Parents get married to a John Ciardi poem, and then we are born. We learn our language, and fumble our way through metaphors. Sometimes they don't make sense to everyone:
Lock up the church,
I feel as unasleep
As a dead cat
Sometimes they do:
A priest after boy's ass
feels better than I
do: When I walk around
ladies on the stoops
think I am death
Sometimes, when our words fall out of their nooses, we just don't care about you, the listener, or you, the reader. We care about the language, because it's ours, but we hate your indifference to it, or the way you express pleasure only when a superior is nearby. Or when your vocabulary or grasp of humanity exceeds our own ("She was a beautiful, small woman / To have such an ugly, large vocabulary"), we despise your intellect, your ability to be snooty and to stop drinking when you've had enough. We always listen to punk rock on the beach of our family vacations to the shore, and we have a reservoir of disgust that we scream in Port-a-Potties:
You God-damned shit.
You God-damned turd.
I hate the standard of your life.
I hate the standard of your soul.
Alan Dugan is more than a wee bit of the "we" described here. He is an "everyman", the poet who speaks to your sensibilities, if not always to your soul. He's a comforting voice when you're not looking for comfort ("I was raised in the suburbs where spite is the child of love"), and a consistently good read when you want justification for disgust or disappointment. While he's a more nuanced, professional writer than Bukowski, he cowers in the same bars, poker games, and dank prayers:
God, I need a job because I need money.
He can be funny, but he more frequently captures a desperate bitterness in the working class, who exact revenge only in their thoughts or through self-inflicted pain:
Then, when the bell rang, they each resolved,
"No man should work, but be,"
and went to cut their wrists inside
the safety handcuffs of machines.
The work is brilliant when it can weave major themes into Dugan's simple, indelicate language. This occurs most frequently in Poems Three (1967) and Poems Four (1974), both of which largely revolved around Vietnam. While "Qualifications of Survivors" and other of Dugan's most political pieces suffer from the fact they're now synopses of Oliver Stone films ("The good ones die first, but I am not so bad: Americans are worse"), anyone flattened by life gains some redemption through his words:
So why not give the man a shot,
empty his bedpan, or let him out
of the army and on to the street
to beg for women, money, and pleasure.
Part of Dugan's greatness comes from the fact that, from his first poem to his last, he can be read and mostly understood by any bus driver/janitor/chicken factory worker. His primary weakness is a dependency on content. If he is tackling something trivial, his writing does not transform it, because he's far more accustomed to playing with beer coasters than language. He's not Ashberry or Gass, or any writer whose language wows you, but a straight shooter, like Stanley Kunitz, who uses words like nails. When he nails them into their proper place, kudos -- but he's an "everyman", a person whom you often wish wasn't hired by his Muse to get the job done. If I were a quadriplegic, wanting my last erection memorialized, would I really want Dugan to do the job ("They should've run a flag up it, it / was his last salute to his cuntree")? He makes small moments smaller than I think they actually are, draining almost all the depth from the poetry that occurs in our daily lives.
Though Dugan's authorial confidence suits the strong masculine voice behind his words, it is problematic when you don't buy into his argument (mouse as hero?). I found his apparent indignation at the animal nature of cats ("It came back to us wing-mouthed...expecting our congratulations / expecting us to say Good hunting / Dancer, dancer, oh you dancer") less than profound, and overall, thought his work would be better with less certainty and more "maybe".
Just as Dugan's impressive body of work would be more impressive with more variety, so would his voice if it sometimes flooded with doubt, surprise, or an awe of the unknown.
And yet Dugan is Dugan, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, because he stands firm. He's tough. He's the John Wayne of good poetry, and you buckle down before his body of work like a limbless man before a whore. His lines of poetry do not feed us the life we may have hoped for, but it's the life we have come to expect, and fuck, and drink down to our death.
-- Theodore Defosse
· · · · · · ·
About the Publisher:
Seven Stories Press is the New York-based independent publisher that
has stepped in to publish -- on First Amendment grounds -- important books
that were being refused the right to publish for political reasons,
including Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Gary Webb's Dark
Alliance, about the CIA-Contra-crack cocaine connection.
Under the direction of publisher Dan Simon, they have also become a major
outlet for women writers addressing serious issues affecting women, and
American writers of African, hispanic and Asian descent. In January 2001,
Seven Stories also began semiannual publication of Autodafe, a journal from
the International Parliament of Writers. In short, they give a great name to
independent publishing.
|
