letter to NY Times Books Editor

1 message

joseph richey <richey80304@yahoo.com> Wed, Apr 25, 2007 at 6:19 PM

To: books@nytimes.com

Dear New York Times Book Review Editors,

Like "Way More West: New & Selected Poems" by Edward

Dorn, reviewer August Kleinzhaler’s “Black Mountain

Breakdown” tries to capsulate forty years of writing,

(Black Mountain Breakdown,” April 22, 2007) by

dividing Dorn’s career into three parts, and ranking

the quality of the work from these distinct periods,

with the early poems being the best, and later work

falling into an also-ran category.

But to compare the poet’s work to itself ignores the

context of late-20th century American poetry to which

Dorn responded. He consistently ran counter to

prevailing winds in his field, in a quixotic effort to

correct the drift in American poetics.

Kleinzhaler lauds Dorn’s early work as “distinctly

American and austere and lovely in design as a Shaker

cabinet.” Those tight lyrical poems emerged in the

free verse free-for-all of the Beat Generation, with

which Dorn is sometimes associated. Then, just when

confessional first-person poetry was peaking, he

dramatically kills the first person “I” in the

anti-epic Gunslinger. In the 25 years after his

classic Gunslinger, and while teaching at the

University of Colorado, Dorn built his reputation as

the consummate contrarian. When the most ascendant

poetry in the land deconstructed syntax and brought

more abstraction and self-affectation, Dorn sought to

revitalize the sentence in what critics called

“statemental lyrics,” the philippic epigrams found in

Yellow Lola, Hello La Jolla, and Abhorrences. His

poetry in the 1990s is consistent with a pattern of

many writers’ late-style - - marked by an impatient

cutting to the quick, and pulling no punches in

asserting controversial positions. Scholarly

assessment of Ed Dorn’s last major work, “Languedoc

Variorum: a Defense of Heresy and Heretics” would

require the historical perspective that he tried to

bring to American poetics. That may have to wait until

the drift is corrected.

Joseph Richey, Editor

Ed Dorn Live: Lectures, Interviews and Outtakes

University of Michigan Press

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