THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CORN IN AMERICAN HISTORY By Alan Dugan After the Puritans landed in Provincetown and the women washed their dirty clothes their men marched to Truro to perform their first political act: theft. They stole the Indians corn buried on Corn Hill, so why is there no monument to them or corn on Corn Hill in Truro? For the same reason there is no working laundry in Provincetown: Cleanliness is next to godliness, Thievery is next to Americanness, and we must not publicize that this country was made by a bunch of dirty crooks. Three Poets Who Learned from Dugan Nick Flynn, Carl Phillips, Rebecca Wolff Alan Dugan Telling Me I Have a Problem with Time One of the first poems I ever published was in Ploughshares almost 10 years ago. It had the same title as the title above. That was the life of that particular poem, a good, short life. The previous summer I had joined the circle that forms around Dugan at Castle Hill. The aforementioned poem chronicled my first session, when another one of my poems, or, more accurately, a draft of a potential poem (which ended up having an even shorter life-span than the one that made it into Ploughshares) was put on the table for consideration. I read the draft out loud, then watched as Dugan read it over a second time. Dugan spoke first, as usual: "This reads like a cheap detective novel and I've got nothing to say about it. Next," as he tossed it back into the center. Stunned, I glanced around the table--no one said a word, though one woman leaned behind Dugan's back and mouthed, "I liked it." We moved on. The next week, before the workshop began, Dugan took me aside--he had reconsidered my poem, slightly, had brought it home and read into it more deeply (probably more deeply than it deserved), noticed what he now praised as my "problem with time," that in it everything keep happening at once. I was touched that Dugan, legend, a poet I deeply admired, had taken it upon himself to return to my not-so-impressive attempt. He even brought his new thinking to the table, elevating my somewhat diminished stature. The summer went on. Dugan continued to be generous and blunt, brilliant and intent. His presence around that table, I have come to understand, is simply one manifestation of his influence in the world, of his continued commitment to shaping a poetics, for himself and for poetry. Knowing him has changed us all.Carl Phillips: Dugan was pivotal in my development as a poet. His workshop at Castle Hill was the first place where I'd ever shown my work to others, and Dugan's immediate response was to believe in it, to pronounce it the "real thing." Which is not to say by any means that I was spared his famously cantankerous rigor when it comes to what matters: the words. I learned from him--and from his poems--the power of austere language; and how to be unsparing, for the sake of the work, in my revision of poems--in equal parts, the near-impossibility of redreaming and the absolute necessity for it. And about the emotional and physical stake that the committed artist must be willing to invest in his art, even as he must learn as well to risk it. Rebecca Wolff: Alan (I chose to use the slightly less formal first name) said, during my second summer of studying with him--I was about 19 years old--the single most important and reassuring thing about my poems that anyone has ever said (in my hearing, at least): "She hears it," he said, to the attentive circle of would-be critics. "She hears it, and she writes it down."