I have been able, by mysterious means, to conduct a posthumous interview with the poet Alan Dugan. It has been edited for clarity, brevity, and punch. Interviewer: I have some questions for you. Alan Dugan: Shoot. Like you, I wrote poetry for twenty years before I felt ready for readers—and even now, I don’t quite feel ready. Do poems need an audience; do poets? Even the most private artists write for someone besides themselves. Emily Dickinson is the classic example, sending poems to that creep Higginson. How do you know when a poem is finished? As Valery says, you abandon it. In my opinion, it’s always possible to further transform or make variations on a poem, and the fact of finishing it is all too often an act of accident, fatigue, publication date, or what have you. Let me backtrack: what is a poem? An internal conversation between various parts of myself. Did winning the Yale Series, the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and a Prix de Rome, all in the same year change anything for you? It changed my life completely, because until then I had been working for a long time at a number of ordinary jobs. I haven’t done an honest day’s work ever since. You write about war, and you served in World War II, is that correct? The whole experience served to reinforce my historical curiosity. And it’s very useful to me to be able to acknowledge the fact that there is a past, because in the United States of America, the past is in a constant process of destruction. Most Americans pretend there isn’t a past at all. Do you think your poetry has changed since Poems 1, your first book? As I said before, I’m still doing business at the same old stand—love, work, war, death, what the world is like outside this window tonight.
[Source text from The Iowa Review]
-Morgan English