Way More West
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraph
Introduction
FROM THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY
FROM THE NEWLY FALLEN
FROM HANDS UP
FROM GEOGRAPHY
FROM THE NORTH ATLANTIC TURBINE
FROM GUNSLINGER
Prolegomenon to Book IIII
RECOLLECTIONS OF GRAN APACHERIA
FROM HELLO, LA JOLLA
FROM YELLOW LOLA
FROM CAPTAIN JACK’S CHAPS/OR, HOUSTON MLA
FROM ABHORRENCES A CHRONICLE OF THE EIGHTIES
FROM WESTWARD HAUT
FROM ROCKY MOUNTAIN SPINE
FROM LANGUEDOC LANGUEDOC VARIORUM: A DEFENSE OF HERESY AND HERETICS
FROM CHEMO SÁBE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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First published in Penguin Books 2007
Copyright © Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, 2007
Introduction copyright © Dale Smith, 2007
All rights reserved
The poems in this collection appeared earlier in various publications with the exception of “Radicals on the
Great Plain” and a version of “Phaethon’s Daughter” which are published for the first time in this volume.
“Book 1” from Gunslinger by Edward Dorn. Copyright © 1968, 1969, 1971, 1972, 1975, 1989 by Edward
Dorn.
All rights reserved. Used by permission of Duke University Press.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Dorn, Edward.
Way more West : new and selected poems of Edward Dorn / introduction by Dale Smith ; edited by Michael
Rothenberg.
p. cm.—(Penguin poets)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
eISBN : 978-0-143-03869-6
I. Rothenberg, Michael. II. Title.
PS3507.O73277W38 2007
811’54—dc22 2006050727
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
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Acknowledgments to Maya Dorn, Terri Carrion, Jane Dalrymple-Hollo, Anselm
Hollo, Steve Fredman, Paul Slovak, and Yvonne Schofer, Humanities-English
bibliographer at the Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and
curator for the Sukov Collection of Little Magazines.
Special thanks to Jennifer Dunbar Dorn without whose editorial collaboration this collection would not have been possible.
—Michael Rothenberg
EDWARD DORN: AN INTRODUCTION
No poet of the post-war era addressed the conflicting public interests of American democracy with the same rhetorical force as Edward Dorn. Whether he wrote with passionate lyricism or scathing satire, he always argued for the principles of locality against the self-interests often embedded in social and political abstractions. For him, more than most, poetry was written to reveal public situations many of us have experienced, such as July Fourth festivities, political election, and other civic incidents of custom. This public-mindedness influenced his work tremendously, and so the poems here, gathered from more than forty years of public engagement, reveal the praise and blame a poet may use to address his audience. He praised the weak and exploited laborers of the West and its native inhabitants while blasting with satirical invective those for whom power was a tool to extend self-interests. He also made himself accountable to his experience of the American West, relating it through his public and private uses of the poem.
Dorn grew up in the Midwest, a child of the Great Depression. The spirit of the small town and the farming communities rooted around it helped form his character. That world is at stake in early poems like “Are They Dancing,” “The Air of June Sings,” and “Sousa.” He acknowledges with sympathy his “Time Wanderers” and the “forgotten places” where “the summer dresses of girls once blew.” In the lyric sweetness of these poems, however—“the belief, the relief / of Sunday occasion”—he sees the grim conditions “of the deprived.” He registers the economic and social forces that are thrust on people, like it or not, “without slipping into the mind-killing error of description.” He does not offer solutions for poverty; he does not seek retribution for offenders of public faith. Instead he makes poetry that speaks through the present, praising those people who are rooted to the particulars of their experience, such as his own “forebears” who “owned a nice clapboard house” during the “intensity of the depression.” His restless self-scrutiny extends an ethos in this early writing of insight and trepidation for the West he beheld:
Yes, at moments I did waste
our lives, giving way
foolishly to public thoughts,
large populations.
Are we needed? On this mountain
or in this little spud town in the valley
or along this highway, you held
your eyes on getting us there, repeatedly
where?
The concern for place and “public thoughts” gives these early poems a tension that will eventually find resolution in the great epic Gunslinger. What makes this early work significant, however, is a commitment to the New American writing of the 1960s, where social interrogation and self-scrutiny were related through a renewed lyric sensitivity. During this time, LeRoi Jones’s Totem Press published The Newly Fallen. Other books from that pivotal decade of social confrontation include Hands Up, Geography, and The North Atlantic Turbine.
