Edward Dorn

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Benny B said:
Prose-y poetry is the dominant mode of American poetry from Whitman onwards, isn't it? I think it can feel like a bit of a con sometimes if you apply a European idea of what poetry should be, and there is a lot of rambling, self-indulgent, over-sincere crap (like Ginsberg and Kerouac imo) or you might think, this might as well just be prose. But I suppose it's best not to get hung up about it and just enjoy the writers that you like.

Sometimes even the best of them really annoy me, but I was reading some Frank O'Hara today and really getting into it, all depends what mood I'm in - I really like Olson sometimes and other times think he was just full of shit really compared to Pound or, a bit later, Prynne, cause they were proper scholars.

Those early Dorn poems I posted on the last page have a very pleasing, subtle structure that elevates them above 'just prose with line breaks' and that makes him stand out a bit from his New American Poetry peers, I think, not quite as 'loose' as they first seem.
Click to expand...

It was an observation, not a value judgement. If it's good, it's good.
 
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I watched that compilation of clips of him reading this morning and some of them are really funny. There's one in particular where he keeps stopping and stumbling over the words and laughing to himself.

8:32 - 12:13

 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

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Haha yeah that one at the end! I watched this the other night.
Like Luka said he's got a got a great voice, but also a great face too.

Him and Prynne are such an odd pair.
 
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There's a lot of talk of geography surrounding Dorn, but as Gunslinger went on I couldn't picture the action taking place anywhere in particular. It lost all sense of place and the characters seemed to be performing against a blank canvas, or floating in a void, like something of Beckett's.

I'm assuming it's deliberate as early in the poem Slinger says:

Time is more fundamental than space.
It is, indeed, the most pervasive
of all categories
in other words
theres plenty of it.
And it stretches things themselves
until they blend into one,
so if youve seen one thing
youve seen them all.
 
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