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Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry
Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, the winner of the National Book Award, presents the life work of a giant of American letters, tracks a forty-year career of honest, tough artistry, and shows a man at nearly 80 years of age and still at the height of his poetic power. Dugan’s new poems continue his career-long concerns with renewed vigor: the poet’s insistence that art is a grounded practice threatened by pretension, the wry wit, the jibes at the academic and sententious, and the arresting observations on the quotidian battles of life. All the while he peppers his poems with humorous images of the grim and daunting topics of existential emptiness.
- GenresPoetryNonfiction
448 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
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May 17, 2023Love the cover. Forget the turtleneck and the black beret, Alan Dugan is your local (well, in New England) anti-poet, ready to smash all of those poetry stereotypes that grow like mosquitoes in a ditch. He's also surprisingly wide in his range of allusions, versed in mythology, psychology, and a lot of other -ologies.
Oh. And crude at times. A touch of that Rabelais, Boccaccio, Medieval hanky-panky keeps popping up. Don't look for any odes to birch trees. Or odes to self (a very popular pastime in present-day poetry, where "identi-me" works are the trend and the passion).
Oh. And crude at times. A touch of that Rabelais, Boccaccio, Medieval hanky-panky keeps popping up. Don't look for any odes to birch trees. Or odes to self (a very popular pastime in present-day poetry, where "identi-me" works are the trend and the passion).
March 29, 2021
Poems Seven - Alan Dugan
This 400 page tome spans forty years of Dugan’s poetry and won the National Book Award in 2001.
I think virtually all of the poems in this collection are good and some are great. As Dugan aged his poetry became more barbed and often humorous. He pulled very few punches by the 7th series.
So a refreshing read. Here are those poems that I enjoyed the most.
1. Love Song: I and Thou - man builds his own home and makes references to feeling like Jesus nailed on the cross
2. I. Enigma: Calm: Addressed to the Air and Comment on I. - snails are trapped in the doldrums of tall grass on a tidal beach
3. Portrait from the Infantry - author sees a man diminished following his war experience
4. Thesis, Antithesis, and Nostalgia - a basic poem of reflection. My favorite poem - perfect imagery
5. Memories of Verdun - man regrets his cowardice at Verdun but he lives while the other sheep were slaughtered
6. Accommodation to Detroit - an analogy between the walled city of Hamtramck and neighboring Detroit and those who came north in the Great Migration and left behind the South
7. Prayer - a poet is trapped in a menial manufacturing job
8. Heart Attack in Bad Air - does anyone care when an old man dies?
9. On a Professional Couple in a Sideshow - what does the knife thrower think when he throws at the woman
10. Stentor and Mourning - soldier shares his fears
11. Teacher’s Lament - teacher’s frustrations with students in love
12. Internal Migration: On Being On Tour - funny and relatable poem about the author trying to attack his obnoxious neighbor because he would have to go to jail and lose his career
13. On Cabin Fever - a man is bored with his life and envies his cat who is ‘not bored with his boring life’
14. Sexist Lament - a man loses his job at an ad agency when his love interest interrupts a meeting with the execs
15. Speech to the Student Clowns - a dark explanation for why clowns should not be cute or nice and the children already know they are evil
16. February 12th Birthday Statement - brilliant retort to criticism that the author only wrote one good poem in his life
17. The Significance of Corn in American History - satire pointing out that America’s greatness is a big whitewash
5 stars
This 400 page tome spans forty years of Dugan’s poetry and won the National Book Award in 2001.
I think virtually all of the poems in this collection are good and some are great. As Dugan aged his poetry became more barbed and often humorous. He pulled very few punches by the 7th series.
So a refreshing read. Here are those poems that I enjoyed the most.
1. Love Song: I and Thou - man builds his own home and makes references to feeling like Jesus nailed on the cross
2. I. Enigma: Calm: Addressed to the Air and Comment on I. - snails are trapped in the doldrums of tall grass on a tidal beach
3. Portrait from the Infantry - author sees a man diminished following his war experience
4. Thesis, Antithesis, and Nostalgia - a basic poem of reflection. My favorite poem - perfect imagery
5. Memories of Verdun - man regrets his cowardice at Verdun but he lives while the other sheep were slaughtered
6. Accommodation to Detroit - an analogy between the walled city of Hamtramck and neighboring Detroit and those who came north in the Great Migration and left behind the South
