Craft: Tim Dlugos

Tim Dlugos (1950-1990) was a poet of contradictions. He had a short life and was never an old person—he died of AIDS in 1990 when he was only forty—bursting with enthusiasm and disillusion. The dual nature of his life produced a humming tension in his best work that is unforgettable: a religious Catholic (and later Episcopalian) and a homosexual; a self-destructive alcoholic who nonetheless embraced sobriety; a pacifist and a militant; a minister of education to the poor and a Republican. Like Pier Paolo Pasolini, Dlugos embraced rather than fled from these contradictions. Like Whitman, he was large; he contained multitudes.