Attended last night the Ed Dorn celebration at a packed Poetry Project, which was altogether unceremonious, if hardly perfunctory, as befits its subject, who was in fact allowed to speak for himself.

Anselm Berrigan helmed things with some quick remarks about Dorn, reading a wee bit from his mother's recent essay in Big Bridge, and later returned in her stead to read Dorn. But Jennifer Dunbar Dorn led things off, thanking Penguin for publishing the collection, and reading a couple of outtakes from Gunslinger. Then Michael Rothenberg, who edited the anthology, read some real laughers. Then Ammiel Alcalay. Then Anne Waldman, the most strident reader, and the only one to read from Slinger proper,  took on Lil's entrance, and the Stoned Horse. Then Anselm Berrigan, reading some beauties from Recollections of Gran Apacheria. Then Rosalie Sorrels gave a beautiful, tart reading, beginning with that terse meditation on Prairie Home Companion (uncollected, but from Abhorrences, I think) and culminating in Dorn's final poem, The Garden of the White Rose. It was heartbreaking. Then George Kimball read that faux-bildungsroman The Cosmology of Finding Your Spot, adding some material details, as he was there for its conception in Lawrence, Kansas. And then read some more Abhorrences, alluding bitterly to the ugly Silliman disparagement a few weeks back. Then Ed Sanders read From Gloucester Out, Dorn's ode to Olson, which, at least to this belated Mourner, was redolent of elegy displaced. Then Amiri Baraka, who scampered to the front, and, clearly very upset, remarked how heavy it was to hear Dorn's voice again – in the poems – that Dorn was the person in "the movement" whom he trusted most, recalling all of the Letters they had exchanged, and impressing just how much he valued Dorn. It was very very very moving, Baraka, perhaps the most militant present, the only one to break down like that over what must be characterized in this frame as a comrade. He then read Tribe, that mondo statement of purpose, pausing midway stumbling and mumbling to comment on its unbelievable detail, and then sort of half-sobbing and repeating the strident final lines, and how much they meant to him, a him that includes a black man. It was a little bit overwhelming – there was patent solidarity (a solidarity, mind you, that Baraka basically capitulated as consonant hatreds, take it or leave it) – and you could feel the energy and anger they were tapped into, as well as the love. Then we watched ten minutes of Dorn reading Westward Haut captured in 1997 at UC Berkeley. Watching him read, his right arm rising vertically from his elbow at the table with the fingers pursed as if to signal quiet and attention, there was something surprisingly effeminate about him, almost fey. Tricked out. Elizabethan, maybe.

Adam Weg