7. Prayer - a poet is trapped in a menial manufacturing job
8. Heart Attack in Bad Air - does anyone care when an old man dies?
9. On a Professional Couple in a Sideshow - what does the knife thrower think when he throws at the woman
10. Stentor and Mourning - soldier shares his fears
11. Teacher’s Lament - teacher’s frustrations with students in love
12. Internal Migration: On Being On Tour - funny and relatable poem about the author trying to attack his obnoxious neighbor because he would have to go to jail and lose his career
13. On Cabin Fever - a man is bored with his life and envies his cat who is ‘not bored with his boring life’
14. Sexist Lament - a man loses his job at an ad agency when his love interest interrupts a meeting with the execs
15. Speech to the Student Clowns - a dark explanation for why clowns should not be cute or nice and the children already know they are evil
16. February 12th Birthday Statement - brilliant retort to criticism that the author only wrote one good poem in his life
17. The Significance of Corn in American History - satire pointing out that America’s greatness is a big whitewash
5 stars
August 30, 2007
Just look at the cover. He's a cranky old man, and he will appeal to your inner cranky old man. Love Dugan.
November 21, 2008
Alan Dugan's poems scour off the sentiment and leave your bones gleaming. How has he stayed so loyal to actual? Obviously, it hasn't been easy.
February 24, 2011
This was one of the 2003 RUSA Notable Books winners. For the complete list, go to http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/rus...
July 26, 2012
If you have a thirst for Dugan's wry wit, and want the full scope of his work in one handy volume, this is it.
June 16, 2024
Dugan has a distinctive voice. Some, few poems, are truly unique and only he could have written them Unfortunately many of the poems seem like angry shouts. I don't see his work in many anthologies. that is a pity. His best poems are very very good. But there are not many.
September 30, 2012
I bought this book in hardcover, when it came out in 2001, at the now-defunct Tudor Bookshop, and I've been pecking away at it intermittently in the long, crazy decade since. Poems Seven was a revelation to me then, and a pleasure to revisit now: Dugan's poetry has swagger and bite, a caustic energy that appealed to a younger, more uncertain version of myself and that remains bracing and enjoyable today, even though I can perceive now its limitations. A drinker and womanizer, a formerly low-level Madison Avenue adman and roustabout, a cantakerous Marxist lover of the classics, Dugan's poetry bristles with profanity, sex, and the violence of the world. If it can be said that his prosody did not vary much of the course of his long career -- he consistently produces short lyrics in jagged bursts of free verse, with sardonic titles -- it must also be said that his voice was genuinely distinctive, an expression of an echt American original.
October 13, 2007
Open it up and flip to any random page: Dugan's poetry is both stark and round. His direct language and humor are refreshing, silly, dirty as hell, filled with love and sadness, reminiscent of why we have these lives to write about.
June 19, 2012
There are very poems that seem more direct and laconic in English, although Nicanor Parra's antipoetry in Spanish is unique close. A retrospective of all of Dugan's career, whose poems still resonate with me since I read them in my late teens in the 1990s even though they were written in the 1960s. While contemporary to Charles Bukowski and Frederick Seidel, Dugan has a subtler art than Bukowski's and a more naunced meanness than Seidel. Often bitter and hyper-rational, there is a subtle beauty that can be seen in poems like "Love Song: I and Thou" whose twists better near nihilism and love can be dizzying. Dugan's irony is classical, not the flippancy of a lot of hipper, younger verse. To be savored, slowly and carefully, even in some of the unevenness of Dugan's later work.
July 15, 2013
On A Desolation Of The Animals At Night
I used to think that the animals
were exempt from human suffering
because they had no brains, but now
I'm not so sure because I hear
two cats moaning on the windowsill,
sleeping in a desolation not to be denied.
Why is it that the dirt made flesh
must suffer for its intuitions for a while
before it goes back to its nature? Ha,
dancy cats? Ha, sleepers? Why
are the insides of your bone heads cleverer
than opals, onyx, and Egyptian goddesses?,
in bearing witness to what's what:
those roaring horrors of the universe,
the stars, if we could only hear them
burning outside the window while you cats
sleep moaning on the windowsill as I
watch out from something wondering inside.
I used to think that the animals
were exempt from human suffering
because they had no brains, but now
I'm not so sure because I hear
two cats moaning on the windowsill,
sleeping in a desolation not to be denied.
