Volume 9, Number 9 · November 23, 1967
Counter-Songs
By Robert Mazzocco
Poems Three
by Alan Dugan
Yale, 61 pp., (paperback, $1.45) (paper)
Variety Photoplays
by Edward Field
Grove, 90 pp., $1.95
You can acquire everything in solitude, Stendhal observed, except character. For that you need the crowded arena, men among other men. Language and texture and sensibility—these have always been the principle concerns of poetry. You often speak of a poet's sensibility, rarely of his character, unless you're Matthew Arnold, handing out certificates of character, frowning on Shelley or Byron. I suppose Alan Dugan is to be congratulated that he so often, and perhaps so daringly, places his own character at the center of his poems. His poems are really studies in character overcome or character unrewarded, inverted belligerent hymns to wrong turnings on the road or of the head, 'how/the travelling was/ that got us nowhere.' In phrasing and movement, the poetry is always flashing, muscular, active. Yet the actions are rarely grand, at times they're almost impoverished, almost reactions. 'The soldiers marched, the cowards wept,/and all were wetted down and winded, crushed.'
Review, 2629 words
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