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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alan Dugan
Alan Dugan
Born in 1923, poet Alan Dugan's collection Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry won the National Book Award...
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FURTHER READING
Related Prose
Reasons for Poetry
by William Meredith
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by Alan Dugan
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The trees in time
have something else to do
besides their treeing. What is it. 
I'm a starving to death
man myself, and thirsty, thirsty
by their fountains but I cannot drink 
their mud and sunlight to be whole. 
I do not understand these presences 
that drink for months
in the dirt, eat light, 
and then fast dry in the cold. 
They stand it out somehow, 
and how, the Botanists will tell me. 
It is the "something else" that bothers 
me, so I often go back to the forests.



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Audio Clip
Academy Audio Archive
1974



From New and Collected Poems 1961-1983 by Alan Dugan, published by the Ecco Press. Copyright © 1983 by Alan Dugan. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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