Why is it that the dirt made flesh
must suffer for its intuitions for a while
before it goes back to its nature? Ha,
dancy cats? Ha, sleepers? Why
are the insides of your bone heads cleverer
than opals, onyx, and Egyptian goddesses?,
in bearing witness to what's what:
those roaring horrors of the universe,
the stars, if we could only hear them
burning outside the window while you cats
sleep moaning on the windowsill as I
watch out from something wondering inside.
December 3, 2011
I will likely never finish reading this book as I keep going back. I think it will just live on my desk for a number of years. I have a lot to learn from those few New ENgland poets like Dugan and Edmonds where I know I like and I understand but I am not yet ready.
November 13, 2008
One of my favorite books of poetry and biggest inspirations. Constantly on my gift list to anyone who reads poetry. Very accessible, very real, a master of american vernacular.
June 15, 2014
This is un-poetry, in the best sense! i.e., genuine & gritty. substance over word-play. pointed. hilarious. & heart-breaking. A must read.
July 18, 2020
my two stars is just a review of the new poems; i've reviewed all his other collections individually
----
as a review of the whole body of work, though, I'd probably give this 3 or 3.5—Dugan was one of the first poets I found whose work resonated with me—his work is largely written in straightforward language; lacks a lot of the more poetry-y flourishes (many of Dugan's poems don't even use any formally figurative language ["This/is not the time for metaphors," the last poem in the last collection says]); has a strange obsession with the ancient world, especially Greek (I was studying classics when I started reading his work); and many of his poems' humor overlaps with the humor of James Tate's work. early on, I looked to Dugan's work as somewhat of a model and his work continues to exert an influence on at least my syntax. that being said, I've found that I've kind of moved past a lot of Dugan's work—it's extremely restrictive, resists a lot of what i find interesting and edifying in poetry, and many poems are misogynistic, racist, and/or ableist, and the blue-collar, fuck-the-world speaker of Dugan's work begins to be harder and harder to believe (Dugan had been a poetry professor for decades by the time his last collection was published, so every time his speaker talks about leaving a bar fifteen minutes before punching in at the factory my eyes glazed over), so even his class politics become fetishy fairly quickly. that being said, there's not really another voice that sounds like Dugan's that I can think of, as weird as that sounds
----
as a review of the whole body of work, though, I'd probably give this 3 or 3.5—Dugan was one of the first poets I found whose work resonated with me—his work is largely written in straightforward language; lacks a lot of the more poetry-y flourishes (many of Dugan's poems don't even use any formally figurative language ["This/is not the time for metaphors," the last poem in the last collection says]); has a strange obsession with the ancient world, especially Greek (I was studying classics when I started reading his work); and many of his poems' humor overlaps with the humor of James Tate's work. early on, I looked to Dugan's work as somewhat of a model and his work continues to exert an influence on at least my syntax. that being said, I've found that I've kind of moved past a lot of Dugan's work—it's extremely restrictive, resists a lot of what i find interesting and edifying in poetry, and many poems are misogynistic, racist, and/or ableist, and the blue-collar, fuck-the-world speaker of Dugan's work begins to be harder and harder to believe (Dugan had been a poetry professor for decades by the time his last collection was published, so every time his speaker talks about leaving a bar fifteen minutes before punching in at the factory my eyes glazed over), so even his class politics become fetishy fairly quickly. that being said, there's not really another voice that sounds like Dugan's that I can think of, as weird as that sounds
June 9, 2025
Found this wonderful gem in the library, the poet unknown to me, what a luck little find.
December 31, 2025
"I have the honor, love, to be / your animal, but will
not please."
not please."
April 17, 2025
Alan Dugan bookended his career in poetry with award winning volumes. His first book, Poems, which focuses on his experiences in WWII, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. This is his last book of poems (2001) and it won the National Book Award. I ended up marking 33 poems in the book of contents, which I found interesting at the end because I didn’t think I’d enjoyed it that much once I was done. But marking 33 poems gives the opposite impression. The marking of these poems wasn’t at all evenly distributed. Those early poems really were some of his best. There were long stretches in the middle where I marked very few. Then in his later work, when he began to wrestle with declining health, that I was marking more frequently.
