568
PARTISAN REVIEW
early style allowed him to express passion and emotion without
transforming and transcending them. As a result one feels that Williams is
trapped not only within the violent prison of the self but also within an
imprisoning idiom. Williams finds in the long lines of his later poems a
way to escape the self, a way to examine his experience and find in it not
only the rage and anger, the injustice and arbitrariness of life but also its
mercy and forgiveness. Williams writes, again from "With Ignorance,"
"Self and other the self within other and the self still moved through its/
word,! consuming itself, still, and consuming, still being rage, war, the
fear , the/ aghast,! but bless, bless still, even the fear, the loss, the gutting
of word, the/ gutting even of hunger,! but still to bless and bless, even
the turn back, the refusal, to bless and/ to bless and to bless."
C.K. Williams comes to accept this mercy and forgiveness by mak–
ing an act of faith in the power of words. This acceptance is a triumph,
human and poetic, and it. is this triumph that makes
Poems :
1963- 1983
a
remarkable and important poetic document.
Although Alan Dugan has won many of poetry's most important
prizes and during the 1960's was one of America's most prominent poets,
he has always been an outsider, an internal exile. No other poet of his
generation has so steadfastly used his poetry as a vehicle for debunking
the sentimental values of religion and the phony pieties of nationalism.
In
"In Memoriam: Aurelius Battaglia, And Against His Tragic Sense of
Life," Dugan tells his friend, " 'Listen, Aurie, it's true that you have an
appropriate fate,! that you're an offensive loudmouth shut up by throat
cancer,! but don't really believe in appropriate fates or tragedies/ or just
punishments for hubris: that's just bullshit. ", With wit, irony, and sarcasm
Dugan demands that we experience life without the illusions and
justifications, the superstitions, we often use to explain our predicaments.
At the close of "In Memoriam," Dugan continues his counsel, '''So lis–
ten, Aurie, when you and I walk out of Ciro's drunk tonight/ . ..
when you are not listening to me and I am not listening/ to you,! we
could both get hit by one of the drunk drivers/ around here/ and that
would not be tragic, it wouldn't even be fate:! it would just be ridicu–
lous: death ... ' "
Poems
6, like Dugan's previous seven collections of poetry, is filled
with attentive and precisely described moments. Unlike Swenson's natu–
ralist's eye or Williams's expansive and dramatic meditations, Dugan dis–
tills and reduces like an aphorist. He does so in a voice that is acerbic,
almost gruff The poem "On Fingernails in Bloody Times" asks, "Why
do our torturers/ rip them off so much?/ Because they are the backups/
for our grasp of things,! not just our caresses, and are the delicate armor/
over such sensitivity/ that we wouldn't even have the hands/ comfortably
to fight with/ if we didn't have them on." The movement of this poem
