Breaking Form Selects: Tim Dlugos (A Summer Poetry Salon)

Please enjoy this Summer Salon Series episode of Breaking Form Selects: Tim Dlugos.

Support Breaking Form by reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts here.

Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books. 

 Notes:

 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, but later lived in New York City 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.

Read this essay about Dlugos and Danez Smith.

Poems we read include:

"G9"

"An Undelivered Class Presentation on the Subject of Gay Consciousness"

"Incredible Risks" (scroll down)

"Healing the World from Battery Park," which you can read in the 1993 Best American Poetry, available here on the Internet Archive.

Watch Ry Dunn read "G-9" here (~15 min). 

And watch Tim Dlugos read a swath of poems here (~30 min).