Something Wicked Something American

These are Peter V. Dugan's selected and award-winning poems from his poetry collections.
A roiler, rager, ranter, Peter Dugan likes to stir things up, especially our conventional sense of order. Influenced by the Beat writers, as well as William Carlos Williams and T.S. Eliot, Dugan's work reveals postmodern surrealist roots of the 60's and 70's. He writes of the alienation of the socially disaffected with rhythmic celebrations of the 60's marginal music of jazz, whose hip jargon colored the rootless speech of the cognoscenti and the beatitude awaiting the rootless wandering pilgrim who seeks it at the fringes of conventional society. With loose and surreal associations, the dreck of contemporary life, images of science fiction and modern physics merge with Dugan's mind to satirically rage against the world of authoritarian and oppressive forces. Struggling with the free play of consciousness, Dugan attempts to penetrate a public world far gone in barbarity, technological systematization, psychological and political repression. Dugan's poetry is a eulogy for the American dream of freedom and the world's dream of survival.