by Edward Dorn
EdDorn Live, edited by Joe Richey, University of Michigan Press, Fall, 2007.
Translations (With Gordon Brotherston)
Our Word: Guerilla Poems from Latin America, Jonathan Cape/ Goliard, London, 1968.
Tree Between Two Walls by José Emilio Pacheco, Black Sparrow Press, 1971.
Caesar Vallejo, Penguin, London, 1975.
Image of the New World (from Yucatecan & Nahuatl), Thames & Hudson, London, 1979.
The Sun Unwound, Original Texts from Occupied America, North Atlantic Press, Berkeley, 1999.
Recordings
The North Atlantic Turbine, Fulcrum Press Records, London, 1967.
Gunslinger Books I, II & The Cycle, S Press Tapes, Munich, 1970.
Satiric Verses, Alternative Radio, Boulder, CO, 2001.
Critical Studies on Edward Dorn
Beach, Christopher. ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradition. University of California Press, 1992 (Chapter 9, “Migrating Voices in the Poetry of Edward Dorn”).
Clark, Tom. A World of Difference: Edward Dorn. North Atlantic Press, Berkeley, 2002.
“Edward Dorn.” Sagetrieb, Special Issue, Vol. 15, No. 3, Orono, ME, 1996 (1998).
“Edward Dorn, American Heretic,” Chicago Review, Summer 2004.
Elmborg, James K. “A Pageant of Its Time”: Edward Dorn’s Slinger and the Sixties. Studies in Modern Poetry, Vol. 6, Peter Lang Publishing, New York, 1998.
Fox, Willard. Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, and Robert Duncan: A Reference Guide (an annotated bibliography). G. K Hall & Co., Boston, 1989.
McPheron, William. Edward Dorn. Western Writers Series #85, Boise State University, 1989.
Sherman, Paul. The Lost America of Love: Rereading Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, and Robert Duncan. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge & London, 1981.
Streeter, David. A Bibliography of Ed Dorn. Phoenix Bookshop, New York, 1974.
Wesling, Donald, ed. Internal Resistances: The Poetry of Ed Dorn. University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, & London, 1985.
Edward Dorn was born in the prairie town of Villa Grove, Illinois, on April 2, 1929, in the wake of the Depression and grew up in rural poverty. He never knew his father. His mother’s father, a railroad man, was French Quebecois, with Indian ancestry. His grandmother was “pure Kentucky English.” He attended a one-room schoolhouse and in high school “played billiards with the local undertaker for a dime a point, away from school weeks on end,” until an English teacher convinced him to get an education. A visiting Scots Methodist preacher, who had the intellectual honesty to say that “everything is not going to be okay,” further inspired him, but after two years at the University of Illinois, he dropped out. He was working at a tractor factory in Illinois when “a set of circumstances and warps of destiny” took him to Black Mountain in 1951: “I was educated at the University of Illinois, and somewhat corrected at Black Mountain College.”
Under the tutelage of Charles Olson, whose A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn set up the methodology for his future reading on the West, and with Robert Creeley as his examiner, he graduated in 1955, having taken off for three years to travel the West, hitching rides, seeking work where he could find it, and returning with a wife, Helene Buck, and three children. After leaving Black Mountain, he continued this peripatetic wandering across the transmountain West, following the winds of writing and employment from San Francisco to Bellingham, Washington (the setting for his autobiographical novel By the Sound, which depicts his marginalized existence in the “basement stratum” of society) to Santa Fe. In 1961 he accepted his first teaching job, at the University of Idaho in Pocatello, and the following year his first book of poems, The Newly Fallen, was published by LeRoi Jones’ Totem Press. He spent the summer of 1965 visiting Indian reservations with the photographer Leroy Lucas for their collaborative work The Shoshoneans, and in the fall he joined the newly created department of literature at the University of Essex in England, as a Fulbright lecturer. He spent most of the next five years in England, where he published several collections of poems and wrote the first book of his masterpiece Gunslinger. He also collaborated with Latin Americanist Gordon Brotherston on translations of “guerilla” poems, and met his second wife, Jennifer Dunbar.
He spent the ’70s as an academic migrant, teaching at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, Kent State, Ohio University, the University of Kansas, the University of California at Riverside and at San Diego, and the University of Essex. In San Francisco he collaborated with the printer and artist team Holbrook Teter and Michael Myers on a series of surreal and subversive projects, including the newspaper Bean News and the publication of Gran Apachería. In 1978 he accepted a professorship at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where, with Peter Michelson and Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, he edited the more substantial Rolling Stock magazine throughout the ’80s. During the ’90s he taught at the Paul-Valéry University in Montpelier in the south of France, from where he made expeditions to the hilltop fortresses of the Cathars—the heretics of Languedoc Variorum. He was also working on another long poem, Westward Haut, and after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in May 1997, the poems for Chemo Sábe. He continued teaching at the University of Colorado and giving readings of his work in Great Britain and Europe, as well as in the United States, until his death on December 10, 1999.
