At the outset of Alan Dugan’s March 1968 reading, the audience seems a little scared when he says, “To my mind he [Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara] can’t get off the hook of being guilty of genocide just because he’s a polite, plausible, systems analyst bourgeois.”
Maybe they’re all nodding vigorously in silence. But toward the end of the reading, he has won them over, and they all laugh during “Love Song: I and Thou.” Here are the first few lines:
Love Song: I and Thou
Nothing is plumb, level, or square:
the studs are bowed, the joists
are shaky by nature, no piece fits
any other piece without a gap
or pinch, and bent nails
dance all over the surfacing
like maggots. By Christ
I am no carpenter...
I love the way he says the title. I love his accent, which I associate with no bullshit. Especially with dry delivery and phrases like “like maggots.”
A couple people in the audience giggle when he says, “By Christ/I am no carpenter.” (Is it right to put in the line breaks when you’re writing about audio? Probably not. You can’t hear them.) He’s got almost everybody laughing by “I can’t do everything.”
It’s a great poem, and it makes me happy to hear it received like this by a contemporary audience. It also makes me happy to hear him light a match, draw on a cigarette. (1968! Another world! BYO Ashtray!)
But I want to focus on Dugan talking to the audience, the “note” he promised about “Love Song: I and Thou,” which ends with “a help, a love, a you, a wife,” and all the pauses that surround it:
“My note is that it’s not necessarily descriptive of a marriage.”
He’s interrupted by the whole audience laughing, but he sticks to that story: “It was meant as an attack on Martin Buber, and it refers to the Song of Solomon.” Then he has to wait before he says anything else, because everyone is laughing too loudly for him to be heard.
I put my headphones on and cranked it to be able to listen for what he isn’t saying. I can’t believe we can’t hear the little crackle of his lips near the mic, the sound of Alan Dugan smiling. I think I hear him chuckle at 2:04-5-ish. I have no idea why this means enough to me that I listened to it over and over again. Maybe it’s just a little miracle that this half a second of Alan Dugan laughing in 1968, after making everybody laugh, is available to all of us on the inter-the-webs.
I found this second of half-chuckle, and I wanted to compare it to some other laughing in here. From a live reading, in front of an audience. I would like it if we could organize the whole digital catalog in this way:
Poems that Make the Audience Laugh
Introductions that Seem to Anger the Poets
Ice in a Glass
Smoking
Mic Trouble Dealt With Gracefully by the Poet
Poets Referring to “Chutzpah” In Between Poems
Poets Saying “Thank You”
Poets Saying “It’s an Honor”
Poets Saying “How Much Time Do I Have?”
The guy who introduces Anne Sexton says when he met her he didn’t believe she could really be a poet, since she’s nothing like Robert Frost. That warms the crowd up. They laugh all through her reading, her clever asides, her self-mocking: she introduces “The Truth the Dead Know” as being from “All My Pretty Ones, said by many to be my best book, which is unfortunate because it’s my second book, and one feels... the dwindling.”
You know the secret of comedy? TIMING. Like that ellipsis. Also, italics. “I mean, you start to believe people, you know? I mean what the hell do you know, anyhow?”
Anne Sexton cracked them up with “The Fury of Cocks,” announcing the title, pausing, and then saying, “Not to be confused with roosters.” Here are the first few lines:
The Fury of Cocks
There they are
drooping over the breakfast plates,
angel-like,
folding in their sad wing,
animal sad,
and only the night before
there they were
playing the banjo.
With the first line she’s got a big audience laughing and clapping. “Playing the banjo” has some woman squealing with pleasure.
During “Music Swims Back to Me” and “The Little Peasant” there’s mic trouble and she’s cracking the audience up while they try to fix it. They laugh at “dingo-sweet” and not at “booty,” which is how you can tell it was a long time ago. Now “booty” would for sure get a laugh, and not just from me.
I told a friend about these two readings while I was working on this essay. She had never heard of Alan Dugan or Anne Sexton. So I explained, “They both won Pulitzers in the ‘60’s. And they’re both writing about heterosexuality. He’s making fun of marriage and she’s making fun of cocks.”
She laughed and said, “Yep, that pretty much sums it up.”