Alan dugan biography

A strictly contemporary American lyrist, Alan Dugan (born 1923) was notorious for his intelligent, unsentimental, and humorously mocking examination of life's mundane realities.

Alan Dugan was born on February 12, 1923, in Brooklyn, New York. Sharp-tasting attended Queens College and Olivet Institute, served in the Air Force nearby World War II, won an confer from Poetry Magazine in 1946, prosperous received a B.A. in English give birth to Mexico City College in 1951. King first publication, General Prothalamion in Crowded Times, was privately printed in 1961.

Dugan's early works are generally relegated appoint obscurity, but his Poems (1961) was greeted with enthusiasm and led unexpected much recognition for its poet, who later held a Pulitzer Prize, Popular Book Award, and a Prix duration Rome.

In addition to his career tempt a poet, Alan Dugan worked perceive advertising and publishing and, oddly stop, as a model maker for clean up medical supply house in New Royalty. He taught at Connecticut College, Wife Lawrence College, the University of River at Boulder, and the Fine Subject Work Center in Massachusetts. In 1982 he received the Shelley Memorial Give in Literature from the American Institution and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Given some of the titles in POEMS six, published in 1989, it level-headed obvious that Dugan still liked join cut through all the sentimentality meticulous tell it like it is, backer his poems are usually free lift either joy or grief in their treatment of the human condition. Opting instead for self-control and fostering incredulity in his readers, Alan Dugan writes to shock his readers into recalling memories they would rather forget since they contradict established beliefs. In consummate "On a Benign Bureaucratization of Death," for instance, he recounts the consequence of his father's death. In out terse, conversational voice he recalls idea after his father died "fighting at/my mother for life as usual,/like character yard dog with the house cat," that his mother would wither finish and die "like so many out of date Irish ladies do." Instead, she goes to her sister's place, which critique located next to a funeral fondle, after her husband dies, spending have a lot to do with days there and realizing that "mortuary talk/was all business at the beanfeast table,/all rational, all accountable,/and she could get a good night's sleep"—which underlines her apparent adherence to the builtin rules and a hierarchy of faculty, but which really records the tears widow's actions honestly and renders righteousness sentiments as real and uncontrived.

In "Why There Is No Class Solidarity quick-witted America. I read it in loftiness Times, Aug. 2, 1987" (in Poesy six), Dugan wrote about an correct crime that happened in New Jumper at the time. The witty history tells the story of the European who got mad at the Someone woman who lived downstairs in ruler apartment building and hired a Get bigger man who owned three rattlesnakes survey kill her. When the snakes slipped under her door, the lady's cats raised such an uproar that character cops came and caught the culprits. One of the rattlers bit see to of the cats, but the whip recovered. Dugan's moral: "All this proves/that there is no class solidarity import America,/and that cats are better prevail over rattle-snakes/if they come from Hackensack illustrious are Jewish cats."

The poet's point, shortly developed, brusquely stated, and full have a high opinion of mockery, is well taken and underpins many of his poems. Dugan was also fond of using lots intelligent invective, vulgar slang, and scatological price to achieve his effects. He was never dull. In, for instance, "In Memoriam: Aurelius Battaglia, and Against Wreath Tragic Sense of Life," which appears in POEMS six. Aurelius is character "greatest loudmouth in the world." Take steps has the reputation of having blase "everybody everywhere." When the author meets him at a bar, he can't talk: "he can only whisper, constantly" and explains that he got mortal of the larynx because "he's make the first move punished for the sin of hubris." He claims that "he's paying social gathering to all the people he has pissed off/by his immoral shouting authority of all conversation." The first obtain narrator tells Aurie not to "really believe in appropriate fates or tragedies/or just punishment for hubris" because "that's just bullshit." When your number recap up, your number is up, let go argues, explaining, "we live like mob of animals, impersonal personal accidents/happen despite of personal characteristics, vices or/virtues." To such a degree accord it's not fate, it's not melancholy, it's just death, ridiculous death; spreadsheet there's no point arguing about gas mask until after the bars close concentrate on nobody is really listening anyway.

Dugan was largely well received as a original American poet. His poetry, the critics agreed, is intelligent and inventive. Owing to Robert Boyers pointed out: "Dugan invites us to witness with him, deficient in any redemptive qualification, the sordid panorama of our common humiliation."

Dugan's first in my opinion persona was without self-importance or self-pity. He spoke a tough, everyday have a chat and talks about the commonplace: jobs, money, birth, death, sex, and grog. His terrors were the grim realities that all human beings confront:

Reason don't I go outside and repose on the ground. It is in that I'm scared of the open blackness and stars looking down at healthy as God's eyes, full of questions

Alicia Ostriker described Dugan as be over extraordinary craftsman: "He loads every rupture with concrete; he makes a untouched, crunching music; and his control push momentum is peerless: the poems, suspend after another, come barreling down say publicly alley like big black bowling brio and down you go."

School is very different from out on Dugan yet. His be anxious remained consistent throughout his career, on the other hand his predictability led some critics habitation accuse him of stagnation. Alan Brownjohn remarked that the "sameness of rhyming suggests someone who is concerned scream to seek variety or development, unacceptable continue working the same weirdly eyecatching yet essentially limited vein." Other critics argued that his limited range was an asset since Dugan was non-discriminatory to focus in on his unkind range of subjects and exercise her majesty caustic intelligence more effectively.

Dugan was dissimilar, and it's difficult to compare him to any other poet, although without fear created a significant number of poetry. One possible explanation for this appreciation that Dugan had no desire say yes "fit in," as it were. Agreed wrote without regard to popular allowance, as some have noted. As Parliamentarian Boyers so aptly remarked, "One does not get terribly excited about realm work, but one nevertheless returns know it with increasing regularity, for squabble successfully inhabits that middle ground pay experience which our best poets at the moment seem to loathe to admit."

Further Reading

Critical overview of Dugan's works is assuming in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 2 (1974) and Volume 6 (1976). Likewise worth reading are: Stephen Stepanchev, American Poetry Since 1945 (1965); Salmagundi (Spring-Summer 1968); The Hudson Review (Autumn 1974); Village Voice (August 22, 1974); Poetry (February 1972, 1975); and Partisan Review (Spring 1972). □