Worm's Cathedral: Alan Dugan Attends to Love's Various Scales

Here's the rather oddly worded Wikipedia entry for Alan Dugan:

"Alan Dugan (1923-2003) was an American poet. His poetry is known for its plain and direct language, though it is supported by technical skill; it is generally trenchant and ironic in its criticism of American life and received ideas, and in its frank sensuality alike. Dugan received many awards for his poetry.

"Dugan grew up in Jamaica, Queens in New York City and served in World War II, experiences which entered his poetry though he avoided simple autobiography or confession. He later lived in Truro on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, where he directed the Fine Arts Work Center and was a mentor and teacher to younger poets for decades.

"Dugan's work was published in successive numbered collections under the simple title Poems. His first book, Poems (1961), was chosen for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, won a National Book Award, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Then followed the collections Poems 2 (1963), Poems 3 (1967), Poems 4 (1974), Poems Five: New and Collected Poems (1983), Poems Six (1989), and Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry (2001), which won Dugan a second National Book Award. He won the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 2002.

Alan Dugan was married to the artist Judith Shahn. He died on September 3, 2003, of pneumonia at age 80."




That brief article contains an inaccurate statement, made in a noble effort to avoid having Dugan stereotyped with the generally pejorative epithet "confessionalist poet." He did not always avoid "simple autobiography or confession." That's simply untrue.

But Dugan is not a confessional poet. Confessionalist is usually reserved for those works in which the autobiographical element is predominant and nearly obsessive; in which daily happenings of great ordinariness tend to be hyperdramatized--to the point where the poet appears to have delusions of grandeur; in which psychological distress or pathology tends to be valorized, and becomes almost competitive. My psychosis is bigger than your psychosis. In other words, confessionalist poetry is generally seen as writing which is self-absorbed, too narrow in focus, and ignorant of the larger offices the art can serve.

Dugan's work has none of these faults, and is very invested in the culture(s) which engendered it, and the culture it is attempting to engender--although Dugan would most likely laugh openly at the last few words of my sentence.

He was a great lover of culture, but he was not a great believer in culture.

People (myself included) often run to Catullus in seeking literary antecedents for Dugan's art, but really so many writers of the Classical World clearly inspired him. You will find poems like "From Heraclitus" and "On Breeding, from Plutarch" near a paean to masturbation. Dugan liked to mix it up, and his readers are grateful.

Open a volume of Dugan and the Greek Anthology, lie them side by side, and you will quickly hear these poems talking back and forth. This is because the world's fundamental problems never change. Even the larger problems amenable to solution (hunger, torture, despotism) never go away. Dugan could never get over that fact, and neither should we.

One can see Dugan tended to prefer the more cynical writers of antiquity when seeking fraternity, but the more idealist writers and spiritual thinkers throughout history also made great cannon fodder for Dugan. (See ""Wall, Cave and Pillar Statements, after Asoka" or On Finding the Tree of Life.") One senses his gratitude for the existence of this latter class probably equaled his appreciation for the former.

(In this, Dugan makes me think of my father, after a particularly awful stroke had reduced him to extremely limited mobility, making a joke one day from his prison-armchair of his gratitude that Hitler had existed..."otherwise I would have nothing to watch on t.v....all day long W.W. II shows, movies, documentaries...." This was indeed just a joke; my father had fought in that War actively in the Pacific theater. My father was also fond of crooking his little finger, calling people close as though he had something monumental to relate, and then whispering "I see dead people..." with his eyes large as saucers. Sorry, it's a digression. But Dugan took me there. Hi Dad.)

This cynicism about the failed "great endeavors" of history, and deep suspicion of government and institutional power was something he did share with the vast majority of his contemporaries, regardless of their aesthetic or stylistic affiliation. Yet, Dugan was never pompous in his deflations of power. He might be exceedingly funny, but not pompous. He knew we are all down here together, and down here very low. He knew, for example, that existentialism was just another schtick, and he was not afraid to craft a book of poetry that was a Sartrean routine and a deadly-serious cultural critique at once. His poetry along these lines managed to avoid the Scylla and Charybis of pontification and glibness. And strait is the gate in that stretch of ocean!

I must confess when I first encountered Dugan's work in anthologies (I was a teenager) I really had him pegged as Irish. Or possibly British.

I didn't read him as American at all.

This was partially because of his metrical meticulousness, and the way his poems were both oratorical and orotund. This just was not an American trait in that period. It was more a continental thing. I should add that Dugan's orotund poems were often scatological or scathing in their indictments of individual or cultural insanity (often his own). But sangfroid was never sacrificed to emotion (which would have been allowed, and even encouraged in this period, ironically).

So I didn't read Dugan as American at all. It was also because he was creating a diachronic sort of art, that was interested in constructing a poetry of surveillance, that watched the whole arc of what came before. This was at variance with most other American schools and constellations, which were now more interested in exploring the radiant present, from the Beats to the confessionalists and Deep Image poets which were to follow. Poetry became increasingly personal, and some of the larger offices were downplayed, seen as authoritarian and retrograde. Even the majority of Black Mountain poets (great innovators that many were) had a healthy dose of autobiography and a strong focus on the present in their works. (One wonders whether the rigorous intellectualism of the next avant-garde, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, was indeed predictable as a timely shift away from the Dionysian, back to the Apollonian?) Dugan's poetry wanted to attend (as it evolved) to the whole sweep of world history and contemporary world events, their machinations, but this was because he wanted to take Occam's razor to them. This the poet did with great dexterity, quite often.

