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Stephen Bunch
New member
Username: Stephen_bunch
Post Number: 203
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Thursday, June 17, 2010 - 11:59 am: | 
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About Ed Dorn
Readers at the Gaz may have noticed my frequent references to the work of Edward Dorn. He is one of a small number of poets who have shaped how I think about poetry and how I think about the world. Now, more than ten years after his death, his work seems to have fallen into relative obscurity, much to my dismay.
I first heard Dorn read in 1969, when he was poet in residence at the University of Kansas (Roberts Duncan and Creeley passed through Lawrence that same semester). I was captivated by that reading and subsequently heard him read another four or five times, as he made the circuit through Lawrence regularly. He was a great reader, and interesting visually with his roadmap of a face and his angular features. He was generous with his time and helped this fledgling magazine editor by giving me a few poems for my second issue in 1979.
I can speculate on a few reasons for Dorn's seeming disappearance from the American poetic firmament:
1. He published exclusively with small presses and in little magazines, broadsides, and fugitive publications. Until the recent Penguin edition (Way More West), Black Sparrow was probably the closest to a major publisher of his work. The Penguin edition is evidence that he made a greater impression on British readers and critics than he did on those in his homeland. And in fact, his stay in England seems to have been instrumental in the turn his work took toward cultural analysis and blistering satire.
2. His work took several sharp turns over the years, which may have cost him some readers who were unwilling or unable to follow the directions he was taking. His early work, which first got wide exposure in Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, was lyrical and economical in its style. With Geography and The North Atlantic Turbine, he began to explore narrative lines, more open forms, and took an increasingly analytical turn. With Gunslinger he took the narrative form and cultural analysis and wed them to an outlandish cast of characters and situations (the pot-smoking talking horse named Claude Levi-Strauss, the inscrutable Howard Hughes, the dead first person I, Cool Everything, and on and on). He returned to the lyric with his two small volumes of love songs, written during the Gunslinger years, but then he turned from the free-wheeling narrative sideshow of Gunslinger and began writing increasingly in an aphoristic style, collected in such volumes as Hello La Jolla, Abhorrences, and others. His biggest following probably developed around Gunslinger, and I’m guessing a lot of these readers just couldn’t make what seemed like a move to miniaturism with these aphoristic poems.
3. Dorn used the poem first and foremost as an instrument to probe the culture, history, and politics of the U.S. generally and the West in particular. While the poems are usually grounded in place—Idaho, Essex, Boulder, La Jolla—they demand of the reader some knowledge of history and a willingness to follow his sometimes abstract lines of inquiry. That is, he’s often a tough read. Did I ever “get” any of his poems on the first reading? Not usually, but I got enough to make me want to keep returning, and with each return I was (and am) rewarded. (Stephen Baraban recalls the following: “He [Dorn] said he liked to put some things in his poems that were slippery & perplexing: ‘it's a service that you do for the reader.’”)
4. He (and his poetry) did not suffer fools gladly, as the saying goes. I suspect this made for some uncomfortable moments for some of the English departments in which he resided over the years.
For more on this American original, see the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Dorn
9781429569125%2C00.html,http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,978142 9569125,00.html
"Entrapment is this society's sole activity...& only laughter can blow it to rags." (Edward Dorn, Gunslinger, Book III)
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Mike Harrell
New member
Username: Marrell
Post Number: 207
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Thursday, June 17, 2010 - 03:34 pm: |
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Thanks for the link, Stephen. I don't know Dorn's work, but I'll be looking it up. |
Stephen Bunch
New member
Username: Stephen_bunch
Post Number: 204
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Thursday, June 17, 2010 - 03:45 pm: |
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Way More West gives the full scope of his career, with all its many shifts and turns.
Looks like my link to Penguin's page isn't working. Here's a good overview at the Poetry Foundation: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=1837
"Entrapment is this society's sole activity...& only laughter can blow it to rags." (Edward Dorn, Gunslinger, Book III)
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