New York Diary

by Tim Dlugos, David Trinidad (Editor)

This diary, written in Tim Dlugos’ first six months in the City That Never Sleeps, is a record of his immersion in the downtown poetry scene and a gay lifestyle that was then relentlessly promiscuous. From the very beginning, when he “gobbles up” some chocolate mints left behind by Joe Brainard, Tim is like Alice eating a cake that changes her size; he’s off and running in a Wonderland of art openings and late-night escapades at the baths. In the forty-four years that have elapsed since Tim wrote this diary, the world has changed several times over: AIDS, 9/11, Coronavirus. The New York that Tim captures in these pages is long gone. While it gives us a few precious glimpses of that lost world, his diary is a reminder of how quickly a world can disappear.

78 pages, Paperback

Published January 28, 2021

About the author

Poet Tim Dlugos was born in Springfield, Massachusetts and grew up in Arlington, Virginia. From 1968 to 1970, he was a Christian Brother at LaSalle College in Philadelphia. He left LaSalle and moved to Washington, DC, where he participated in the Mass Transit poetry readings. In the late 1970s, he moved to New York City and was active in the Lower East Side literary scene, where he was a contributing editor to Christopher Street magazine and on the Poetry Project staff.

Dlugos’s books of poetry include High There (1973), Je Suis Ein Americano (1979), Incredible Risks (1980), Entre Nous (1981), A Fast Life (1982), Strong Place (1992), Powerless: Selected Poems 1973–1990 (1995), and the posthumous A Fast Life: Poems of Tim Dlugos (2011), edited by David Trinidad. Marked by witty observation, narratives that recount life’s daily minutia, and heavily enjambed lines, Dlugos’s poetry shares its immediate, offhand style with the work of Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler. Dlugos’s work is also noteworthy for its firsthand depiction of the AIDS pandemic.

Dlugos’s poetry inspired the 2011 collaboration with painter Philip Monaghan titled At Moments Like These He Feels Farthest Away, which paired Monaghan’s work with the Dlugos poem “Gilligan’s Island” and was shown at New York University’s Fales Library.

After learning that he was HIV positive, Dlugos studied at Yale University Divinity School to become an Episcopalian priest. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1990.

Reviews

[Bill Hsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

From David Trinidad's introduction:

There are too many people, too many parties and poetry readings, too much alcohol, too much sex.

Sigh.

[Bill Arning · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love his poems but the diary is many a list of famous and less than famous friends encountered as he was trying to Get established as a writer. There are some entertaining stories but too many of the pages feel like lists of names. You can tell when he star struck and when he thinks someone might help his career And most engaging Lee when one of the people he encounters stir his libido. But as a poet he never fails to mention friends and lovers and the depth of the poetry is much more engaging in the diary

[josé saleiro gomes]

i say this both with love and as a former scholar of dlugos: this one (all 78 pages of it, mostly footnotes) should have stayed in the archive