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Critical Survey of Poetry, 2d Rev. Ed. Alan Dugan Born: Brooklyn, New York; February 12, 1923 Principal Poetry General Prothalamion in Populous Times, 1961 Poems, 1961 Poems Two, 1963 Poems Three, 1967 Collected Poems, 1969 Poems Four, 1974 Sequence, 1976 New and Collected Poems, 1961-1983, 1983 (includes Poems Five) Poems Six, 1989 Ten Years of Poems: From Alan Dugan's Worshop at Castle Hill Center for the Arts, Truro, Massachusetts, 1987 More Poems: From Alan Dugan's Workshop at Castle Hill Center for the Arts, Truro, Massachusetts, 1994 Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, 2001 Other Literary Forms Alan Dugan's literary accomplishments have centered on the medium of poetry. Achievements Alan Dugan had been publishing poems in literary magazines for a number of years-winning an award from Poetry as early as 1947-before his first book of poetry was published in 1961. That book, Poems, enjoyed one of the greatest critical successes of any first volume of poems in the twentieth century. Dudley Fitts awarded it the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award; it also won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Poet Philip Booth called it "the most original first book that has appeared . . . in a sad long time." Dugan published subsequent volumes of poetry, similar in style and range to his first volume, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry again in 1967 for Poems Three. Dugan also won the Prix de Rome from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1962-1962), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1963-1964). He was a Rockefeller Foundation fellow in 1966-1967 and won a Levinson poetry prize from Poetry magazine in 1967. In 1981, Dugan won the Shelley Memorial Award. In 2001, Poems Seven won the National Book Award for Poetry, awarded by the National Book Foundation. Biography Born in Brooklyn, Alan Dugan has spent most of his life in New York City. His stint in the Army Air Corps during World War II was of importance to him, and a number of his first published poems were portraits of servicemen. He attended Queens College and Olivet College, and received his B.A. degree from Mexico City College. He married Judith Shahn, the daughter of the painter Ben Shahn. After the war, he held a number of jobs in New York City, working in advertising and publishing and as a maker of models for a medical supply house. These jobs made him dissatisfied with the world of office work that he satirizes in his poetry. The success of his first book of poems in 1961 led to his winning a series of awards that gave him more time for his poetry. Besides the National Book Award and two Pulitzer prizes, he received a Rome Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1962-1963, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1963-1964, and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1967-1968. He was a member of the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College from 1967 through 1971, and he has been on the faculty of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, since 1971. Dugan has given many poetry readings, and, after adjusting to his high voice and the purposely undramatic, cold presentation, audiences have found that his style of reading fits the poems. Analysis Alan Dugan brought to his first remarkable volume, Poems, a completely developed style. That style was colloquial, spare, and tough, fitting the bleak vision of much of his poetry. Dugan has been characterized as a poet lacking in charm, and truly, there is no attempt to be charming, only intense and truthful. His mocking, ironic style fits the narrowness of his outlook, and both the achievement and the weakness of his poetry rest on it. Whether Dugan writes of war, love, or work (his key subjects), he confronts them with a similar ironic stance. His poetry is against sentimentality, even against transcendence, a kind of antipoetry. Dugan's language makes it evident that he belongs to the colloquial tradition of American poetry. In a manner somewhat reminiscent of William Carlos Williams, Dugan reverses the expectations of the reader of love or nature poetry, turning sentiment into irony. Like Williams, and like contemporary poets such as James Wright and Philip Levine, Dugan sets his poetry in the city and expresses sympathy for, and identification with, the urban working class. Although Dugan's poems seldom rhyme, they often employ traditional meters and stanza as well as free verse. The emphasis on form-even, on a few occasions, the resort to pattern poems-often creates an interesting tension with his dominant plain style. "How We Heard the Name" "How We Heard the Name," the poem that Dudley Fitts, the judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, selected for its "strangeness" despite "the greyness of diction and versification," is typical of Dugan's work. In part, this poem depends for its meaning on a classical allusion, a surprisingly common technique in this tough-talking urban poet. At the center of the poem is the battle of Granicus, one of Alexander the Great's most famous victories, but Dugan has singled out a seemingly trivial historical oddity: Alexander wrote that he won the battle "with no help from the Lacedaemonians." In Dugan's poem, the river brings down the debris and dead of the battle until it also brings down a soldier on a log. The speaker of the poem inquires about the source of this grim pollution, and the soldier sardonically tells him of the famous victory won by the Greeks "except/ the Lacedaemonians and/ myself." He explains that this is merely a joke "between me and a man/ named Alexander, whom/ all of you ba-bas/ will hear of as a god." The antiheroic stance, the directness of the language, the