Tim Dlugos
Poet 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, where he participated in the Mass Transit poetry readings. In the late 1970s, he moved to New York City and was active in the Lower East Side literary scene, 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.
Dlugos’s poetry inspired the 2011 collaboration with painter Philip Monaghan titled At Moments Like These He Feels Farthest Away, which paired Monaghan’s work with the Dlugos poem “Gilligan’s Island” and was shown at New York University’s Fales Library.
After learning that he was HIV positive, Dlugos studied at Yale University Divinity School to become an Episcopalian priest. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1990.
“American Baseball It's for real, not for practice, and it's televised,not secret, the way you'd expect a civilized countryto handle delicate things, it's in color, it's happeningnow in Florida, "This Is American Baseball" the announcerannounces as the batter enters the box, we are watching,and it could be either of us standing there waitingfor the pitch, avoiding the eye of the pitcher as we takea few practice cuts, turning to him and his tiny friends inthe outfield, facing the situation, knowing that someonebehind our backs is making terrible gestures, standingthere to swing and miss the way I miss you, wanting to be outof uniform, out of breath, in your car, in love again, learningall the signals for the first time, they way we learned the rulesof night baseball as high-school freshman: first base, you kissher, second base, her breasts, third, you're in her pants, and home is where the heart wants to be all the time, but seldomcan reach past the obstacle course of space, the home in ourperfect future we wanted so badly, and want more than ever sincewe learned we won't live there, which happens to lovers in civilizedcountries all the time, and happens too in American baseball whenyou strike out and remember what the game really meant.”