Beginning with his first full-length collection, “Looking for Holes in the Ceiling,” in 1974, Mr. Dunn specialized in poems about surviving, coping with and looking for meaning in the ordinary passages of life, or at least of the middle-class life he was familiar with.
More often, though, his subject matter was of a sort that might draw a sigh or smile of familiarity from the reader.
“In a nutshell, Frost for his strategies of composition and his quotidian yet philosophical investigations,” Mr. Dunn wrote.
He was a star at Forest Hills High School, from which he graduated in 1957, and then played guard at Hofstra University, including on the team that went 23-1 in the 1959-60 season.
“One of the points that I make in the essay,” he told NPR’s “Weekend Edition” in 2014, “is the similarity between poetry and basketball, is a chance to be better than yourself, to transcend yourself, if you’re hot that day.
“Grace,” published in The Iowa Review in 1994, reflected on the 1993 World Series, which ended dramatically when a home run by Joe Carter of the Toronto Blue Jays defeated the Philadelphia Phillies, a team with many fans in Mr. Dunn’s part of New Jersey.
But at 26 he abandoned it and went to Spain to try to write a novel; he did, he said, but threw it away.
“All the 22-year-olds in the creative writing program at Syracuse were more advanced in their reading than I was,” he wrote in his article for the Pulitzer site.
In addition to Ms. Hurd and his daughter Susanne, who is from his first marriage, he is survived by another daughter from that marriage, Andrea Dunn; a stepdaughter, Tara Perry; a stepson, Adam Wilson; two grandchildren; and four step-grandchildren.
Mr. Dunn turned 60 in 1999, with a new century beckoning.