Alan Dugan

(this review first appeared in The Literary Review)

Courting Songs

            In his introduction to Alan Dugan’s Poems (1961), Dudley Fitts notes, “a strangeness…and extraordinary tension, too, in spite of the greyness of diction and versification.” No one has more aptly described the peculiar effect of Dugan’s poetry. From the publication of his first book in 1961 his work has intrigued and perhaps repelled readers with a deep irony and self-defacement that challenges not only the pieties of culture but of poetry itself. Since Lowell’s Life Studies and Ginsberg’s Howl fully opened poetry to the unadulterated voice of the self, American poetry has dwelt on psychological nuance, sometimes to the extreme of embracing a maudlin solipsism. Nothing could be further from that sentimentality than Dugan’s gruff realism. Although his poems often speak in the first person, their voice attains an air of objectivity that quashes all pretensions of the ego. What are we to make of a poet who writes,

            I’ve promised that I will not care about things,

person, 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

during this “life is pain” phenomenon.                       (“Untitled Poem”)

Fitts observes that “it is something to be able to bring damp chaos under a modicum of control,” while noting that such formulations cannot account for the strangeness, which is unteachable and perhaps beyond critique because so difficult to define. Dugan’s plain diction and simple constructions eschew the notion of order through elaboration of form, but embrace instead the possibility that order exists in its own right, as an element of chaos itself. Fitts’ usual acumen fails him here: that chaos may even be form is an idea that haunts these poems, throwing into doubt the utility of Eliot’s (and all of modernism’s) project of shoring fragments against the ruins. This is just one of Dugan’s various challenges to cultural and social axioms.

            Dugan’s ironic detachment seems strange because it applies to the voice—the speaker—of the poem, whether first or third person, as well as to the ostensible subject. Eventually the reader understands that the voice is always the actual subject, and that Dugan’s poetry is concerned with psychological nuance in the same way as Ford’s Good Soldier. That is, rather than indulging in self-examination, producing a poem of introversion (with all its consequent concealments), Dugan engages in self-exposure, which is as rare in poetry as it is in life. When he writes of Orpheus, “Singing, always singing, he was something / of a prig, like Rilke, and as dangerous / to women”  (“Orpheus”), we understand that he is exposing himself. But lest we take that for granted, consider how much supposedly confessional verse would admit that the speaker is a prig and dangerous to women.

            Just in case readers of the 1961 collection didn’t understand that these strictures apply to the speaker himself, Dugan returns to the theme of danger to women in his later poems, most explicitly in “Courting Song: Attack! Attack! Attack!”:

Oh I approached and bowed.

She turned away. I ran around

in front of her and bowed.

She turned away. I ran beside

her till she stopped. I bowed.

She turned away. I ran around in front

of her again and bowed and cooed.

Oh she lay down and sighed.

Then, Wham, Bang, Thank you Ma’am

I got her where she lived

and nearly died.

That this poem is spoken in the voice of a pigeon will not appease those who find it sexist, antisocial, or in some other way an affront to the pieties of the day. But Dugan’s task is not to appease anyone’s pieties, including his own. His task, as Thoreau says of his own work, is to “drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it prove[s] to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it….” The detachment and powerful sense of reality required for this work is difficult to find in a sentimental age.

Most especially, to detach one’s self from the self and see it as others might is an unusual act, and only infrequently encountered in literature. Usually, introspective literature romanticizes personal suffering, and exposes faults in terms that encourage our sympathy. Dugan neither encourages nor allows sympathy on the part of the reader, and if the speaker indulges in it, ridicules him. A poet who can ask, “Why feel guilty because the death of a lover causes lust?” is unlikely to require our sympathy, and will satisfy himself with our attention.

            Perhaps all ages are sentimental; ours certainly is, and this is why Dugan, despite having won a Pulitzer Prize and recently his second National Book Award, appears in few anthologies and remains relatively unknown. His earthy irreverence is witty enough to make the Sphinx crack a smile, but the current literary establishment is committed to poetry that for the most part would strike Sarah Teasdale as too timid to bother with. “Old Billy Dugan, shot in the ass in the Civil War,” speaks against whole worlds of cowardly politics and aesthetics when he notes, “The North won the Civil War / without much help from me / although I wear a proof / of the war’s obscenity” (“Fabrication of Ancestors”).

This detached yet committed voice links the ancient world to the present, suggesting that Dugan’s models are more likely to be Horace and Catullus than T. S. Eliot or Wallace Stevens. Horace might have noted that, “The Augean stables were so full of horseshit / that the Augean nobles came to laugh at Hercules / when he was told to muck them out by hand” (“Marxist Analysis of the Fifth Labor of Hercules”), while Catullus surely wrote the poem on the facing page: “‘Pray for me and die rotten,’ the men’s- / room wall read. ‘I don’t want a drink,’ / the old whore said. ‘You know what I / want. Come on. Come on. Come on’” (“Memories of the Bowery”).

Fitts notes that “this is not a young poetry,” and, “Neither is it an elaborately wrought poetry.” The diction is plain, the roots are deep and classical, and the voice is mature. Poems Seven, Dugan’s recent collection, contains all of his work from his Yale Younger Poets book to the present. Fitts’ characterizations apply to the most recent work as well as the earliest. The consistency of the voice is remarkable. It is the consistency of a hard-earned perfection, however, and does not limit Dugan’s ability to engage almost any subject, theme, or problem. “Closing Time at the Second Avenue Deli,” the final poem of this four-hundred page collection, gently (for Dugan) mocks the notion of metaphor, the very basis of poetry:

                    This

            is not the time for metaphors. This is the time

            to turn out the lights, and yes,

            imagine it, those two ketchup bottles

            will stand there all night long

            as acrobatic metaphors of balance,

            of emptiness, of fullness perfectly contained,

            of any metaphor you wish unless

            the manager snaps his fingers at the door,

            goes back, and separates them for the night

            from that unnatural balance….

Metaphor, we realize, is only a rhetorical device, while even ketchup bottles possess an actuality independent of what we say about them. This is not necessarily a fashionable idea, but in the materiality of the world and the self Dugan finds the antidote to intellectual, moral, and aesthetic pretensions. Facing down these pretensions requires courage, but instead of locating that virtue in himself Dugan finds it in creatures like the hermit crab for “doing what he thinks he has to do / while shrinking” (“Life Comparison”).  Courage in the face of one’s own cowardice is a necessary virtue in Dugan’s world, but he is too modest (though he mocks his own modesty) to claim it for himself, so I claim it for him. Few poets have for so long remained unflinchingly true to an original vision, few have written, as Dugan has, poems of old age that retain the virility of his youthful work, and fewer still have so long defied the forces of sentiment and fashion.

Alan Dugan, Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001. ISBN 1-58322-265-0. $35, hardcover.