“courage will make the world plain."
--"A Sawyer’s Rage Against the Trees Noble as Horses"
Reading Alan Dugan is something best done with a) a sense of humor, b) a tabla rasa as far as poetics are concerned, and c) the patience to read enough of his poems to engross yourself in his voice and methods. In short, Dugan is not an easy poet to read if you’re looking for a mellifluous ride full of poetic device and cute rhyme-schemes. Dugan is forthcoming, no bullshit, unflinching, all-encompassing poetry. His poems are brimming with politics, sex, sin, war and history. When a Dugan poem fails, it fails because it lacks music; when it succeeds, it succeeds because it is truth.
If anything can be said of Dugan’s work, it can be said that he’s called a spade a spade since book 1: Poems. Each succeeding book simply became another numeral added to “Poems" (Poems 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 & 7). What is included in each volume, to no reader’s surprise, is poems! Dugan wasn’t thinking marketing strategy, how to best confuse the reader, or which carefully calibrated selection of words would distantly foreshadow the undercurrents of his book, he was laying the groundwork for the way his poems operate: They are bare. They are not superfluous. They include just enough to make one uncomfortable with how true they are, and then they end-- no solution, no compromise, no advice.
It is clear how Dugan approaches this theme with his form: although many of his earlier poems demonstrate a knowledge of rhyme and meter, the closure of end-rhyme is often too certain for the kind of messy truth he pursues. Dugan plays with language and grammar the way the language poets have played with it, though I certainly would not call him a language poet, as this approach seems more a passing fancy with Dugan and nothing he would invest in, and he does it in a way that does not come off as trickery but rather as contributive to the meaning of the individual poem. Dugan mixes stanzaic pattern, indentation and breathing space in appropriate portions to show the reader he knows what he’s doing, but not enough that the devices define his work.
Not surprisingly, Dugan’s work is full of allusion and debt to Greek Mythology. The parabolic style of the myths seem to be exactly what Dugan is after, a simple story for each certainty of the world. There is little that Dugan cannot compare to a myth, or a character from mythology. He has a respect for poetic tradition in the sense of influence and hints at this in his poem "Idyll of Ascension":
Whoever devours the lion
Tastes the deer’s flavor.
While he also dabbles with biblical references, he is dissatisfied with religion, much as he is dissatisfied with the illusion of reason:
All these activities
Supposedly have consequences, but
If one dresses correctly and has the right
Social attitude, haircut and spare eye-
Glasses it is possible to maintain that:
That that little girl raped me, that that
Old lady gave me the money for beer,
And that I walked into an open car door.
If one does not have the suit and all, all
One has to do is hide out for a few days
And the scars, girl and old lady will fade away
Like the money. This is why there is no reason
For suicide, and this is why there is no god.
--"Untitled Poem"
Dugan has so much to say about the flaws of governments, corporations and other people that the reader wonders where Dugan himself stands. I think a sufficient answer is found in his poem, "On Looking for Models":
The trees in time
Have something else to do
Besides their treeing. What is it.
I’m a starving to death
Man myself, and thirsty, thirsty
By their fountains but I cannot drink
Their mud and sunlight to be whole.
I do not understand these presences
That drink for months
In the dirt, eat light,
And then fast dry in the cold;
They stand it out somehow,
And how, the Botanists will tell me.
It is the “something else" that bothers
Me, so often I go back to the forests.
Dugan’s entire span of poetry sets out, as he might have put it, to put each item back into its nature. The essential problem with an illusory world of gimmicks and trickery is elicited in "This Morning Here":
Every item has
Been cut out of its nature,
Wrapped disguised as something
Else, and sold clean by fractions.
