Strong Place

by Tim Dlugos, David Trinidad (Introduction)

Genres: Poetry, LGBT

89 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Poet Tim Dlugos was born in Springfield, Massachusetts and grew up in Arlington, Virginia. From 1968 to 1970, he was a Christian Brother at LaSalle College in Philadelphia. He left LaSalle and moved to Washington, DC, where he participated in the Mass Transit poetry readings. In the late 1970s, he moved to New York City and was active in the Lower East Side literary scene, where he was a contributing editor to Christopher Street magazine and on the Poetry Project staff.

Dlugos’s books of poetry include High There (1973), Je Suis Ein Americano (1979), Incredible Risks (1980), Entre Nous (1981), A Fast Life (1982), Strong Place (1992), Powerless: Selected Poems 1973–1990 (1995), and the posthumous A Fast Life: Poems of Tim Dlugos (2011), edited by David Trinidad. Marked by witty observation, narratives that recount life’s daily minutia, and heavily enjambed lines, Dlugos’s poetry shares its immediate, offhand style with the work of Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler. Dlugos’s work is also noteworthy for its firsthand depiction of the AIDS pandemic.

Dlugos’s poetry inspired the 2011 collaboration with painter Philip Monaghan titled At Moments Like These He Feels Farthest Away, which paired Monaghan’s work with the Dlugos poem “Gilligan’s Island” and was shown at New York University’s Fales Library.

After learning that he was HIV positive, Dlugos studied at Yale University Divinity School to become an Episcopalian priest. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1990.

Reviews

[Al-anoud Al-Serhan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a blind buy. I was not familiar with Dlugos before, but this was a decent introduction. It was a little like solving crosswords. You need to dig deeper beyond the simple use of words to understand what he meant, or intended to convey in a poem. You may say this is the case with poetry in general, but this one requires a little background knowledge of the author to understand the text fully.
Solid two stars.

[Wally · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dlugos is the best.