Often, a poem of historical address would be followed by a poem of great dailiness. The larger problem would be seen repeated in the smaller household quandary. A holocaust could be seen brewing in Tuesday's failure to organize one's mind, or get out the front door. Tsunamis often start as ridiculously small events way out in the ocean, events which would seem insignificant at the time, had we witnessed them. The moral abdication of emperors or contemporary nations might be mirrored in the moral abdication of our poet whom it sometimes indeed "hurts to think."

But then the poems that were getting anthologized were often some of the (I apologize for this) cuter poems. He didn't often write cute poems, and he rarely wrote a frivolous poem, but the anthologists were seeking them out. Usually these were poems which took various animals (ex. "Funeral Oration for a Mouse") as subject matter and almost had that Robert Burns quality of the drunkard's homiletics on nature. These are not his best work, but they evince great craftsmanship and are enjoyable. Maybe the anthologists knew their audience, after all. I don't know.

I don't want readers to think because Dugan addressed some predictable subject matter, that his poems are in any way predictable! Quite the contrary, as you will see if you read some of the poems I have assembled below. He often writes wonderfully weird poems. The arguments are filled with quirky, almost Carrollian turns sometimes and strange spins are put on the world's great thoughts. But this imparted torque is what reminds the reader that (s)he is alive, destabilized, responsible for this great mess, this cosmic soup. "It's all poetry," Dugan seems to say, "and you're soaking in it." Everything is going to be rewritten. Tonight. You are going to write it.

Anyway, Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry was the volume which won me over in a final way and revealed what an attentive student, what a perceant inhabitant, of the twentieth century this poet had actually been. I found this in 2002, when it was issued by Seven Stories Press. As Wiki told you, this won Dugan a second National Book Award. That can't be a feat repeated too often.

I wanted to share with you a few of my favorites from this collection in the hope you might add this to your library if you don't already own it.

These poems are taken from all periods of Dugan's career and I am listing them in the order in which they appear in the book, which is organized in a straightforward, chronological manner.

Enjoy...




     AGAINST FRANCE: ON THE ALGERIAN PLEASURES OF ENTITY


When I died the devils tortured me with icepicks and pliers
and all the other instruments they learned from men of faith;
they took off my genitals and nails, less troubles, chained me
to the wall, and came in shifts with forced food and electrodes.

Later, after works, I tore the chains from the wall. What whips
chains are! I lashed my lashers and escaped their cell,
armed to my last two teeth in search of god. My arms, though,
were chains chained to my arms, so what I touched I struck.

I met all the animals with beaks and offered them myself
to rend, since as a student of torture, I had found it fun,
and wrecked them as they bit. What would I have done
if I had met a smile? Well, I swam the river of spit,

crossed a plain of scorpions, and went into the lake
of fire. I emerged bone, dripping the last of my flesh,
a good riddance, and asked whoever came to chew the bones,
"Where is god?" Each answered: "Here I am, now, I am,

in a way." I answered: "Nonsense!" every time and struck
with chains. Weary, weary, I came to the final ocean of acid:
pain was a friend who told me I was temporal when nothing
else spoke, so I dipped my hand-bones and saw them eaten.

"It is good to be rid of the bones," I felt, "as clattering
encumbrances to search," and dived in whole. However,
instead of being shriven or freed up into flight, oh I
was born again. I squalled for a while to keep my death,

that time when chains were arms and pain was a great ally,
but I was conquered and began my sentence to a child's
forgetfulness, uneager to collect the matter of these dreams,
and stared into the present of you innocent beasts.







     CREDO


They told me, "You don't have
   to work: you can starve,"
so I walked off my job
   and went broke. All day
I looked for love and cash
   in the gutters and found
a pencil, paper, and a dime
   shining in the fading light,
so I ate, drank and wrote:
   "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 pay
for your free love at night."







     I DREAMED I GOT A LETTER FROM EZRA POUND


Oh, I got jammed among the bodies as
they yelled away the air, enclosed. I slept
naked between two living pains. My chin-
bone plowed the floorboards as my talk,
all teeth, chewed at the salt ankle of
a raving man. I have been sent here
to commit the psychopaths to violence
and have succeeded. I have my disciples.







     TO A KID WHO BELIEVES IN ASTROLOGY

Those lights in the sky at night are not
from the stars as they are now. Also,
they are from where the stars were.
Now the stars are some place else
and the stars themselves are different.

Each point of light you see is the central point
of a continuously expanding sphere of light
that the star sent out once long ago
while going away. It interpenetrates
all the other spheres of all the other stars.

I don't think that it refers to you because
it all happened so long ago. You're too stupid
to listen to me, you beautiful astrologer, and I'm too
   stupid to know
what's happening out there where space is dark
and filled with interpenetrating spheres of light.




