A Fast Life: The Collected Poems

by Tim Dlugos, David Trinidad (Editor)

A Fast Life establishes Tim Dlugos the witty and innovative poet at the heart of the New York literary scene in the late 1970s and 1980s and seminal poet of the AIDS epidemic as one of the most distinctive and energetic poets of our time. This definitive volume contains all of the poems Dlugos published in his lifetime, a wealth of previously unpublished poems, and an informative introduction, chronology, and notes assembled by the volume s editor, poet David Trinidad."

Genres: Poetry, Queer, LGBT

632 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1982

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

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been reading through reviews and they all more or less declare that this substantial volume confirms Dlugos as the great gay poet of the AIDS era; I'm not really in the position to opine on such a judgement (this isn't my era or area of expertise) but can absolutely confirm that there are a number of poems collected here that would be considered excellent by any standard.

No, I didn't read every poem—500+ pages is too much poetry to take on at once, but I read many and more than enough to familiarize myself with a writer I had been previously unfamiliar with. At this moment I was most immediately drawn to his early, casual poems obviously indebted to the work of Frank O'Hara: brief, often witty little reflections that vibrate with the stuff of everyday life (conversations experienced, news and pop culture witnessed, events attended, locations visited, friends met with, lovers had). So many serve as little windows into a life experienced at a particular moment in time, momentarily making the past feel like the present again—a lovely, heady sensation. Dlugos also has a great gift in creating a sense of intimacy that evokes intimate contact, deliberately evading the implicit distancing effect often built into the author/reader relationship.

These poems are arranged chronologically and as time passes the poems get longer, more dense, technically complex, and, as their writer directly stares down impending death, more taxing to read and process. My quick readings absolutely didn't do these late poem cycles justice, and I will undoubtedly return to them again at some point in the future.

A major achievement, and as the editor David Trinidad conveys in his introductory comments one that took much effort to get, ultimately, into the hands of readers (it was clearly a many-year labor of love on the part of Trinidad, a fellow poet and personal friend). One hopes that it does manage to achieve its stated goal and cement Dlugos's critical reputation once and for all.

"I open my eyes you
kiss me, say It's dawn
I smile, don't even check
go back to sleep you too"

-the opening stanza of "Knowing It"

[Lars Meijer · Rating 5 out of 5]

De afgelopen maanden heb ik, voor het slapen, stukken gelezen uit A Fast Life, het verzameld werk van de Amerikaanse dichter Tim Dlugos. Ik wil graag een lans breken voor de vroegtijdig overleden dichter, gezien zijn werk en leven veelal in de schaduw lijkt te staan van zijn aids-gerelateerde gedichten.

Dlugos was, vergelijkbaar met vrienden Joe Brainard, James Schuyler of Eileen Myles, onderdeel van de tweede golf van literaire beweging The New York School. Een groep die zich, in het geval van de beeldend kunstenaars, in geen geval gemakkelijk laat vangen, maar wanneer het op de dichters aankomt, toch beter te herkennen zijn. De invloeden van Frank O'Hara, popcultuur en het dagelijkse leven zijn ook in Dlugos' poëzie onmiskenbaar aanwezig.

Tijdens het lezen werd ik vaak door de toon van Dlugos getroffen. Er spreekt een vertrouwen en, in een bepaald opzicht, intimiteit uit zijn werk dat ik zelden tegenkom. De manier waarop hij zijn kwetsbaarheden durft te laten zien en volledig in dienst lijkt te staan van het gedicht, blies me weg. Hier spreekt geen dichter wier werk meer op een zelffelicitatie lijkt, maar een toevallige passant.

Ik laat Dlugos voorlopig even op mijn nachtkasje liggen. Ik kan niet wachten om zijn werk nog een keer te lezen.

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Today I had the old school pleasure of finding this book face out in a quaint bricks and mortar retail environment. (OK, it was Powell’s. Hi, Kevin! You and the crew and the poetry face outs you keep doing on primo eyelevel shelf space all rock.) Nightboat’s been doing fascinating work of its own for the last 8 years, and their Dlugos was born for face outs, with a heft and a font and a good paper stock that leaves that last crop of print-on-demand contest winners Amazon free-shipped you in the dust. 400+ pages of Dlugos, who died at just 40, seems like a lot, and there’s maybe a little glint that gets lost when a small press legend blinks inside the carapace of a Collected. But I’d rather that than the alternative of no face at all, with no bricks and mortar to lift up the legend for you to find on a Friday and hold.

[Graham P · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a blessing to read a poet from his beginning to his end. Dlugos feels like a Frank O'Hara, a wayfarer of bitter wit and vanity's abundance. We see him grow from hook-ups, power moves, leftist ramblings, all the way into to his faith in God to ego and essentials, spirit and divinity and drag queens -- and all in between. Nobody is perfect, and Dlugos reminds us of this. He captures the wild and shallows of the Age of Aquarius, the freewheeling TV generation on the podium of America's landfill. This expansive collection shows us a friend you never met, unraveling and unwinding what a poet does...capturing the moments, the visions, no matter how bleak, wise-ass, or otherwise transcendent.

[Oscar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic collection that shows the transformation of Tim Dlugos and his poetic craft.

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

I breezed through a hundred or two-hundred poems in a couple days, and I felt overloaded. I wasn't in the right mindset to take on such a large collection, especially when I had limited time, since this was a library item. With that said, the poems I did read were stark, invasive, and beautiful. Dlugos's poems sit at the surface, but are held buoyant by the complex reality underneath.

This is a collection I will certainly consider buying, to work through slowly, gradually taking in the beauty and complexity of Dlugos's "fast life."

[Marcelo Yáñez · Rating 5 out of 5]

oh Tim my dead lover forever