Edward Dorn

[Benny Bunter]

From that poetry foundation essay on Prynne:

In Kitchen Poems, Prynne took up, at the level of the name, the relations between language and the real. Expanding and enriching the significance of this inquiry was the practice and theory of Olson and the projectivists. It is into the gap that opens between the name and what is named, between sign and referent, that deception and trickery penetrate. Names can return us to things, to the world of which they are themselves a part, only insofar as we are prepared to trust to the very trickery that has deceived us and to recognize in the absence, the lack, of language an unveiling, a bringing into presence. In the language of poetry speaks that which speaks nowhere else. Poetry is a calling by name of that by which poetry is spoken. Prynne writes, in “Sketch for a Financial Theory of the Self,” “the names, / do you not / see, are just / the tricks we / trust, which / we choose.” Tradition, custom, is the richest expression of trust we have, its most profound expression the mysteries of liturgy, ritual, that enact and sustain the deep analogies between language and the real. For us, now in a world in which that trust has been broken, a world of monetary exchange, of the ego centered upon consumption and profit, it is our condition that “what I am is a special case of / what we want.” Language, reduced to demand, closes in upon the needs of the ego. But paradoxically, for Prynne, such needs return us to the elemental clarity of certain facts, to the physicality of the body, and opens to language anew the experience of the real:

The purity is a question of
names. We are here to utter them. This is
a prayer. I have it now between my
teeth and my eyes, on my forehead. Know
the names. It is as simple as the purity
of sentiment: it is as simple
as that.

 

[version]

There's a bit in the Dorn where Slinger says the mortal can be described, that's all mortality is.

 

[Benny Bunter]

I hope the Prynne/Dorn letters get published at some point. Looks like there's a lot more to Dorn than I first thought from just reading his early stuff in the New American Poetry anthology and an extract from Gunslinger.

 

[version]

There's a bit in the Dorn where Slinger says the mortal can be described, that's all mortality is.

Your vulgarity is flawless
but you are the slave
of appearances --
this Stockholder will find
that his gun cannot speak
he'll find
that he has been Described

[...]

The total .44
recurred in the Slinger's hand
and spun there
then came home like a sharp knock
and the intruder was described --
a plain, unassorted white citizen.

 

[version]

A mathematician from Casper Wyoming
years ago taught me That
To eliminate the draw
permits an unmatchable Speed
a syzygy which hangs tight
just back of the curtain
of the reality theater
down the street,
speed is not necessarily fast.
Bullets are not necessarily specific.
When the act is
so self contained
and so dazzling in itself
the target then
can disappear
in the heated tension
which is an area between here
and formerly
In some parts of the western world
men have mistakenly
called that phenomenology --

 

[Benny Bunter]

 

[luka]

he had a really great speaking voice

 

[Benny Bunter]

Quite rare for a poet in that he's genuinely funny too.

 

[woops]

there's a really good interview with him online can't be bothered to find it

 

[woops]

or maybe i can lol

 

[version]

Someone collected the interviews; might be worth a look.

Ed Dorn Live: Lectures, Interviews, and Outtakes (Poets On Poetry)

“Ed Dorn’s achievement has been to create single-handedly a language of public reference, and to have brought within the sphere of expressive language and poetic experience objects and feelings which had been, literally, unimaginable in those terms. It is in this context that he is one of the...

mitpressbookstore.mit.edu

 

[woops]

A mathematician from Casper Wyoming
years ago taught me That
To eliminate the draw
permits an unmatchable Speed
a syzygy which hangs tight
just back of the curtain
of the reality theater
down the street,
speed is not necessarily fast.
Bullets are not necessarily specific.
When the act is
so self contained
and so dazzling in itself
the target then
can disappear
in the heated tension
which is an area between here
and formerly
In some parts of the western world
men have mistakenly
called that phenomenology --

this is good, but i find some of the line break action a bit forced or portentuous personally, especially here:

When the act is
so self contained
and so dazzling in itself
the target then
can disappear
in the heated tension
which is an area between here
and formerly

 

[woops]

just nit picking though.

 

[version]

this is good, but i find some of the line break action a bit forced or portentuous personally,

I feel I'm reading it like an oddly spaced novel rather than a poem, although the breaks force me to follow a certain rhythm, so maybe I am reading it like a poem. It does feel a bit like prose arbitrarily broken up to look like poetry though, and he said he didn't see much of a distinction between the two:

"Dorn's verse was inclined to be loose in structure. He could say, without blinking, that there was little difference between poetry and prose, and even between poetry and talk."

the guardian.com/news/1999/dec/14/guardianobituaries

 

[version]

Jacket 16 - Excerpt from Edward Dorn: A World of Difference, by Tom Clark

 

[version]

The data the data is spraying the shrine

 

[version]

« We are bleached in Sound
as it burns by what we desire »
and we give our inwardness
in some degree to all things
but to fire we give everything.

 

[version]

All may wake who live
the combination is given
and Some comb the connections
in blind search
there are deaths at birth
there is death at 21
and burial at 80
each calculation
involves another century.

Our company thus moves collectively
along the River Rio Grande.

 

[version]

It's a bit dated and goofy in a very 60s way and some of it went over my head, but I really liked it. Somehow manages to be quite affecting when the group disperses at the end despite them barely hanging together as characters and it being near impossible to tell what's actually happened.

The things which came across most strongly were the humour and range of voices. There are so many puns and comical back and forths; the voice keeps switching and the font, layout and style shift accordingly. You get rhyming verse, a scrambled telegram, words spelled backwards and all sorts.

There are a couple of essays in the back of my edition (50th anniversary); one by a guy called Michael Davidson that's helpful and mentioned things I hadn't picked up on, and one by Olson that's some mishmash of letter, reading list, essay and poem he sent to Dorn in 1955.

To Eliminate the Draw: Edward Dorn's Slinger (1981) - Michael Davidson
A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn (1955) - Charles Olson

Also, some more lines that jumped out at me:

"the media dream of war"​

​

"Never mind that, the Oil Smellers​

have already got the scent​

Everything hollered and slammed the door​

and the horses reared and churned the dust​

as they went quickly to the limits of Cortez​

to the nightmare limits of town​

through the smell of cut and bleeding grass"​

​

"None Other, they are the new machinists​

Masters of the wedge inclined plane screw​

Silhouetted against the growing intensity​

of teutonic artillery fire over the western line​

Don't worry, the poet advised​

a pound of gold is worth a ton of lead"​

​

"Vegas is a vast decoy"​

​

"The immense inertia of the old order​

buckles that chain of blue mountains​

This is old dinosaur country​

a record full of sudden changes"​

​

"some consign their money​

directly to the ice"​

 

[Benny Bunter]

I feel I'm reading it like an oddly spaced novel rather than a poem, although the breaks force me to follow a certain rhythm, so maybe I am reading it like a poem. It does feel a bit like prose arbitrarily broken up to look like poetry though, and he said he didn't see much of a distinction between the two:

"Dorn's verse was inclined to be loose in structure. He could say, without blinking, that there was little difference between poetry and prose, and even between poetry and talk."

the guardian.com/news/1999/dec/14/guardianobituaries

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.