(One is sure the "interpenetrating spheres of light" in dark space are the young, the kid, belief itself...it's a very moving poem about what ages does to one...).








     UNTITLED POEM



One tries to be sober and respectable
so as not to be committed as insane
by the extended family or state police
but every once in a while something happens
that blows the whole construct apart.
One finds onseself stripping the pants
off a little girl who says Wow, or else
one falls down in the front yard of her
house party and cuts a forehead just to go
for more beer with the money taken from
her mother's purse. 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 the 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.










     AFTER A POEM BY CARLOS DRUMMOND DE ANDRADE TRANSLATED BY ELIZABETH BISHIP AS DON'T KILL YOURSELF


Listen, Dugan, don't read.
It's bad for you. Don't hang around
reading bad novels indoors, drinking
yourself to death on carcinogenic beer
and going broke. Do something. Stop
being an idiot, stop living
off women. Be a man, not
a gigolo. Go out, find a job:
the day is interesting outside,
there are all sorts of people,
actions, scenery, and things to do.
Life is not that difficult!,
to do and die of, so go out, pretend
to love it, leave it, or engage in it.
Go buy something, razor blades,
a woman, a politican, a god;
steal some money (basic), do
something, don't just sit here reading and writing.




(And no, the following is not a commentary on langpo memorialization, so if you read it that way, you're cattivo to the max...)

     EMPIRICAL SCENE


We saw a grand piano fall off a roof
as if in slow motion, and hit
the sidewalk without a sound
as we laughed at the philosophical implications
and went down into the subway
where the noise of all crashing pianos
is kept on permanent performance
at full volume, so at least we weren't deaf
or in an inconsistent universe.
It had been like the beginning of a silent movie
but we didn't know that we were in it
so we never found out what happened,
we, who didn't hear the grand piano.







     DRUNKEN MEMORIES OF ANNE SEXTON


The first and last time I met
my ex-lover Anne Sexton was at
a protest poetry reading against
some anti-constitutional war in Asia
when some academic son of a bitch,
to test her reputation as a drunk,
gave her a beer glass full of wine
after our reading. She drank
it all down while staring me
full in the face and then said
"I don't care what you think,
you know," as if I was
her ex-what, husband, lover,
what? and just as I
was just about to say I
loved her, I was, what,
was, interrupted by my beautiful enemy
Galway Kinnell, who said to her
"Just as I was told, your eyes,
you have one blue, one green"
and there they were, the two
beautiful poets, staring at
each others' beautiful eyes
as I drank the lees of her wine.








     WHAT IT REALLY MEANS



The cemetery where the college
students went to screw
was where we went to test
this S.M. business after
drinking up to it. I tried
to put a rose-thorn
through your ear lobe but
you ran off screaming while I
didn't feel a god-damned thing:
you weren't a masochist,
I wasn't a sadist, we
weren't even lovers, but
we did remain friends
back in philosophy class
where "The truth
of a theory is
demonstrated by
its practical application."
This is what it really
means. Pragmatism.










     THE JACK-OFF OF THE GRAVEYARD SHIFT



When his machine was running right
he could come up behind you,
grab you by the elbows
and pretend to fuck you up the ass,
six-two, two hundred twenty pounds,
laughing, and you were helpless,
except for shouted words: Men
would tell him sexy things
to see him run to the john
and jack-off, yelling. Once
he wanted me to help him rob
the rich old lady in his rooming house
because he saw her pocket book
was full of folding money but
he jimmied the Coke machine instead
and disappeared. Later
the foreman said the cops
had been around the office after him. He was
a total innocent, a total fuck-up,
a natural for the graveyard shift
to liven up the nights of noise,
with the four-slide stamping-out machines
going 12-to-8, 12-to-8, 12-to-8,
sex-and-money, sex-and-money, sex-and-money.
He was missed. He kept people from going crazy too.
These stories were told about him for months.








     HARD-ON DEATH



When whats-his-name the quadriplegic got
his final hard-on nurses came
from all around the Veterans Hospital
to ooh and ah and touch
it but it didn't do him any good:
he couldn't feel a god-damned thing,
and everybody got an extra joint
that night because he died, and joked
they should've run a flag up it, it
was his last salute to his cuntree.








     ON INTER-RELATEDNESS IN THE UNIVERSE



I want to tear you apart.
I said to the butterfly,
in a sexy way,
and did, and it did
not matter: the tear
did not tear up the air
and rip the sky apart
the way it should
in a moral universe
because, you know,
morality is only human,
the universe and bugs
are not. I only made
a butterfly into a worm
like me. But oh
the wings, the wings:

Do not say these wings
are little fritillary fripperies.
They are great works of art
though small, say, compared
to the Milky Way, or you,
love in your various scales.
The great question is
why are they so beautiful
as the flying stained glass
flimsy windows of the worm's
evanescent flying cathedral.




(That is the penultimate poem in this large collection of over four hundred pages. It's a gorgeous shiv of words, innit?

"...or you, love in your various scales..."

I hope this works as an introduction to some readers out there to this American master, one of whose chief themes was the masterlessness of it all.

But it least we have art, the prosthesis, right?...)