost it
In my travels I know not where
I never knew my mother
But I had a lock of her hair
If that quatrain fails to rise very far above the pedestrian, it is nonetheless a fragment that suffers only mildly from comparison to these duly published lines from Paul Potts’ poem "Jean":
There is a wild flower growing
Inside a broken vase
On a mantle in my memory.
This flower will die
When you are dead,
And while you live will grow.
(From George Orwell’s Friend: Selected Writing by Paul Potts, edited by Ronald Caplan. Wreck Cove: Breton Books, 2006)
It makes sense to at least make an assessment of Fred Dunn in terms of his standing as a poet. We won't be able to do that until some enterprising soul locates and sifts through his notebooks and his backs of envelopes.
Near the end of his life, after years in a hermit's shack, Dunn had secured with the help of social workers a small apartment above an east Toronto coffee shop. When he died, workers from Toronto’s Street Survivors social program returned to sort through his belongings, largely clutter that was thrown away. It's possible some of the poems were preserved.
Christopher MacKinnon is a Toronto-based freelance writer whose articles frequently appear in Canadian magazines and newspapers.
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