Although the word truth has been used prolifically, these poems do not resonate as vague or universal in the grand sense, but rather they set out at one very specific task at a time. One way of observing this facet of Dugan’s poetry is by scanning a list of poem titles from any of his books. The titles can be cut into two categories: the curiously complex and specific (such as "Riding Songs for a Semi-Feudal Army, For Glubb Pasha, For Tortured Colonels") and those tagged "Poem" (in variations also seen as "Untitled Poem" and "Prose Poem"). While the notion of an untitled poem or a poem called "poem" may not set well with modern literary critics it does serve a purpose in Dugan’s collection. The dismissive title forces the reader to focus more attention onto that part of the page below the headline, and the rest of his titles are so intriguing that the reader has confidence this is not a scheme or a form of laziness. The reader begins reading with thoughts such as: is it really a poem? Why wouldn’t he title it? One possible answer is that concerning oneself with a title to a poem where a title is just a tertiary tag is a diversion in a world of too many diversions, as the speaker states in "Sixteen Lines on Marching":
It was a time of looking
To the right and left instead of straight ahead.
The Confessional Poetry movement has lost much of its flavor because of its overuse and a seemingly artificial way of putting oneself too directly into one’s poetry, but Alan Dugan managed to use his life experience in poems without saying this is what has happened to me and what I feel about it. He lived through the pretentiousness of academics, so his poems reflect frustrations with academics; he lived through war from an American’s perspective, so his poems reflect frustration with war and America’s role in history; and he lived as a man, so his poems do not shy away from the sexuality of a man in various stages of his life cycle. A guiltless sexuality pervades these poems, and almost threatens to usurp the poetry at many points, but as Dugan points out in "For Masturbation":
THIS IS THE WAY IT IS, and if
It is “a terrible disgrace"
It is as I must will
There is, it seems, nothing in Dugan that one can deny the verity of, whether or not it is pleasant.
While a philosophic view of life passing by does not seem Dugan’s style, he does have an almost Staffordesque moment in "How We Heard the Name":
The river brought down
Dead horses, dead men
And military debris,
Indicative of war
Or official acts upstream,
But it went by, it all
Goes by, that is the thing
About the river.
At one point in the progression of Dugan’s collected poems it seems as though the illusions of freedom and truth we feed ourselves may be our best bet, and perhaps we should just subscribe to them for our own comfort’s sake:
It is no use: poverty
Is worse than work, so why
Starve at liberty? When I
Can eat as a slave, drink
In the evening, and pray
For your free love at night.
--"CREDO"
However, he will not let himself subscribe to this work without knowing:
The veil is the lie
Of the truth beneath it
And therefore corrupt.
--"Against Veils On Exodus 33:23 and 34:33"
Dugan won so many awards throughout his career (National Book Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the Prix de Rome and the Grand Prize of the Yale Series of Younger Poets) that he seemingly transcended any type of poetry written with awards or audiences or poetics in mind. It is only when the writing comes from somewhere outside of the literary world in which it will be published that it is of any value. In "What a Circus" Dugan draws an image closely related to this idea as the Contortionist/Acrobat speaker unfolds himself and says:
The hell with this
Contortionist acrobatic act.
This poem is important because it not only speaks of the ridiculous things one puts oneself through in an effort to do one’s “duty" or “work," but also because its title points out that there is an audience (the circus) there waiting, expecting you to contort yourself. When one writes the way Dugan wrote, you ultimately roll the dice on whether or not the circus audience (or the reading world) will praise you for your decision to buck the contortionist act, or boo you out of existence.
This poem is also significant because it brings out the pain of the individual and begs for a justification of these pains. In a stunning few lines from "On an Accident: on a Newspaper Story" the speaker proclaims:
Children can act largely, death
Can be small, and art can go on
From the pains of its individuals.
Dugan is conscious of every move he makes as an artist, and he is capable in his field; however, for all his art, as with anyone’s, he ultimately comes to the final truth of: “it is a good life if life is good. If not, not."
I think it is a shame to read comments about Dugan’s poems (usually by someone who has only read one to a handful of poems) that dismiss them as dry, music-less nonsense-- Dugan wrote in a way that requires depth of thought and effort on the part of a reader. He wrote in a way that indicates he probably wouldn’t be bothered by those who aren’t willing to give his work more than a second glance. The naked truth of Alan Dugan’s work was that he wrote his life and everyone else’s in a way that didn’t exclude, that didn’t forgive, and that didn’t ask for forgiveness.
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