Edward Dorn: Collected Poems, edited by Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, Carcanet, 1000pp, £25 (paperback)
Westward Haut, Edward Dorn, Etruscan Books, 56pp, £9.50 (paperback)
In comparison to the work of his American contemporaries Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg or John Ashbery, the poetry of Edward Dorn (1929-1999) has been little read and published in Britain. His life-long rejection of schools and affiliations, and his preference for working outside of metropolitan coteries, either of mainstream or avant-garde complexion, may not have helped. To most poetry readers he is known, if at all, as a junior member of the Black Mountain school or as the author of Gunslinger (1968-1975), a long poem of the American West which has never been in print in its complete form in the UK. But this monumental and superbly produced Collected Poems from Manchester’s Carcanet Press should go some way to rectifying things, for it reveals the body of Dorn’s lifelong work in poetry as an achievement of tremendous intelligence, scope and energy.
‘Growing up poor during the Great Depression, Ed would always identify with the outcast and dispossessed’, writes Dorn’s widow Jennifer, the editor of this volume. This identification is a distinguishing feature of Dorn’s early books, such as The Newly Fallen (1961) and Hands Up! (1964). Stand-out poems in the latter are ‘Los Mineros’, on the coal miners of New Mexico, and ‘On the Debt My Mother Owed to Sears Roebuck’, in which recollection of a Depression-era Midwest childhood moves clear-eyed among the links between personal, economic and international histories:
On
the
debt
my
mother
owed
to
Sears
Roebuck?
I have nothing to say, it gave me clothes to
wear to school,
and my mother brooded
in the rooms of the house, the kitchen, waiting
for the men she knew, her husband, her son
from work, from school, from the air of locusts
and
dust
masking
the
hedges
of
fields
she
knew
in her eye as a vague land where she lived,
boundaries, whose tractors chugged pulling harrows
pulling discs, pulling great yields from the earth
pulse for the armies in two hemispheres, 1943
and she was part of that stay at home army to keep
things going, owing that debt.
In an afterword, J. H. Prynne movingly describes the ‘intense and humble clarity’ of Dorn’s insight into the lives of the obscure and downtrodden, and his words are borne out by poems such as ‘Thesis’ (1967), addressed to the town and inhabitants of Aklavik (‘Barren Ground’), in the far Northwest Territories of Canada, which gathers from that clarity a rare lyric grace:
Only
the
Illegitimate
are
beautiful
and only the Good
proliferate only the Illegitimate
Oh
Aklavik
only
you
are
beautiful
Ah Aklavik your main street is dead
only the blemished are beautiful . . .
That poem comes from The North Atlantic Turbine (1967), one of the mid- Sixties volumes written and published in England, where Dorn had been hired by Donald Davie to work at the University of Essex; before that it was printed in The English Intelligencer, the legendary magazine conducted by Prynne among others. Dorn’s time in England marks a period of great intellectual ferment, in close relation to Prynne and drawing on the example of Charles Olson, with the common aim of inventing a language of poetry which could extend from the smallest desires of daily life to the largest economic, geological and cosmological perspectives. Whereas Olson sometimes tends towards grandiosity in The Maximus Poems, and Prynne towards work of an icy remoteness, Dorn plies such various discourses much more freely, funnily, and charismatically.
The real fruit of this period of expansion emerges in Dorn’s masterpiece, Gunslinger, begun in the later 1960s and published in full in 1975. The plot of this long poem is not easily paraphrased (it involves a demigod cowboy and a talking horse named Claude Levi-Strauss, searching after a reclusive billionaire with the help of a brothel madam called Lil’), but in its madcap freehand pursuit it contains multitudes of critique, stoned metaphysics and humour:
Do you know said the Gunslinger
as he held the yellow tequila up
in the waning light of the cabaret
that this liquid is the last
dwindling impulse of the sun
and then he turned and knelt
and faced that charred orb
as it rolled below the swinging doors
as if it were entering yet descending
and
he
said
to
me
NO!
it is not. It is that
cruelly absolute sign my father
I am the son of the sun, we two
are always in search
of the third — who is that I asked Hughes?
Howard?
Somebody should acquire the rights, because Gunslinger would make the greatest animated film of all time.
The middle two hundred pages of this book preserve the beautiful setting of the first full edition of Gunslinger, with its arsenal of typographical invention and ornate initials, while eight pages at the back of the book reprint the homemade newspaper Bean News (1972), the ‘“secret” book’ of Dorn’s epic, in elegant facsimile. The editor records in her preface that ‘Ed loved print in all its forms’ and one of the signal achievements of this Collected Poems is the pains it takes to preserve traces of the original books that are compounded in it. They include some of the landmarks of late-modernist small-press publishing in England and America, from among others Black Sparrow Press and the Fulcrum Press run by Stuart and Deirdre Montgomery. The Collected Poems maintains the running order of these individual volumes, with each given its own half-title page, complete with dedications and epigraphs in their original forms. In a series of excellent appendices it reprints their prefaces, jacket notes, and introductions, adds lovely afterwords by Prynne and Amiri Baraka, and provides detailed and scholarly publication histories.
Fittingly, the Collected Poems is issued simultaneously with a small-press companion from Nicholas Johnson’s Etruscan Books (www.e-truscan. co.uk), which has published the complete text of Dorn’s Westward Haut (1986-1999), a fragmentary narrative in which two dogs named Odin and Saluki travel across the Great Plains to meet a trucker named Joe Ochenta, all conveyed in a superbly high-spirited linguistic soup of bantering archaisms and la-plume-de-ma-tante borrowings, as when Odin and Saluki are airborne:
A patch of rough air brought on the seat-belt sign,
and
the
artificial
Tan
Am
voice
pointing out the eternally obvious.
Miss Saluki fusses with the hardware—Je deteste
zees abominable biped arrangements!—and it clicks shut
across
the
long
curvature
of
her
flank.
Odin
gazes
out
the
window
at
a
Banana
Republic
brightly lit by the tropical sun with some volcanoes
scattered about, poking through the mist, and mutters
No, we Do have some bananas. Und das’s das Problem.
Dorn’s work after Gunslinger has generally been held in lower critical regard, with books such as Abhorrences: A Chronicle of the Eighties (1990) largely abandoning the freewheeling dictional variety of earlier work for a language of satirical directness, often in epigrammatic form: ‘It would have been as good to live/with Genghis Khan as Reagan Ron’. But read in sequence with his previous work, these poems confirm Dorn as a crucial voice of democratic dissent in the public life of late empire. This Collected Poems should secure Dorn’s reputation as the equal of any poet writing in English in the last six decades: he is as hip and quick-witted as Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, fiercer and clearer-sighted in its political denunciations than Ginsberg’s Howl, and as intellectually ambitious as Olson’s Maximus Poems. Everyone who enjoys modern poetry should read him.