On February 3, 2012, I received an email message from Paul Rickert saying that the poet Dugan Gilman had died in Syracuse at the age of sixty-six. His younger brother, Kevin, had been one of my poetry writing students in the early 1970s while I was teaching at the State University of New York College at Oswego, about forty-five miles north of Syracuse, on Lake Ontario. When he was my student Kevin told me that his older brother was a poet, and that he had decided to take my classes because Dugan had suggested he do so.
After his graduation Kevin Gilman became a Northwestern Mutual Insurance Company executive, not a poet, but he stayed in town. I had, and still have, a Northwestern account, and I saw him often until he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 58 on December 17, 2009. For twenty-two years at Midsummer Kevin had hosted a “Longest Day of the Year Party” where family and friends gathered from across the country and the globe; it was there that I first met his sister Teresa who is also a poet.
Paul Rickert in his email elaborated a bit. He wrote that Dugan “was quite eccentric, lived outdoors and homeless many years, then settled into a house purchased by his siblings [for Dugan to live in] in the Westcott Street area where he lived as a hermit.”
Kevin told me that Dugan lived in a tent in the woods while he was homeless, and that he “lived off road kill,” which astonished and appalled me. Eventually Dugan moved into his sister Niki's home to live a solitary life in the basement, but when Wesleyan University Press in 1971 published his first and only book, Upstate, in its prestigious series, Dugan had not yet, so far as I know, shown symptoms of his impending eccentricity. However, the crop of young poets, of whom Dugan was one back in those early ‘seventies, had learned from Robert Bly how to distort reality; they were known as “deep image surrealists.”
In 1958 Robert Bly had founded an extremely influential literary magazine that inaugurated the capitulation of the teaching Academic Poets to political correctness and anti-formalism. Bly’s periodical was originally titled The Fifties, then The Sixties, and, briefly, The Seventies, together with his press of the same names. In his periodical and in the books that he issued from his press, no less than in his own work, Bly began to press two ideas. The first was that, in order to write quintessentially "American" poetry one had, quixotically and paradoxically, to study the work of the Chilean Marxist poet Pablo Neruda and the Scandinavians, including Gunnar Ekelof and Thomas Tranströmer, all of whom Bly was translating.
Bly's second idea was that poets needed to get in touch with their basic natures somehow, needed to reach down into their ids to pull up and bring to light the primal urges of the brute and somehow reconcile them with their conscious existence. The way to do this was to utilize what has come to be called the "underground" or "deep” image, a term coined by Amiri Baraka, but an idea Bly derived from Theodore Roethke whose method it was to walk the edge of madness deliberately, not falling over into insanity nor, on the other hand, giving in to the logical mind. It was the poet's job to bring from the side of the unconscious those images that would enable humankind to face and understand itself. These images would, of course, be distortions of "reality" as the conscious mind perceived it; therefore, "deep imagism" was a type of literary surrealism.
Bly pressed ahead with his theories, and soon he had a great many converts. One of the most beautifully lyric academic poets of the period, James Wright, joined the ranks of the Deep Imagists. Wright went on to gather an excellent reputation as a poet for, though much lyricism was lost in his switch to the ranks of Blymagism, his talent was large enough to bridge the gap. However, Bly's major convert, perhaps, was James Dickey, although their association was short-lived.
It was Dugan Gilman who, when he came to visit me once in Oswego, coined a term to describe the Deep Imagism which had enveloped the college graduate writing workshops, of which there began to be a great many throughout America during the late 1960s and the 1970s. Gilman, who had been one of those young poets enveloped by the movement, called it the "Pink Fog."
During this period many formal poets were persuaded to the view that formalism was no longer relevant to the times, which were becoming oriented to social activism, reform and to “self-expression”; i.e., egopoetry and “confession.” Unlike every other art taught in the academy, poetry became the stepchild of "intuition." If young people wanted to find out consciously what they were actually doing with pen, muse, and paper, they were no longer going to discover it in the classroom; no, it had to be learned privately, on one's own in the silent hours, an activity I was able to foster in 1968 by publishing The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, a book that Kevin was using in class around that time, and with which Dugan clearly was familiar because many years later another Syracusan, Paul Harvey, wrote to tell me about his experience using The Book of Forms:
“The Book of Forms has brought immeasurable pleasure to me (and my children who also use it) over the years,” Harvey wrote. “Introduced to it by a local poet and an old friend here in Syracuse, Dugan Gilman, it has given me the structure over the years to write much more pleasing and, I think, effective poetry. Once [I was] a proponent of free verse…until Dugan convinced me that I needed discipline and structure and gifted me with a tattered copy of [the] book.
“Now on my third copy, and having bought several more as gifts, I still find regular pleasure in using it. In fact, I am currently writing a book of poems for my daughter who turns forty in February. It will contain many different poems in many varied forms (hell, I may even include a free verse here and there).
“An attendant pleasure was the respect the book gave me for the poets of the ages. I found myself appreciating and even memorizing many of my favorites.”
Dugan Gilman had come to visit me at home in Oswego after his first book of poems had been published and gotten good reviews. Arriving with a new manuscript, he told me that he had written his first collection by osmosis, picking up out of the air the neo-surrealism that hung like a "pink fog" over the campuses. Now, he said, he wanted to learn how to write well.
I read his ms., which was full of formal verses, and I had to tell him I felt he had a long way to go before he could handle meters and rhymes and such bugbears with seeming ease — with artfulness. He had, I said, gone about the whole thing backwards: He had written a successful book of poetry before he had learned how to write. He had imitated a popular period style and gotten away with it, but if he wished to grow he would have to put his mind to it. I'm afraid he was considerably disillusioned, but it was the truth. He had two choices: He could go on imitating the poems he had written and their models, or he could learn how to write anything he wanted to write. I don’t know how successful he was, for he never published another volume.
A memorial service for Dugan Gilman will be held from 5:00-7:00 p.m. on Thursday, February 9th, at Burns-Garfield Funeral Home, 3175 East Genesee Street, Syracuse, New York, 13224, (315) 446-2466.
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