J
johnny_yen
Guest
"Modules: constant and fixed= straight striated space; regularly variable= focalized modular curved striated space, irregularly variable=nonfocalized modular curved striated space. A nomos A logos (e.g. the octave) Non-octave-forming scales reproduced through spiraling. Smooth is continuous variation, continuous development of form Striated intertwines fixed and variable elements, producing order and succession of distinct forms." - The Smooth and the Striated, Mark Bonta
"Dorn began to write Gunslinger, one of the major North American long poems, first published as a sequence of books while in progress and finally as one volume in 1975, the year after its completion. Those years saw the Dorns in Chicago, in Mexico, and, with occasional breaks, in San Francisco. Dorn's early newspaper experience and his work in the Print Shop at Black Mountain combined in the tabloid Bean News, with contributions by Prynne and other correspondents. His neighbour Holbrook Teter's old linotype machine, held together with wire, produced the type for this, and for the complete Gunslinger, while Teter's partner Michael Myers drew the elegant cover for Recollections of Gran Apachería, Dorn's next book." - http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/dorn/
wiki given
"A great treat awaits those who are yet ignorant of Gunslinger. Elmborg has a good time discussing the attempts that have been made to place Gunslinger in a genre. Is the poem comic opera, comedy, an anti-epic, an allegory, mock-epic, or a romance. It is all and none of the above. These futile attempts to pigeonhole a work that breaks down categories, defies authority and reduces if not eliminates distinctions are themselves somewhat comical. Literature exists outside the university English Departments. While some of it is there being routinely contaminated with redundant exegesis, literature's more permanent repose is the minds of people willing to have their states elevated and their intellects instructed while their emotions are assuaged and purged. Obviously a single great poem cannot break the university monopoly on irrelevance, but Gunslinger is certainly one of the ones that is having that unintentional effect. It is also, for the record, the greatest contribution to civilization made on cocaine since Sigmund Freud's The [Mis]Interpretation of Dreams." - http://centomag.org/dorn/potts2
Smooth, quick runway, prompt vomiting
of the dinner flight from "El A Equi,"
dark ramps, sparse migrations through the Stapleton
pre-corrupt Hall of Peña DIA
midcontinent mid-brain aerodrome
of the 50 colonies of the States United,
10:50 PM Mountain time. Deflation severe -
almost the aesthetic equivalent of the bends; mucho,
hugely diminished lights, the whole pizzaz
of electronic pretense cranked down
to enablement, enough by which to get home.
Topping the green belt ridge (except for a shack or two
and a confused dog in the distance, a golfer, a nutzo wideboy,
fresh from a spontaneous murder in Louisville--
pronounced Loois vill--there is not the slightest
stir of a single solitary blade of prairie grass.)
Back to Bold Boudoir, from a closely packed,
long weekend in Hollywood. It is a big lowering of the tone--
so strong that all one's reserves, stored up over a lifetime,
spill out into the general flood of the wettest season
the heartland has seen since the last glaciation.
After consorting with Heidi, if only in the public print,
Bold Boudoir's intolerable clash and sweat of bicycle wars
can't come close to Babylon - in fact, nothing comes close
to Babylon and the view of the Strip and le Chateau Marmot
from the Hillside eyrie of Juan Diario, where we stayed.