casualness of the mention of Alexander, and the comedy of "ba-bas" to characterize those who believe a mere man can be a god, make up a microcosm of Dugan's tone and style. This is a voice that has come to joke about Caesar, not to praise him, yet reserves its greatest contempt for the sheeplike followers of great leaders. No apologies are made for running away from the battle, and the reader is left with the feeling that it was the action of an intelligent man who, like the Lacedaemonians, knew when not to fight. War Poetry Dugan often speaks sarcastically of war, whether it is one of Alexander's, the American Civil War, the two World Wars, or the Vietnam War-all of which make appearances in his poetry. In a "Fabrication of Ancestors," Dugan sums up his attitude toward all wars when he praises his ancestor, "shot in the ass," who did not help to win the war for the North but wore on his body a constant "proof/ of the war's obscenity." In the curious "Adultery," Dugan contrasts the insignificance of private immoralities with greater public evils-the world of "McNamara and his band" and "Johnson and his Napalm Boys," who wipe out the lives of entire cities in Vietnam. Dugan does not plan to be among "the ba-bas." "Love Song: I and Thou" Love is another dominant subject of Dugan's work, and he approaches it in much the same tone of fierceness and irony that informs his poems about war. In these poems he turns to the war between the sexes, its battles and betrayals. "Love Song: I and Thou" is one of Dugan's most skillful poems and is deservedly one of his most frequently anthologized. In a complicated brew, it mixes the techniques of allegory and allusion with Dugan's terse colloquial style. It illustrates the basic paradox of much of his verse: the dominant conversational, flat tone that all the reviewers have emphasized, merging with elaborate poetic devices-devices that only a few commentators have mentioned. The overriding figure is the comparison between a man's life and a house, a badly built house, in this case. The opening line of the poem declares how badly it is built: "Nothing is plumb, level, or square." It is a house with a corresponding life in considerable disarray, a house for which, on one level, the speaker insists on taking responsibility ("I planned it"), yet whose chaos, on some other level, must be blamed on a higher power ("God damned it"). The description of the house becomes a description of the ancient quarrel concerning the roles of free will and determinism in a person's life. Also running throughout "Love Song: I and Thou" is a comparison-contrast between the speaker and Christ: "By Christ/ I am no carpenter." This reference concludes in the final lines about crucifixion in a passage that suddenly introduces the love song promised by the title. The title's "I and Thou" is a reference to the modern Jewish philosopher Martin Buber; I-Thou is the language he used to describe a true and vital love relationship between equals, as opposed to I-It. The ending of Dugan's poem, however, creates a highly ambiguous feeling. In what sounds like tender talk, "I need . . . a help, a love, a you, a wife," the speaker is asking for someone to nail his right hand to the cross. He cannot finish his crucifixion by himself; he needs a helpmate, a nailer. One critic finds the language very touching, but there seems to be a bitter joke at the heart of this complex poem. "Letter to Donald Fall" Although Dugan sometimes praises the world of sexuality ("the red world of love"), his enthusiasms are almost always tempered by irony. In a "Letter to Donald Fall," he makes a list of "my other blessings after friendship/ unencumbered by communion." They include: a money making job, time off it, a wife I still love sometimes unapproachably hammering on picture frames, my own city . . . and my new false teeth. . . . The words "sometimes unapproachably," which manage to go both forward and backward, suggest Dugan's attitude toward love. Even more typical is the comic introduction of his false teeth, which become a parallel to the approaching spring. The teeth seem to him to be "like Grails" and they talk to him, saying, "We are the resurrection/ and the life." Amidst some amusing images of spring coming to the city, Dugan comes as close as he can to satisfaction when he addresses his friend with the symbolic name in the final line of the poem: "Fall, it is not so bad at Dugan's Edge." "Cooled Heels Lament Against Frivolity, The Mask of Despair" The Muse, too, is tough in the poem with the amusing title, "Cooled Heels Lament Against Frivolity, the Mask of Despair"; she is a kind of distant boss, keeping the poet waiting in her office, as she swaps stories with the "star-salesmen of the soul." He seems to speak to her with slim hope of any positive response: Dugan's deathward darling; you in your unseeable beauty, oh fictitious, legal person, need be only formally concerned. . . . If the fanciful Muse seems cold and indifferent, it is because there is not much to look forward to in one's encounters with the real world of bosses and work. "On a Seven-Day Diary" That world of work is often portrayed in Dugan's poetry as a necessary but painful evil. "No man should work, but be" is the dream that cannot be fulfilled because "poverty is worse than work." "On a Seven-Day Diary" comically sums up Dugan's attitude with the insistent refrain, "Then I got up and went to work." It is repeated five times for the five weekdays, but "Then it's Saturday, Saturday, Saturday!" The speaker excitedly proclaims that "Love must be the reason for the week!" as he lists the pleasures of the weekend. Yet he drinks so much on Saturday night that most of Sunday is lost, and-as one might expect from Dugan-the poem ends with "Then I got up and went to work." "On Zero" War, love, and