It was Rachel Blau DuPlessis at the Zukofsky Centennial who reminded me of the profoundly political nature of resentment – that this was what one often saw rising up out of the classic texts of A Test of Poetry. Resentment, anger, bitterness, three facets of a diamond that burns white hot at the center of certain personalities. Something that transcends & always predates whatever the immediate trigger, locatable no doubt deep in personal history, sometimes so deep its true sources might never be extracted. If used properly, this burning diamond might shine like a beacon, a lighthouse beam through the fog of the daily oblivion, calling out the like-minded, anyone with a grudge to bear.
It was always apparent to whoever read closely that Edward Dorn was such a person – there was something that cut deep & did not stop cutting. So many of even his lightest lyrics appear to have written through gritted teeth. And “light” is a term one uses cautiously when approaching the work of Ed Dorn:
In the State oyster
all particles foreign in it
surrounded by a grey mucous –
graveyards are filled with
the rotting pearls
that have been within its shell
those of heaven & hell
cremated or lost at sea
rot equally
This first stanza of “An Address to the First Woman to Face Death in Havana (Olga Herrera Marcos)” appears in facsimile of its original typescript in the Chicago Review Edward Dorn American Heretic issue midway through a reprint of his correspondence from the very early 1960s primarily with Tom Raworth & LeRoi Jones. It is worth noting that Dorn may well have been the first poet to have noticed & recorded the murderous underbelly of Fidel’s liberation of Cuba from Batista’s even more corrupt regime.
Dorn was a man with some self-knowledge – his comment that “From near the beginning I have known my work to be theoretical in nature and poetic by virtue of inherent tone” is accurate, figuring the work’s blind spots as well as its strengths. Slinger divided the younger poets who were just then glomming on to Projectivist poetics precisely because that’s what Dorn wanted – it was a work at once both within its heritage & in the same moment one that rent asunder whatever temple Olson had thought himself building. Can you write serious philosophy in the mode of a comic book narrative within the framework of the American longpoem, with its ever so self-important tone (at least as set out by Pound & Olson, tho here I think Dorn’s assault misses Olson’s own humor, the degree to which Max is also déjà toujours the absent-minded professor)?
Dorn’s later battles, most notably siding with Tom Clark against the folks at Naropa in his own final home town, isolated him from large portions of the post-avant community. All of the later books, including Yellow Lola, High West Rendezvous, Chemo Sabe & Captain Jack’s Chaps, or Houston/MLA appeared in small editions, none above 500 copies, most of them just half that. The manifest racism & homophobia that accompanied the Naropa poetry wars were appalling & left a bad taste that lingers to this day, yet I think that Dorn’s role in all that was not entirely unlike his own stance years earlier when the likes of LeRoi Jones & Meg Randall were first becoming so smitten with varying modes of communist revolution, simply to ask if this is so great, why does it have execution squads?
So American Heretic captures at least one side of this anger – tho anger was not all of Dorn & a good part of what this extraordinary compilation of documents presents are the other facets of this diamond: 75 pages of correspondence, memoirs by Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, Alistair Johnston & John Wright, essays by Dale Smith & Keith Tuma, a 48-page interview of Dorn reprinted from a 1993 issue of Chicago Review & a selection of the later poems, especially those from Chemo Sabe, composed during Dorn’s final battle with pancreatic cancer. The volume is generously illustrated & the copy I got even has a color postcard photo of Dorn with ever-present cigarette to pursed lips. Because so much of Dorn’s late work is hard to get – according to abebooks.com, the only available copy of High West Rendezvous costs $200 – Tuma’s overview of it is especially valuable, at least until a truly complete edition replaces the Collected that appeared 25 years before Dorn’s demise.
I had only one serious interchange with Dorn, back in 1973. I had been charged with putting together a poetry reading as a fundraiser for a prison movement group that I was working with in Marin County, so I wrote letters to Dorn, Bob Creeley & Joanne Kyger, the combination I thought would draw the largest possible audience to the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco. I’d never put on a reading before of any kind, so was obviously in over my head even if I was, just as obviously, starting at the top. Creeley & Kyger said yes instantly, but Dorn wanted me to come by & talk, to explain to him in detail what I was doing with this group, what the group – the Committee for Prisoner Humanity & Justice (CPHJ) – was up to, & what he might be endorsing by thus participating. So I hitchhiked home from San Rafael one afternoon & then caught a Muni out to where Dorn was living in San Francisco’s Sunset District. He asked probing questions at length before saying yes & had one “non-negotiable” demand – that he be allowed to read last so that he wouldn’t have to talk with either Creeley or Kyger. Tho the demand struck me at the time as creepy to the Nth degree, I accepted it in order to get the lineup I wanted. At the time, I’d had no idea of his intense feuds with so many other poets. Before I left, Dorn wanted to seal the deal by rolling a doobie the size of small – oh maybe not so small – baseball bat. I remember later having to work very hard indeed just to remember where I lived as I rode the bus back on some complicated route from the Sunset to the flat I shared in Pacific Heights. At the event itself, on August 31, Dorn arrived as advertised, late, and lingered pacing in the back of the large sanctuary (Creeley & Kyger were seated up front), as if examining the crowd of 400 who turned out. When it was his turn, he came up & read from a then-new & still unpublished work, Recollections of Gran Apachería. Someone (not me) had the wits to record the event & an excerpt of Dorn’s reading later appeared on John Giorno’s selection of Dial-a-Poem poets: Disconnected, available for listening & downloading now via Ubu Web.* Five poems, not in the order of the finished book that came out a year later, printed on “comic book” stock with a cartoon cover by Michael Myers, nor, for that matter, entirely as printed (lines & phrases were added, it would seem, none subtracted)
Dorn would have made a great blogger – his journalistic impulses, first with Bean News & Zephyrus Image, later with Rolling Stock, anticipate the form. And certainly blogging’s a mode well suited to someone whose instinct is to stir the shit. Indeed, when I opened up my copy of Gran Apachería, out dropped an old Ed Dorn bumper sticker: “RECREATION / wrecks the nation.” Who else might have thought to do that?
* This record, originally a vinyl LP, also contains one of Creeley’s poems from the same event, as well as a treasure trove of other poets of that time.
