DORN, Ed(ward Merton)

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Nationality: American. Born: Villa Grove, Illinois, 2 April 1929. Education: University of Illinois, Urbana, 1949–50; Black Mountain College, North Carolina, 1950–51, 1954–55. Family: Married 1) Helene Dorn; 2) Jennifer Dunbar in 1969. Career: Reference librarian, New Mexico State Library, Santa Fe, 1959; taught at Idaho State University, Pocatello, 1961–65; visiting professor of American Literature (Fulbright Lecturer, 1965–66, 1966–67), University of Essex, Wivenhoe, England, 1965–68, 1974–75; visiting poet, University of Kansas, Lawrence, 1968–69; taught at Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, 1970–71, and Kent State University, Ohio, 1973–74; Regents Lecturer, University of California, Riverside, 1973–74; writer-in-residence, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, 1976, and since 1977, University of Colorado, Boulder. Editor, Wild Dog magazine, Salt Lake City, 1964–65; editor, Rolling Stock newspaper; since 1983 editor Rolling Rock magazine. Awards: National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1966, 1968; D.H. Lawrence fellowship, 1969. Address: Department of English, Campus Box 226, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309, U.S.A. Died: 10 December 1999.

Publications

Poetry

Paterson Society. Privately printed, 1960.

The Newly Fallen. New York, Totem Press, 1961.

From Gloucester Out. London, Matrix Press, 1964.

Hands Up! New York, Totem-Corinth, 1964.

Idaho Out. London, Fulcrum Press, 1965.

Geography. London, Fulcrum Press, 1965; revised edition, 1968.

The North Atlantic Turbine. London, Fulcrum Press, 1967.

Song. Newcastle upon Tyne, Northern Arts, 1968.

Gunslinger, Book I. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1968.

The Midwest Is That Space Between the Buffalo Statler and the Lawrence Eldridge. Lawrence, Kansas, Terrence Williams, 1968.

Gunslinger, Book II. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1969.

Gunslinger 1 and 2. London, Fulcrum Press, 1969.

Twenty-Four Love Songs. San Francisco, Frontier Press, 1969.

The Cosmology of Finding Your Spot. Lawrence, Kansas, Cottonwood, 1969.

Ed Dorn Sportcasts Colonialism. Privately printed, 1969 (?).

Songs: Set Two, A Short Count. West Newbury, Massachusetts, Frontier Press, 1970.

Spectrum Breakdown: A Microbook. LeRoy, New York, Athanor, 1971.

A Poem Called Alexander Hamilton. Lawrence, Kansas, Tansy-Peg Leg Press, 1971.

The Cycle. West Newbury, Massachusetts, Frontier Press, 1971.

The Kultchural Exchange. Seattle, Wiater, 1971.

Old New Yorkers Really Get My Head. Lawrence, Kansas, Cottonwood, 1972.

The Hamadryas Baboon at the Lincoln Park Zoo. Chicago, Wine Press, 1972.

Gunslinger, Book III: The Winterbook Prologue to the Great Book IIII Kornerstone. West Newbury, Massachusetts, Frontier Press, 1972.

Recollections of Gran Apacheria. San Francisco, Turtle Island, 1974.

Gunslinger, Books I, II, III, IV. Berkeley, California, Wingbow Press, 1975; revised edition, as Gunslinger, Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 1989.

The Collected Poems 1956–1974. Bolinas, California, Four Seasons, 1975.

Manchester Square, with Jennifer Dunbar. London, Permanent Press, 1975.

Slinger. Berkeley, California, Wingbow Press, 1975.

Hello La Jolla. Berkeley, California, Wingbow Press, 1978.

Selected Poems, edited by Donald Allen. Bolinas, California, Grey Fox Press, 1978.

Yellow Lola: Formerly Tilted Japanese Neon (Hello, La Jolla, Book II). Santa Barbara, California, Cadmus, 1981.

Captain Jack's Chaps, or, Houston, MLA. Madison, Wisconsin, Black Mesa Press, 1983.

Abhorrences. Berkeley, California, Handmade, 1984; revised edition, Santa Rosa, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1990.

From Abhorrences: A Chronicle of the 80ies. Boise, Idaho, Limberlost Press, 1989.

The Denver Landing. Buffalo, New York, Uprising Press, 1993.

High West Rendezvous. Hereford, West House Books, 1996.

Recording: Edward Dorn Reads from "The North Atlantic Turbine," Livingdiscs, 1967.

Short Stories

Some Business Recently Transacted in the White World. West Newbury, Massachusetts, Frontier Press, 1971.

Other

What I See in the Maximus Poems. Ventura, California, and Worcester, Migrant Press, 1960.

