Though I came to him late, Alan Dugan is a favorite poet of mine: the genius of American poetry is in its cranks, its nonconformists, and Dugan, a leftist curmudgeon, is firmly in the American grain. I've been thinking lately about the irony of living, as a longtime anti-capitalist radical, in a country under the sway of radicals of the right, and of being forced to unlearn some of my radicalism (I have a newfound love of procedural democracy) as a consequence. Dugan was there before me: leafing through his volume of collected poems last night, I found this, from his 1974 collection, Poems Four, perfect for our own moment, which I offer in the brief calm before the SCOTUS storm:

Confession of Heresy

Once I demanded annihilation and frenzy.
I applauded the smiles of thieves and had
a passion for debris.  Lost in the traffic
of argument, I appraised skilled assassins
and preached the slaughter of the pure,
but now I'm scared and only critical
of what I once proposed to wreck:  I see
vandals at the monuments I hoped to save,
experts, who exceed in self my strong words,
and call themselves the business or the state.
They grow up in the rubble of our wreck,
kill with a purist's hatred of the strange,
and feed on death, until a liberal man
must blush like a rose for holding on to one,
turn grey, and learn to shout the slogans:
"Annihilation!", "Frenzy!", just to run
the gantlets of their streets in safety
from himself, them, or other enemies.

posted by michael  7:58:36 PM  
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