John Yau Reads Tim Dlugos, A Fast Life at Hyperallergic

Tim Dlugos's collected poems, A Fast Life, edited by David Trinidad and published by Nightboat Books, first appeared in 2011; this thorough, thoughtful compendium invites readers to return to the poems again and again. In this article, at Hyperallergic, John Yau writes “D.O.A.,' the last poem Dlugos wrote before dying of AIDS three months later, and the last poem in the book, should be required reading in every literature class." More:

A few weeks ago, while I was reading In the Empire of the Air: The Poems of Donald Britton, edited by Reginald Shepherd and Philip Clark, I was reminded of A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos (2011), edited by David Trinidad. This happens with poetry – one poem or book leads to another, like a chain letter. Britton and Dlugos were friends, but their writing could not be more different. For one thing, Britton’s selection amounts to less than 100 pages, while Dlugos’ is over 600. Ted Berrigan called Dlugos “The Frank O’Hara of his generation.” The comparison is both apt and beside the point. Dlugos’ poems need to be read for what they are, indispensable testimony of an age and time.

Without dwelling on the biography, which can be gotten from Trinidad’s “Introduction” and “Chronology,” it is enough to say here that Dlugos (1950 – 1990) and Britton (1951 – 1994) were good friends, and that Dlugos dedicated the poem “Qum” to Britton. Both died of AIDS or, as Douglas Crase correctly writes in his “Afterword” to Britton’s In the Empire of the Air:

We say ‘died,’ but of course they were killed, by a threat they could never have foreseen.

Trinidad usefully divides the poems into the cities where Dlugos lived: Philadelphia, 1970-1973; Washington, D. C., 1973 – 1976; Manhattan and Brooklyn, 1976 – 1988; New Haven and Manhattan, 1988 – 1990. In twenty years, the reader goes from the exuberant disclosures of a young poet absorbing Frank O’Hara’s dictum, “I do this, I do that” to the poems written after he tested positive for HIV (November 1987) and began studying at Yale Divinity School, with the intention of becoming a priest in the Episcopal Church.

Continue at Hyperallergic.