Alan Dugan
Alan Dugan was an influential American poet born in Brooklyn in 1923, who grew up in the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. His education began at Queens College but was interrupted by military service during World War II. After the war, he completed his B.A. at Mexico City College in 1949 and returned to New York to pursue a career in poetry. Dugan gained recognition with his first major poetry collection, "Poems," published in 1961, which showcased his distinctive voice characterized by caustic irony, self-castigation, and a bleak worldview.
His poetry often critiques societal norms and explores themes of nihilism and existential despair, presenting a universe devoid of meaning where human connections are fraught with irony. Despite the dark themes, Dugan's work is praised for its cleverness and humor, engaging readers with sharp wordplay and vivid imagery. Over his career, he received several accolades, including the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and taught at institutions such as Sarah Lawrence College and the Fine Arts Work Center. Dugan's unique style and evolving body of work continue to resonate with poetry enthusiasts, making his contributions significant in the literary landscape. He passed away in 2003.
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Alan Dugan
American poet
- Born: February 12, 1923
- Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
- Died: September 3, 2003
- Place of death: Hyannis, Massachusetts
Biography
Born in Brooklyn in 1923, Alan Dugan (DEW-guhn) grew up in Brooklyn and in Queens. He attended elementary and high school in these boroughs and then enrolled in Queens College in 1941. However, he was drafted into the army two years later and served during World War II. Upon his discharge, he enrolled in Olivet College in Michigan, but he completed his B.A. in 1949 at Mexico City College in Mexico. After brief postgraduate study at Mexico City College, he returned to New York, where he spent most of the next ten years writing poetry while he supported himself with various short-lived jobs. His persistence was rewarded when his first major collection, Poems, was accepted for publication by the Yale Series of Younger Poets. This book, which appeared in 1961, introduced the fully mature poet to a mostly receptive audience.
Dugan never volunteered extensive biographical detail, so it is hard to explain the source of the caustic irony, the relentless self-castigation, and the whirling nihilism of his work. However, these characteristics define a world in which a mindless determinism controls things without and within, as in Mark Twain’s later works such as Letters from the Earth (1962) and The Mysterious Stranger (1916). In Dugan’s world, however bleak things may look, there is nowhere to go but down. That the poems are clever, even funny—some to the point of provoking loud laughter—is Dugan’s gift. These poems often have a tensely precise surface which allows glimpses through it to underpinnings of moral and philosophical chaos. The brilliance of their meteorlike metaphors charms the reader into at least partial acceptance of Dugan’s terrifying premises.
Dugan’s favorite targets were the well-worn and comfortable clichés by which people live. Antireligious and antiromantic, the poems depict a world in which the only drive is the appetite and the only goal is its temporary satisfaction. Loyalty, altruism, and heroism are poses and fakes. Joy is an illusion. People are cruel and stupid. The family is a joke. It is not possible to find any kind of escape in nature—the natural world is just more appetite, other alien hungers. There is no comfort or beauty in it. Clever wordplay and mocking laughter are the only sources of revenge against the void.
Dugan’s poetry has a strong following among critics and readers of poetry, and he was a recipient of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize as well as of two Guggenheims and other grants and awards. He taught at Sarah Lawrence College from 1967 to 1971, and he taught at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, New Jersey, for a number of years, but his primary occupation was the writing of poetry. He died in 2003.
Dugan was unusual in another way: There were major changes in the style and content of his poetry during his career. It is appropriate that he titled his books Poems, Poems Two, Poems Three, and so on, because he continued to base his work on the same premises and to use the same basic techniques. The poems do not become boring despite the obsessive repetitiousness of their themes, because each poem has its own often startling set of images or controlling metaphor. It is easy for anyone familiar with the poet’s work to recognize a poem from any phase of his career; the Dugan voice is that distinctive.
It speaks clearly and memorably from his first collection onward. “Love Song, I and Thou,” perhaps his most frequently anthologized piece, demonstrates the Dugan trademark clearly. It begins with a description of a do-it-yourself project gone hopelessly amiss:
. . . no piece fits
The speaker tells of his building project, his failed attempts to construct. The completed structure held true for an instant, Dugan writes, then skewed “as wrong the other way.” The disaster complete, the speaker can only claim, “I will live in it until it kills me.” His house is now his cross, and he needs some assistance:
I can nail my left palm
The notion of love as a self-crucifixion, the speaker’s frantic drive to crucify himself and his need to have the “wife” as helpmate in this project—this is vintage Dugan. If some critics find his level of self-absorption unacceptably high, they cannot evade his corrosive wit and the rueful grins it evokes.
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, by Alan Dugan. 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.