Prior to this prolific period of early writing, Dorn had begun attending Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he studied with Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan. In A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn, Olson outlined a course of study that would occupy Dorn’s attention. Besides figures of literary modernism, Olson suggested readings from the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, the cultural geography of Carl Sauer, and the historical studies of the American West by Bernard DeVoto and Frederick Merk. By shifting stress from literature to the intersecting vectors of historical and geographic “fact,” Olson insisted, “it is not how much one knows but in what field of context it is retained.” Dorn’s application of this bibliography led him to use the poem as a tool for discovery and judgment that is not based on aesthetic principles but on the organization of a field. In “The Problem of the Poem For My Daughter, Left Unsolved,” he notes how “the oblivious proc
ess / of a brutal economic calculus” shifts his attention from “superficial . . . quality in other poems.” He discusses this notion of a “field”:
In the chronically vast complex
explanation, a field true,
but a field
no field hand knows
beyond the produce of it
on some citizen’s land. . . .
The measure of his “field” against that of the “field hand” shows a tenuous link between poet and laborer. Dorn seeks a more permanent change in the process of how we think about the places we inhabit, and through the agency of the poem he arrives at a scathing list of the genetic and technological forces that leave a “man, / in that framed condition / of some totally onanized culture.”
Gunslinger marks Dorn’s radical departure from lyric to laughter—an unavoidable release from the shock of the actual. Its epic narrative makes a metaphysical riot of Nixon-era public dialogue. While the poem focuses on the internal compositions and extensions of psychic forces at work behind American social life, it is necessary to remember the intense turmoil of these years of war. The “Elizabethan ear” Robert Creeley admired in Dorn’s early writing now tuned in on comic books, Westerns, drug slang, and slapstick to relate the more serious political and philosophical orientations of the West. This road trip epic stars a number of characters such as the transfigured “I” (“There will be some along our way / to claim I stinks”), the Gunslinger “of impeccable personal smoothness,” Dr. Flamboyant, and The Stoned Horse who rolls bomber joints. Gunslinger is an ironic and complex work that integrates humor and puns into its pre-Socratic revision of the Western psyche. As Michael Davidson has noted, “Dorn’s Gunslinger is a problematic blend of existential outlaw, robber baron, and metaphysician,” and through him “Dorn’s view ranges over the entire industrialized world as a succession of replaceable parts in what he calls ‘the cultural exchange.’” Conversations among key characters such as Lil and Kool Everything are often comedic and evasive in the poem’s strategy of deflating the high tone of traditional epic. This is, however, a highly rhetorical work, with staged conversations and deliberations as the Gunslinger and his gang journey toward Four Corners, the geographic intersection where four Western states meet. Here, as in earlier poems, Dorn works against the progressive urgency of explanation:
Questioner, you got some strange
obsessions, you want to know
what something means after you’ve
seen it, after you’ve been there
or were you out during
That time? No.
And you want some reason.
How fast are you
by the way? No local offense
asking that is there?
No.
The distinctions here are crucial to the underriding arguments of the book that suggest knowledge cannot be dumped into the brain as if it were some kind of container. Intent and instantaneous perceptions of experience create the only meaning we need. The time lag brought on by reflection and discursive language get in the way of speech, words, and actions. To get to this, “I” (“secretary to Parmenides”) is Dorn’s agent of change. After containment in a vat of LSD, “I” emerges transformed as a kind of pre-Socratic new man, and he’s got an answer for any still in wait of one:
Entrapment is this society’s
Sole activity, I whispered
and Only laughter,
can blow it to rags.
Gunslinger is essential today for its ex-static reading of The West. Its wit is timed to imprint the more relevant dispositions of the Gunslinger and his crew deep in the psyche of the reader. You hardly notice the draw as the bullet enters its target.