Prose 1, with Michael Rumaker and Warren Tallman. San Francisco, Four Seasons, 1964.

The Rites of Passage: A Brief History. Buffalo, New York, Frontier Press, 1965; revised edition, as By the Sound, Mount Vernon, Washington, Frontier Press, 1972; revised edition, Santa Rosa, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1991.

The Shoshoneans: The People of the Basin-Plateau. New York, Morrow, 1967.

Bean News. San Francisco, Free Press, 1972.

The Poet, The People, The Spirit, edited by Bob Rose. Vancouver, Talonbooks, 1976.

Roadtesting the Language: An Interview, with Stephen Fredman. San Diego, University of California Archive for New Poetry, 1978.

Views, Interviews, edited by Donald Allen. Bolinas, California, Four Seasons, 2 vols., 1980.

Way West: Stories, Essays & Verse Accounts. Santa Rosa, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1993.

Translator, with Gordon Brotherston, Our Word: Guerrilla Poems from Latin America. London, Cape Goliard Press, and New York, Grossman, 1968.

Translator, with Gordon Brotherston, Tree Between Two Walls, by José Emilio Pacheco. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1969.

Translator, with Gordon Brotherston, Selected Poems, by César Vallejo. London, Penguin, 1976.

Translator, Image of the New World: The American Continent Portrayed in Native Texts, edited by Gordon Brotherston. London, Thames and Hudson, 1979.

Translator, with Gordon Brotherston, The Sun Unwound: Original Texts from Occupied America. Berkeley, California, North Atlantic Books, 1999.

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Bibliography: A Bibliography of Ed Dorn by David Streeter, New York, Phoenix Book Shop, 1973.

Manuscript Collection: Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.

Critical Studies: "An Interview with Ed Dorn," in Contemporary Literature (Madison, Wisconsin), 15, 3; The Lost America of Love: Rereading Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, and Robert Duncan by Sherman Paul, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1981; Internal Resistances: The Poetry of Ed Dorn by Donald Wesling, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1985; Edward Dorn by William McPheron, Boise, Idaho, Boise State University, 1988; Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, and Robert Duncan: A Reference Guide, by Willard Fox III, Boston, Massachusetts, G.K. Hall, 1989; "The Relation between Open Form and Collective Voice: The Social Origin of Processual Form in John Ashbery's Three Poems and Ed Dorn's Gunslinger" by Anne Dewey, in Sagetrieb (Orono, Maine), 11(1–2), spring-fall 1992.

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Ed Dorn's work has been widely praised in both England and the United States. Russell Banks, writing in Lillabulero, has compared him to Olson, Williams, and Pound. A. Alvarez has suggested that Dorn has produced "a handful of beautifully pure and unaffected love-songs, and an intriguing long poem about a drive, 'Idaho Out,' in which cultural worry loses out to a kind of anarchic, footloose vitality and a feeling for the vast, frozen emptiness of the American West." Dorn's work reminds Alvarez of Hemingway, and it is true that Dorn is concerned with capturing idiomatic speech accurately. But he also indulges a kind of jam-pack jumbling of observations that is more the poetic counterpart of exuberant and excited writers like Thomas Wolfe. Dorn's recall of childhood, his feeling for places and writers, his political convictions, his tourism—all find their way, in cascades of energy, into his loose, straying verse.

Dorn's reactions to England, where he lived for some time, are particularly sensitive:

   As we go
   through Sussex, hills are round
   bellies are the downs
   pregnantly lovely
   the rounds of them, no towns
   the train passes
   shaking along the groove
   of the countryside.

He purports "to love / that, and retain an ear for / the atrocities of my own hemisphere," criticizing, with simplistic pessimism, almost everything about the United States:

   The thorn however
   remains, in the desert
   of american life, the thorn
   in the throat of our national hypocrisy.

And yet Dorn is also sentimental at will about his native land: "And yes Fort Benton is lovely / and quiet, I would gladly give it as a gift / to a friend / …" At his best, he is a sentimentalist for the America he denounces:

   Bitterly cold were the nights.
   The journeymen slept in the lots of filling stations
   and there were the interrupting lights
   of semis all night long as those beasts
   crept past or drew up to rest their motors
   or roared on.

Dorn's Gunslinger seems to be built on these strong native feelings. It is an effort at building a comic epic on the western, in which Dorn finds the archetypal characters and enthusiasms that reveal America:

   And why do you have a female horse
   Gunslinger? I asked. Don't move
   he replied
   the sun rests deliberately
   on the rim of the sierra.

This work also moves away from the ego as center, a practice that was somewhat problematic in earlier long poems in which Dorn spoke as a seer. One does not, however, want to lose other qualities of his earlier work—his exuberance, puritanical anger, and authority about his enthusiasms.

—David Ray