This book provides an arch of his life and his main mode struck me as bitterness, which softened as he got older. Poems turned up throughout this collected work that kept his conception of himself as a warrior always lurking in the background, surfacing when you thought he may have moved on from it. I’ve never heard of Alan Dugan associated with the confessional poets and I don’t think he would have considered himself one, but there’s a way in which this poetry taken together reveals him, perhaps in ways he hadn’t intended, that strikes me as having the quality of, or perhaps more accurately, the effect of reading a confessional poet. He may be less blatant but there’s a cumulative sense of “issues” revealed.
In the end, can I recommend this book? I can recommend it to anyone interested in war poetry. This may be the only place where his first volume on WWII is preserved. If you have a low tolerance for bitterness, this isn’t the collection for you. If you’re not inured to old fashioned objectification of women, some of his poems could be grating. But if you’re interested in reading about a man’s (a specifically male perspective) movement through his life, this may be a book for you.
This book provides an arch of his life and his main mode struck me as bitterness, which softened as he got older. Poems turned up throughout this collected work that kept his conception of himself as a warrior always lurking in the background, surfacing when you thought he may have moved on from it. I’ve never heard of Alan Dugan associated with the confessional poets and I don’t think he would have considered himself one, but there’s a way in which this poetry taken together reveals him, perhaps in ways he hadn’t intended, that strikes me as having the quality of, or perhaps more accurately, the effect of reading a confessional poet. He may be less blatant but there’s a cumulative sense of “issues” revealed.
In the end, can I recommend this book? I can recommend it to anyone interested in war poetry. This may be the only place where his first volume on WWII is preserved. If you have a low tolerance for bitterness, this isn’t the collection for you. If you’re not inured to old fashioned objectification of women, some of his poems could be grating. But if you’re interested in reading about a man’s (a specifically male perspective) movement through his life, this may be a book for you.
October 25, 2011
The poet laureate of cranky old men, Dugan has an intolerance for nonsense that is, at times, quite bracing. His poems are almost painfully absent of metaphor, coldly staring at the objective reality of the external world and recording what grudging, critical observations he has about it. He is a self-assured man, unafraid of the truth, however ugly or banal it may be, and definitely comfortable with himself (he harps quite a bit about sex and his body, which is a strange and slightly amusing habit, rather like when your grandpa tells off-color jokes at the dinner table.)
He is unimpressed with the worlds of metaphor, and while he has a taste for classical allusion, it is always in the service of recording the plain, unvarnished truth of the situation, rather than weaving some deeper metaphorical sense into the narrative. He is a terribly present-grounded poet: his life is happening right now, and he isn't scared of its passing or nostalgic of what has passed. He merely sketches the raw material of experience in sturdy, utilitarian language.
He is rather one-sided. Mere recording is something he does a lot of, and his poetry lacks a certain wetness, a certain romanticism that might have made a very potent combination with his honesty. He flirts with self-absorption, and lacks a certain humanitarian spirit. Still, he is nothing if not distinctive; I think I could tell a Dugan poem from the first line or so.
Not a lot of this poetry spoke to me, as young and relatively inexperienced as I am. But I think that there are plenty of people, especially older people, who will find in Dugan a poet that speaks for them.
He is unimpressed with the worlds of metaphor, and while he has a taste for classical allusion, it is always in the service of recording the plain, unvarnished truth of the situation, rather than weaving some deeper metaphorical sense into the narrative. He is a terribly present-grounded poet: his life is happening right now, and he isn't scared of its passing or nostalgic of what has passed. He merely sketches the raw material of experience in sturdy, utilitarian language.
He is rather one-sided. Mere recording is something he does a lot of, and his poetry lacks a certain wetness, a certain romanticism that might have made a very potent combination with his honesty. He flirts with self-absorption, and lacks a certain humanitarian spirit. Still, he is nothing if not distinctive; I think I could tell a Dugan poem from the first line or so.
Not a lot of this poetry spoke to me, as young and relatively inexperienced as I am. But I think that there are plenty of people, especially older people, who will find in Dugan a poet that speaks for them.
January 4, 2008
honest, cynical, unromantic poetry can be...beautiful?
July 3, 2008
Unsung American poetic voice
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July 7, 2012I admire Dugan's work very much -- direct, not sentimental, no attempt to be obscure --
August 1, 2024
Believe it or not, for its informal and unassuming quality it’s this book that turned me on to poetry back in the day. Could be a gateway drug for others as well.
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August 7, 2007poetry with humor, wit, cynicism, and honesty can be beautiful.
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