Dlugos' "hunger for the transcendent"

A snippet:

…Dlugos may be the great poet of the AIDS epidemic, above all in "G-9," a remarkable long poem in short lines whose meditative prosody owes more to James Schuyler, perhaps, than to O'Hara. The poem, named for the ward at Roosevelt Hospital where Dlugos was being treated, is astonishingly clear-eyed in facing the fate he shared with so many of his friends—"There are forty-nine names / on my list of the dead, / thirty-two names of the sick." Yet he finds a sort of peace in his gratitude for the gift that allowed him to face down his illness: "the unexpected love / and gentleness that rushes in / to fill the arid spaces / in my heart, the way the city / glow fills up the sky / above the river, making it / seem less than night."

Dlugos was, of course, not only an AIDS poet, and his early work, which he began writing more than a decade before the onset of the AIDS crisis, is characterized by gossipy banter and a playful take on pop culture (see "Gilligan's Island"). But it won't do to exaggerate the changes that came over Dlugos's work when he first got sober and then got sick. Under the wit of his earlier writing—but not very far under—was always that hunger for the transcendent that had led him to the Christian Brothers as a teenager, and for which his enthusiastic assent to the Baudelairian directive Enivrez-vous was perhaps just another disguise.