work make a similarly dour pattern in Dugan's poetry-the grayness of Monday always returns. This is a poet whose longest published poem is entitled "On Zero," and whose attitude toward change might be summed up in the closing lines of "General Prothalamion in Populous Times": "the fall/ from summer's marching innocence/ to the last winter of general war." Reading a collection of Dugan's poems can be harrowing. His is a world where freedom is something to be feared, where to meet the morning is to confront "the daily accident," and where "sometimes you can't even lose"; yet Dugan often brings enough skill and humor to his work to overcome the darkness of the vision. What has been said of other writers who have been called cynical or misanthropic can be said of his work as well: The very energy of his language and the vitality of his wit belie his pessimism. Poems Six In a 1989 interview, Dugan himself complained about the slightness of the poems he wrote in the 1970's. In the same year, he published Poems Six, which attempts to get back to the more ambitious mode of his earlier volumes. Even for those accustomed to the bitterness of Dugan's work, however, the poems in this volume seem still bleaker in vision. The language of nausea and excrement often dominates Dugan's responses to the world's and his own difficulties. In the opening poems of this volume, Dugan often confronts political subjects more directly than he had in the past. "Take on Armageddon" is addressed to Ronald Reagan. After talking about the final battle, the poem ends in a description of a world where there will be "no more insects, and no more you and your rotten God." In "Love and Money," Dugan describes a moment in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, when a steelworkers' strike and a convention of baton twirlers are taking place at the same time. The strikers "didn't touch the girls or the mills/ because they weren't theirs," but the speaker declares the mills do belong to the strikers since they built them and ran them. Their inability to recognize this, however, leads to the conclusion that "There is no left-wing politics in America left/ There is the International Baton Twirlers Association." In Poems Six, Dugan continues to concentrate on his subjects of work, war, and love, and on occasions-as he did in his earlier volumes-to mix his tough-guy talk with allusions to classical literature and mythology. He tells his audience that as a child he used his statuette of Erato, Muse of lyric poetry, as an exercising dumbbell. He would "grab her by the neck and ankles when I got her alone/ and pump her up and down." Now the statue remains behind in silent rooms in Brooklyn as the traffic outside is leaving "for New York and the Wild West." Possibly the most successful poem in Poems Six is the final one: "Night Scene Before Combat." The trucks moving in convoy outside his window in the middle of the night become a complicated symbol for the speaker, containing poetry, war, and death: "Did you know/ that metaphor means Truck/ in modern Greek? Truck. Carryall." He feels a battle within himself between staying with the woman he addresses and joining the convoy that rumbles by outside. The trucks, however, prevail, and the speaker turns to the woman "for one last time in sleep, love,/ before I put my uniform back on,/ check my piece, and say So long." Poems Seven The year 2001 saw publication of the collection Poems Seven, a grand compendium four hundred pages in length and covering Dugan's entire forty-year career. Along with early war poems, three dozen new, previously uncollected, poems appear. The collection impressed the National Book Foundation sufficiently to garner for Dugan a nomination for the National Book Award for Poetry for 2001. Bibliography Atlas, James. "Autobiography of the Present." Poetry 125 (February, 1975): 300-301. This review emphasizes Dugan's acute observations about commonplace moments in daily life. Atlas criticizes the later poems of Dugan for adopting a hectoring and polemical tone. Boyers, Robert. "On Alan Dugan." In Contemporary Poetry in America, edited by Robert Boyers. New York: Schocken Books, 1974. A clear and thorough overview of Dugan's poetry. Despite his limitation in range, Dugan is praised as a moralist in difficult times. Boyers believes that the best poems make "a temporary truce with the miserableness of the world." Dugan, Alan. "An Interview by J. C. Ellefson and Belle Waring." American Poetry Review 19 (May/June, 1990): 43-51. In this wide-ranging interview, Dugan talks about his childhood, his parents, his early jobs (including writing for The New York Enquirer, later to become The National Enquirer), and his attitude toward poetry. He expresses admiration for the poetry of Charles Bukowski and Philip Levine, contemporary urban American poets with whom he feels a kinship. Howard, Richard. Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950. Enlarged ed. New York: Atheneum, 1980. In this complex and difficult-to-read book, Howard finds something like paranoia at the center of Dugan's work. He believes that the poetry displays an "honest and desperate resentment and hatred," a hatred sometimes directed at language itself. Scharf, Michael. Review of Poems Seven. Publishers Weekly 248, no. 43 (October 22, 2001): 71. A review of the collection that garnered for Dugan his second nomination for a National Book Award. Stepanchev, Stephen. American Poetry Since 1945. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Stepanchev states that nothing is sacred to Dugan. He praises him highly for the colloquial directness and honesty of his work and discovers a kind of irony in the way his simple style confronts difficult and complicated subjects. Michael Paul Novak; |
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