I’ve decided that I need to finish reading Dugan’s Poems 7 or I’ll put it down and forget it about without ever finishing the book. Truthfully, though, some of the poems are beginning to wear on me, or at least irritate me.

While it may have been a secret in some distant past that men are often horny and dream of making love to a woman, it’s pretty old news now, so it’s rather hard to get excited by poems like this:

TO A COLLEAGUE. FROM THE COUNTRY

I’m jealous of your life. What
are you doing out there. You’re
probably having a drink at that
bar and trying to get into you-
know-whose panties and joking with
those friends of yours I don’t
even know while I am sitting here
all alone in the snow having no
fun. Man, man to man, I hardly know
you so why are you doing this to me.

Perhaps I’ve just read too many Beat poets, but there doesn’t seem to be much that’s going be learned from a poem like this. Hell, it’s probably best left as an email sent to a close friend, or, even better, just kept to yourself.

It might be worth blogging or writing a poem if you DON’T feel horny anymore. Oh yeah, I think I did blog on that when I was taking some medicine before my prostate surgery. Now, that was an UNUSUAL feeling well worth writing about.

Luckily, there are enough poems like this one that do appeal to me to keep me reading until I can finish the book. (And the rain outside helps a little, too.)

APOLOGY (TO THE MUSE)

I’m so unaware of what
is going on around me that
I like to watch the brief lives
of the birds: they look around
before they take a seed because
they’re always there at present,
self-accounted for in their fears,
hungers and the necessaries
of their rites, whereas I
do not see approaching cars
forget dinner and my address
and realize your beauty
only after you have made a pass
and gone away, saying, “Oh well.”

As I visit other blogger sites that I link to, I often discover just how unaware I am of the world around me. Birds, though, birds I know.

Just this morning walking in the mist I heard the cry of the Pileated Woodpecker, the thump, thump, as he dug deep into the tree rot, and finally located him across the street high in the top branches of a dying tree. Squawking blue jays announced our arrival. While Black-Capped Chickadees flitted back and forth chirping chick a dee dee dee.

I must admit I was beginning to tire a bit of Dugan’s Poems Seven by the time I finally finished it. Luckily, the last section entered some new areas, and Dugan’s sense of humor came to the fore, probably because by the time you reach eighty that’s about all you have left.

I seriously thought about citing a poem called “Another Cat Poem, To a Cat Person” but reconsidered when I recalled I still might need to ask for some technical assistance on updating my site.

Besides, this poem seems to have a more universal appeal and provides a cleaner answer to those who argue that America was founded on fundamental Christian principles:

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CORN IN AMERICAN HISTORY

After the Puritans landed at Provincetown
and the women washed their dirty clothes
their men marched to Truro to perform
their first political act: theft.
They stole the Indians’ corn
buried on Corn Hill, so why
is there no monument to them
or corn on Corn Hill in Truro?
For the same reason that there is no
working laundry in Provincetown:
Cleanliness is next to godliness,
thievery is next to Americanness,
and we must not publicize
that this country was made
by a bunch of dirty crooks.

I wish I’d found this poem while I was still teaching American Lit; I would have introduced it during that boring, beginning section when the texts introduced Puritan “literature,” which consisted almost solely of sermons and self-serving diaries.

I’m sure most students wouldn’t even recognize this as “poetry,” since it seems so different from what’s usually taught as poetry. In retrospect, this poem reminds me more of the Beat poets than traditional American poets. There’s an immediacy and grittiness usually lacking in popular poetry that can be found throughout Dugan’s poetry. It often seems to offer gnomic truths reminiscent of Emerson or Thoreau’s aphorisms, but, unfortunately, it lacks the rhythm and power that made Whitman’s re-statement of the same ideas unforgettable.