I met Alan Dugan at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center in October 1980 with a few titles of his in my head, all from Poems (1961). This first collection won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and the story was that a friend had submitted the manuscript on his behalf for the Yale Younger Poets Award.
When he asked me to leave a few poems in his mailbox, I felt intimidated. What tone of voice would he use to critique my poetry? He was known not to hold back. As soon as I put four poems in his mailbox, I began to agonize. I thought a short afternoon nap would solve the problem. Two hours later when I opened my eyes, I wanted to run downstairs and retrieve the poems. Or maybe I would leave him only two. But the mailbox was empty. Damn! I steeled myself. I would look him in the eyes and take the criticism. I tried not to think it would be easier to stand at the edge of the bay and watch seagulls rip the guts out of fish beached on the sand.
The afternoon we met was overcast. I could see Alan in the parking lot puffing a cigarette. He knocked on the door and entered with a low “Hi, Yusef.” We sat at the small kitchen table. He pulled a can of beer from his coat pocket. I think it was a Bud. Then he pulled my poems from another pocket, smoothed out the pages on the table.
I couldn’t believe his shyness. It contrasted the robust voice in his poetry. He mentioned the importance of concision in verse. I don’t remember his exact words, but he also said he expected to see more of the South in my work. He wanted to know the poets I was reading, and I said Robert Lowell, Michael Harper, Adrienne Rich and Robert Hayden. When I asked who influenced him, he took a swig from his beer, wiped his mouth with the back of hand, and said, “Constantine Cavafy.” I must say, I learned a lot those seven months at Provincetown through this man’s generous but pointed critique.
Dugan’s poetry had been worked, honed, and shaped as if on some lathe of bone. Each poem reminds us that it is a made thing. The voices in Dugan’s work know prison, war, the street life of cities, and the salty smell of oceanic air among the sand dunes of Truro and Provincetown. They also emanate from earthy desire and pain, ritual, and social reality, and the questions posed through wrought metaphors are seldom answered. Naked wit and irony are a given.
This poet is a philosopher, perhaps a Marxist, who once worked in a factory making prosthetics (or plastic vaginas used for demonstrating the proper insertion of a diaphragm). I think Alan admired those who accomplished physical labor. He writes about the “graveyard shift” and the “swing shift,” and the word “work” weaves its ways through his body of work. He’s straightforward, seldom off-handed. Each poem owes all to an astute precision, but never grandiosity.
Dugan’s poetry is deceptively basic but also gauges complexity, and even probes the metaphysical. His most anthologized poem, “Love Song: I And Thou,” opens with these lines:
Nothing is plumb, level, or square:
the studs are bowed, the joists
are shaky by nature, no piece fits
any other piece without a gap/or pinch, and bent nails
dance all over the surfacing
like maggots.
The “by nature” is a tactical gesture. The “maggots” prepare us for the speaker’s self-crucifixion, and we are anointed with a closure that transfixes: “I need a hand to nail the right,/a help, a love, a you, a wife.” The repeated article, the “a,” puts flesh on an over-controlled emotion. The speaker questions the institution of marriage, and perhaps sees it as a shared crucifixion. Dugan is an unsentimental thinker, tempering the scene, as he lets us see and feel a sliver of vulnerability. (In his own life he was married to the artist Judith Shahn for decades, and he dedicated all his collections to her.) There’s gruffness in this voice that reaches for a different trope, and it is this measured contrast that summons the reader.
Alan Dugan has been accused of being overly committed to a perfected style. But I do not view this supposed flaw as a weakness; in fact, for this poet, as is true with his mentor through example, Cavafy, a style and a sense of aesthetics facilitate multiple topics. Even when a poem seems somewhat experimental, as is the case with “Triptych” (three columns), one knows it has been tooled under Dugan’s keen eyes and ears, his authority of touch and design. The shape of “Triptych” is a visual thesis.
Throughout Dugan’s journey a life of observation guides the pen as sword or dagger — wit and innuendo as an imagistic search for a truth in people, animals, nature, and objects. Everyday situations and minor things are his muse. Each poem seems whittled down to essential breath, music, and pace. Yet, tone and imagery seek a distilled density of thought and being — a juncture where spectrum of possibility enlarges through each reader’s query. Dugan always leaves a little door open; he dares us with a straightforward language that’s never apologetic. Some may even view the poet’s signature work as brash, or even churlish, but this authentic voice also bears a hint of Catullus — but not as raw. His vision definitely creates a dialog that links vestiges of classical sentiment to modern and contemporary realism.Recently, teaching my graduate students, I was surprised to discover that some aspiring young poets hadn’t read Alan Dugan. I could feel them rethinking the idea of the poem as they engaged his work, intrigued with how elements of gravity and playfulness converge in this cosmopolitan voice shaped by American ethos.