174 Poetry for Students
ting, as well as of the narrator and the audience, is
not that important, although the poem ultimately
does provide some of this information). Whoever
the audience is, they already know the name to
which the title refers. If they did not, it is likely
that the narrator would mention the name in pref-
acing the story. Why is this important? Because it
introduces right from the outset a split between the
world of the poem and the world of the reader. Of
course this split is always there, in every poem.
Some poets labor mightily to disguise it; others
brazenly call attention to it. Dugan does neither. He
creates a world and steps aside, or seems to, letting
his readers find their own way into it and through
it even at the risk of losing their way. Yet while
seemingly absent from the poem, Dugan is actu-
ally very much present, giving his readers clues to
help them along, if only they have the wit to rec-
ognize them. Poetry of this sort demands a reader’s
full attention and intelligence.
At first glance such poems may seem to reflect
a degree of contempt on the part of the poet for his
readers, and with some poets that is doubtless the
case. But if Dugan’s poetry is difficult, it is not to
trumpet his superiority; on the contrary, he is sim-
ply paying his readers the compliment of assuming
they are at least as intelligent and insightful as he
is. Which may or may not be true, but it’s nice to
get the benefit of the doubt! Here Dugan gently
teases his readers with two riddles: who are the
“we,” and what is “the name” they hear? Again,
these riddles are not present within the context of
the poem itself, the fictional world of the narrator
and his audience; they are only apparent to those
who approach the poem from outside, seeking to
gain entrance.The language of the poem, like that of its ti-
tle, is of the everyday sort. Yet as the reader pro-
gresses line by line, it becomes clear that some-
thing relatively unusual is being talked about. “The
river brought down / Dead horses, dead men / And
military debris, / Indicative of war / Or official acts
upstream.” The disjunction between the subject of
this first sentence—which meanders through eight
lines very much like the river that is its literal be-
ginning and end—and the language employed
therein, constitutes a second split, adding to the ef-
fect of the split referred to above between the re-
spective worlds of the poem and its readers, as well
as between the poet, the narrator, and their respec-
tive audiences. Indeed, the poem, despite its ap-
parently smooth and seamless surface, is shot
through with cracks and splits of all kinds: of iden-
tity, of time, of structure and rhythm.They are present not because Dugan is a sloppy
writer. On the contrary, it’s through the purposeful
and artful manipulation of such fissures that Dugan
gives his poem its pervasive and quietly devastat-
ing tone of irony. Babette Deutsch, in her indis-
pensable Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms,
defines irony as “a statement that contradicts the
actual attitude of the speaker or a situation that con-
trasts what is expected with what occurs and al-
ways having overtones of mockery.” The phrase
“official acts,” for example, used by the narrator as
a euphemism for war, is ironic (it also reveals
something about the narrator that he would choose
to employ such a phrase). As will become appar-
ent, in this poem irony itself is riven by splits, giv-
ing rise to a kind of double or even triple irony that
must have been both dizzying and exhilarating to
readers in 1956. It is less so now, after nearly half
a century. In fact, some postmodern literary critics
and philosophers, such as Jean-Francois Lyotard,
would argue that this sense of multiply nested
ironies, like the overlapping windows of a com-
puter screen, has come to characterize all aspects
of contemporary culture.The overt subject of the poem, then, is a war;
or, more specifically, the aftermath of a battle. To
paraphrase, the narrator (and his fellows) are stand-
ing along the bank of a river and watching detritus
suggestive of a clash of armies being carried down-
stream. Among this detritus, finally, is a soldier
clinging to a log. The narrator asks him why “Had
he and this junk / Come down to us so / From the
past upstream.” Note how Dugan establishes an al-
most drowsy rhythm by the measured repetition of
words (in line 2, “Dead horses, dead men,” with itsHow We Heard the NameAs will become
apparent, in this poem
irony itself is riven by
splits, giving rise to a kind
of double or even triple
irony that must have been
both dizzying and
exhilarating to readers in
1956.”