After the success of Gunslinger, Dorn turned increasingly to the epigram as the prime literary form for his satirical attacks on public sensibility and the self-interests of 1980s and ’90s. In Hello, La Jolla and Abhorrences he aimed his invective against European and American culture and its economic stranglehold on world resources. He continued to view social problems, political greed, and national aggression in genetic and technological terms. Unlike with Gunslinger, the epigrams of Hello, La Jolla and Abhorrences offer poems that have been stripped to a central message. The work inspires us to laugh, often uncomfortably. For instance, in “Distraction Control” he says “The most oecological way / to kill the fleas / is to kill the dog.” Despite the surface plainness, these poems often make insightful puns and redirect attention to show how the seemingly mundane is completely significant. “One bullet,” Dorn writes in Abhorrences, “is worth a thousand bulletins.” The pace in these epigrams is timed to deploy maximum wit. Perspective is also important, for it is not a linear calculus by which he moves his attention, but one of recurring pattern, so that, in “People of the Earth,” he says, “You should check your calculations. / From a distance, it looks like / a chicken farm.”
These poems are essential works of protest against what Dorn saw as an increasingly apathetic public mind. Besides the policies and institutions he blasts, his audience is often left to fend for themselves. It is not unusual to be made uneasy by his views, but such challenges to sensibility lie at the core of Dorn’s late poetics. Like it or not, if you read him, you might be led into a kind of awareness you had not anticipated. In “The Protestant View,” for instance, Dorn stresses the radical context of Protestant theology, forcefully stating “that eternal dissent / and the ravages of / faction are preferable / to the voluntary / servitude of blind / obedience.” Such statements are insightful for their quick connections of religious history to current situations where modern “consumer societies” seem predicated by that unexamined servitude. This recognition of the political force behind religious views would lead him to investigate the Cathar heresy of twelfth-century France in his late work Languedoc Variorum: A Defense of Heresy and Heretics, a poem sequence notable for its footnote-like “Subtexts & Nazdaks” that introduce a running commentary linking current social and political issues within the historical-poetic framework of the body of the main text.
Although the Taxol he was given to treat his cancer fuels Chemo Sábe, Dorn’s last work, one poem in this collection relates a social and hereditary genealogy. “My tribe,” he wrote, “came from struggling labor / Depression South Eastern Illinois / Just before the southern hills start / To roll toward the coal country. . . .” This deeply personal poem relates an unsettling geographic description of his people through the places they live and the work they do. It is also an indictment against the state. “Governments always conspire against / The population,” he writes, “and often / This is not even malice; / Just nothing better to do.” The final stanza identifies his American tribe with “every defiant nation this jerk / Ethnic crazy country bombs.” “Tribe” is a public testament, a final relation of where he stands against state proposals of land division, political economy, social engineering, and ethnic chicanery.
Despite his force of opposition, the late poems seek a kind of redemption for human failing too, and share a sympathy for human struggles that he addressed earlier in his study of Apache resistance, Gran Apachería, and in the poems of protest he translated from the Spanish with Gordon Brotherston, The Sun Unwound . Dorn finds through the harrowing composition of Chemo Sábe strength in the lyric’s mediation of personal urgency to protest his cancer. In “The Garden of the White Rose,” where “mercy is stretched so thin / to accommodate the need / of the trembling earth,” he wonders how he can find relief for his “singularity,” observing “the White Rose, whose / house is light against the / threatening darkness.” These tensions of public testament and private vision give Way More West an astonishing edge, relating the insight of his “singularity.” His attention to place and people come together here with biting wit, and also love. For a tenderness and vulnerability to public inspection mark these poems as uniquely his own. Think of them as communications across the great distance of the West.
Dale Smith
Austin, Texas<
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FROM THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY
The Rick of Green Wood
In the woodyard were green and dry
woods fanning out, behind
a valley below
a pleasure for the eye to go.
Woodpile by the buzzsaw. I heard
the woodsman down in the thicket. I don’t
want a rick of green wood, I told him
I want cherry or alder or something strong
and thin, or thick if dry, but I don’t
want the green wood, my wife would die
Her back is slender
and the wood I get must not
bend her too much through the day.
Aye, the wood is some green
and some dry, the cherry thin of bark
cut in July.
My name is Burlingame
said the woodcutter.
My name is Dorn, I said.
I buzz on Friday if the weather cools
said Burlingame, enough of names.
Out of the thicket my daughter was walking
singing—
backtracking the horse hoof
gone in earlier this morning, the woodcutter’s horse
pulling the alder, the fir, the hemlock
above the valley