Alan Dugan died this September, just two years after he won his second National Book Award for his collected works, Poems Seven. The first time he won the award was in 1962 for his first book, Poems, published by the Yale Series of Younger Poets and for which he also won a Pulitzer Prize. That year he also received the Rome Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Since then he has been awarded a Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation awards, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
He was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1923 and grew up in Queens. He began his undergraduate education at Queens College in 1941 but was drafted into the Army Air Forces just two years later. After the war, he studied in Mexico, receiving his B.A. from Mexico City College in 1949. Dugan then moved to New York to write. When he learned that his first book would be published by the Yale Series of Younger Poets, he was working for a physiological-model manufacturer making plastic vaginas that showed doctors’ patients how to properly insert diaphragms.
His approach to writing poetry carries with it, perhaps, the same kind of unabashed candor required of a plastic model of a vagina. He once told a Boston Globe interviewer that “Prettiness is often the death of poetry. You say something is pretty, you know it stinks." His poetry removes all traces of the sentimental; at times, the poetry is nihilistic, dark, giving words to the side of human nature where vice and guile reside--all in the language of the daily idiom, the talk of everyday life.
For this reason, critics have accused him of being “unpoetic." Part of this is due to the fact that Dugan refused a strict alignment with any existing school of poetry: he remained unaffiliated with the Beat poets, language poets, Black Mountain, or New York school. This lack of affiliation might also provide an indication as to why Dugan is overlooked in the current anthologies: when editors look for poems in an anthology, they usually group poets in the same school; without a defined community, Dugan has lost the professional and (let’s face it) political power that comes with community. The forces working against Dugan’s inclusion into what is a more and more tightly controlled canon-shaping project are cause enough for any serious critic to reassess Dugan’s work so that it will not be lost for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of his poetry.
The general themes that Dugan writes about in his poetry vary, especially from the early poetry to the later poetry. He writes about war, the quotidian domestic experience, adultery, getting an erection at a poetry reading, what your cat does while you’re at work. Probably the most famous of Dugan’s poems is “Love Song: I and Thou." Far from being a traditional lyric love poem, the poem instead ironically mocks the institution of marriage. In it, a husband is a carpenter building a wooden cross. He tries to nail himself to it, but admits that he needs helps:
This is hell,
but I planned it, I sawed it,
I nailed it, and I
will live in it until it kills me.
I can nail my left palm
to the left-hand crosspiece but
I can’t do everything myself.
I need a hand to nail the right,
a help, a love, a you, a wife.
The tone of the poem is both reverential and sarcastic, a technique that shows up in Dugan’s poetry frequently. The theme of the poem, the love relationship, also shows up quite frequently. However, each treatment of the subject is unique and introduces new clusters of imagery that relate to the subject.
For example, “Variation on a Theme by Stevens" is a poem about winter: “In fall and whiskey weather," in which the poet understands winter as a season of renewal, a spring-like time in which “All appetites revive and love/ is possible again in clarity/ without the sweats of heat." The central image of the poem is the leaving of the geese in “Their noisy Vs,/ half a horizon wide" while the “walleyed artic birds/ arrive to summer in the fall,/ warmed by these chills." His conclusion of the poem decries the tragedy of staying or leaving a relationship, and it is comforting:
Therefore it is not tragic to stay
and not tragic or comic to go,
but if is absolutely typical to say
goodbye while saying hello.
Another poem about winter, “Winter: For an Untenable Situation," has a similar theme, staying and leaving. This time, the poet is more nostalgic, but it is a bittersweet remembrance. A couple fights the cold of winter by burning everything in sight. When nothing is left, they burn each other:
Outside it is cold. Inside,
although the fire has gone out
and all the furniture is burnt,
it is much warmer….
--------------
oh we will burn the house itself
for warmth, the wet tree too,
you will burn me, I will burn you,
and when the last brick of the fireplace
has been cracked for its nut of warmth
and the last bone cracked for its coal
and the andirons themselves sucked cold,
we will move on!, remembering
the burning house, the burning tree,
the burning you, the burning me,
the ashes, the brick-dust, the bitter iron,
and the time when we were warm,
and say, “Those were the good old days."
The fire in Dugan’s poem becomes a Heraclitean fire-- the never-ending flux of the universe in which objects change shape and appearance, a world in which things get used up, even people. On a deeper level, the poem is about the weight of objects and the use of objects.
From Dugan’s 1974 collection, he returns again to the idea of flux and fire as a natural and renewing quality of life. His poem suggests that giving over to the flames is the only way to live with a clarity of vision and a clear sense of value in experience:
“Untitled Poem"
I’ve promised that I will not care about things,
persons, or myself, but I do. For example:
my house looks like a set for a New England tragedy
but it isn’t. Outside it looks like a dump.
What it’s like inside I’m too arrogant to describe
although we’re happy for whole moments at a time...
---------
Nevertheless my objects, loves and self
interfere with my own being. We should,
me and my wife, burn all this down
and start again possessionless toward death
and not together, which is nonsense. Loves,
marriages, families are stultifying in
accumulations of debris of love and artifacts.
Let it all go, as it will, upwards in the fire after death.
In this poem, Dugan speaks of death as a moment of renewal, a cleaning house. What is most important about this poem, however, is the way in which Dugan describes his own struggle with identification. The poem is untitled, the objects in the poem serve only as kindling, “artifacts." In this poem, Dugan resists definition, and he reminds us that our satellites of possessions aren’t benign. They come between us and the nectar of experience, the flux of the world, the “fire after death."
Dugan’s struggle with identification occurred even within the realm of poetry itself: he did not ally himself with any defined school of poetry; he wrote even when the critics derided his line breaks; he listened to the his own voice, a voice he said was his sixteen-year-old self. In the end, Dugan’s legacy goes beyond the awards, the fellowships, the trips abroad. In a poem called “February Twelfth Birthday Statement," Dugan writes about a recent poetry review from a critic who didn’t review his work favorably as he simultaneously addresses future poets. He writes:
That nameless son of a bitch of a critic who
wrote that I only wrote one good poem in
my life might be right so here’s to you
future brother and sister and other poets
to drink to me and you with a shot
of bourbon and a bottle of beer
to the success of my intention on
my sixty-fifth birthday and to your
matching accomplishment. One poem
is enough.
Indeed, one poem is enough. But, if one poem is enough, then Dugan’s corpus is Niagara. It is a flood.
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