1 Index number for the notorious red #2.
2 An experiment conducted at 110 degrees Farenheit scale (a mere 70 degrees below the fundamental interval) by Jeremy Prynne, using the upper registers of a #365 Marine Band Hohner.
3 Yet, it is too easy to use one whose very name is a satire upon all government. (taken from Junius)
4 Airbags are a good example of Say’s Law, which says that production creates, notoriously, the product, but the market also. And of course, the rationale, in this instance, Immortality.
5 A tennis intelligence is subtle up to but not including the shot.
6 Even the Dentist, that meanest class of sportsman, when he breaks your tooth, doesn’t exclaim Shit! as he critically stares at his pliers. Footbol, both types, is perhaps least dialated by this instrumental paranoia. The passer does not glare in hatred at the hand which overthrew the pass, nor does the kicker inflict punishment on the foot that missed the goal. The hunter does not throw away the gun that missed the duck &c.
7 For A. H., of Sitka.
8 There are two main kinds of cruelty: That which is enthusiastic, and that which is unnecessary. The period in which we live practises the latter.
9 The curious can ask around. I never once saw it on an actual bumper during several weeks of observation. There is a corrupted version of it in a photograph of a desk motto (sign) in N. Geog. #5, 150.
10 The domestics are said to eat wild meat from freezer coffins.
11 CH2CH, a hydride derivative of ethylene, probably from Texas, probably from Gulf & Western, sure to cause cancer of the butt.
12 The length and utility of summer day is notorious in latitudes near the Circle where the season becomes a diurnal extrusion and the sunne takes on the powerglides of a big Sandoz pill, and the population gets a little open-eyed rest in the brief crack of twilight. “The sky is full of parhelions of delusive glory.”
13 Or ursine and certain, as an arm torn from its socket. The bears treat this place like muggers do Manhattan.
14 Big denomination dope and L.A. women might be the exceptions.
15 Athletic and asthetic appreciation is invariably destructive. the force of nature is never considered destructive because its ends are unknown.
16 from Abba Abba by Anthony Burgess, Faber & Faber, London, 1977, p. 82. Work suggested
by Tom Clark after author’s trip to Rome.
17 Pactitaxel, the brand name of the chemical derived from the yew tree bark—note the
bizarre Nahuatl aspect of the word.
18 On the first of the month you make a silent wish upon awakening—the first
words out of your mouth must be “White Rabbit”.
1 Index number for the notorious red #2.
2 An experiment conducted at 110 degrees Farenheit scale (a mere 70 degrees below the fundamental interval) by Jeremy Prynne, using the upper registers of a #365 Marine Band Hohner.
3 Yet, it is too easy to use one whose very name is a satire upon all government. (taken from Junius)
4 Airbags are a good example of Say’s Law, which says that production creates, notoriously, the product, but the market also. And of course, the rationale, in this instance, Immortality.
5 A tennis intelligence is subtle up to but not including the shot.
6 Even the Dentist, that meanest class of sportsman, when he breaks your tooth, doesn’t exclaim Shit! as he critically stares at his pliers. Footbol, both types, is perhaps least dialated by this instrumental paranoia. The passer does not glare in hatred at the hand which overthrew the pass, nor does the kicker inflict punishment on the foot that missed the goal. The hunter does not throw away the gun that missed the duck &c.
7 For A. H., of Sitka.
8 There are two main kinds of cruelty: That which is enthusiastic, and that which is unnecessary. The period in which we live practises the latter.
9 The curious can ask around. I never once saw it on an actual bumper during several weeks of observation. There is a corrupted version of it in a photograph of a desk motto (sign) in N. Geog. #5, 150.
10 The domestics are said to eat wild meat from freezer coffins.
11 CH2CH, a hydride derivative of ethylene, probably from Texas, probably from Gulf & Western, sure to cause cancer of the butt.
12 The length and utility of summer day is notorious in latitudes near the Circle where the season becomes a diurnal extrusion and the sunne takes on the powerglides of a big Sandoz pill, and the population gets a little open-eyed rest in the brief crack of twilight. “The sky is full of parhelions of delusive glory.”
13 Or ursine and certain, as an arm torn from its socket. The bears treat this place like muggers do Manhattan.
14 Big denomination dope and L.A. women might be the exceptions.
15 Athletic and asthetic appreciation is invariably destructive. the force of nature is never considered destructive because its ends are unknown.
16 from Abba Abba by Anthony Burgess, Faber & Faber, London, 1977, p. 82. Work suggested
by Tom Clark after author’s trip to Rome.
17 Pactitaxel, the brand name of the chemical derived from the yew tree bark—note the
bizarre Nahuatl aspect of the word.
18 On the first of the month you make a silent wish upon awakening—the first words out of your mouth must be “White Rabbit”.