- Edward Dorn, "Prolog", The Denver Landing, 1993
"Maybe it's in part because he had a lonely and precarious beginning in life that later on Dorn always liked to surround himself with congenial company. In life as in literature Ed had this weird little travelling party or company: the cowboy, the dance hall madam, the poet-singer, the Stoned Horse, among others. The great honor of friendship he conferred on me was to number me as an outrider of that party of outriders, along with other diverse disparate friends. As to Ed's itinerant young manhood out West -- of which one can get some sense in an image from a Hands Up! poem, "a windborn seed" -- I learned quite a bit from travelling with him across the upper Plains in 1979 on what was supposed to be a reporting assignment. We were "covering" the Wyoming energy boom for a magazine, but Ed's coverage always went deeper, wider, longer. We crested the Wind River range in white light and came down to Moorcroft, Wyoming, where Ed drove me past the old New Moorcroft Hotel, a landmark in his great early story «C. B. & Q.». We found Tiny's restaurant, back of which the half desert still begins, just as it does in that story. In Ed's day crews of gandy dancers hung out there between shifts. Ed was remembering his wandering working-life circa 1951, when "You could work endless hours but it was dangerous."' - http://jacketmagazine.com/09/clark-dorn-obit.html
Edward Dorn reads from "The North Atlantic Turbine": http://ubu.wfmu.org/sound/dorn_ed/north_atlantic/Dorn-Ed_North-Atlantic_01.mp3
Dorn speaking:http://tomraworth.com/Dorn.wav
What will say this
Something like was is
I can remember myself
How I gon remember them, him
Yall, with whens, oh the talk the
Discussions, serious with laughs
I dug Ed Dorn because he wd rather
Make you his enemy
Than Lie
No matter what AG & the others might think
Tho Allen, I can say, was reluctant as Naropa
That Ed had vowed to stay awayYou know because of that drunken preacher
Allen's Tibetan Buddhist sexhound teacher
Anyway, that's what I hold of Ed
Thin straight blonde Cowboy
Movie looking white guy with the mind
Of a saw. Hey, me & Ed wd run it
We of the Green Lantern
By Day or By Night
No Evil will Escape
Our sight.
So to that hideous unrelenting deadly far left jab
Of this Dis world, the jabs are grabs
Look up, another of my peepas
Has booked.Yeh, they was
Really here
& it wasn't for a
long time
whatever it seemed
way gone
Zizwe Ngafua
Split the other
Day, my man
A poet, God
& Gaston too
& Ed Dorn
a White dude
Straight as
The barrel
Of a pen
Called his self
A Gun Slinger
Tall rock hard
Slim, Hey, Ed
Gun Slinger,
You know, we'll get to argue
Again.
- 1/15/00"; Amiri Baraka, "Ed Dorn", http://www.poetspath.com/napalm/nhs01/baraka.html
His poetry also stood apart from theirs in being rooted in working-class politics and a sense of wild western myth. A list of a few of his many titles gives a hint of the territory he occupied: Hands Up! Idaho Out, High West Rendezvous, and the most famous of them, Gunslinger." James Campbell, Guardian obit, http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,249075,00.html
my dedication: I read Gunslinger as an undergraduate English student at the University of Georgia, in a class on Pynchon and Gravity's Rainbow, I wrote a thesis (my post-grad admissions essay) that looked at the treatment of virtual geographies in Gunslinger and Gravity's Rainbow. The course was taught by Jed Rasula (see his book, "Imagining Language", an important anthology) and covered Bob Dylan's life in-depth (we read Absolutely Ffifth Street and watched Don't Look Back). This was in 2004, I got an A in the course. Here is an excerpt from the rough draft of the essay: The epic is the endpoint of modernist implosion into premodern aesthetics and anti-formal/anti-perspectival tribal art, whether that makes GUNSLINGER modern postmodern or premodern is anyone's guess, which smears semantics and Heidegger and cocaine at the college where Ed Dorn studied an americanized version of psychogeography with Charles Olson and Robert Creely, who contributed to the emergent acid speghetti western epic/poem aesthetic; additionally Gunslinger influenced King's novelseries of the same title, more than Kubrick or Alfred Hitchcock, who made films perceivable external to the nervous system, a medium Creely's Prose and Dorn's epic document in detail, in minimal-character rather than vsualmediaphorm, Gunslinger was devoted, each module, to a drug: cannabis, cocaine, mescaline, and LSD, which revolve like Ludd's narrative memory wheels and dictate the poet's unconscious literary patterns that are exhited as rhyme, metaphor, tonality, editing, incunabulae, handwriting, allitteration, latching to multiple protinussenses cognatus motus mentis (it is impossible for science to say how many senses are 'in use' or embodied in Dasein, they estimate or worse conjecture)
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