“Just the Externals, Mam”: Ed Dorn and the Public American West
Way More West: New and Selected Poems, Ed. Michael Rothenberg, Penguin Poets, 2007
Ed Dorn Live: Lectures, Interviews, and Outtakes, Ed. Joseph Richey, University of Michigan Press, 2007
In a 1977 lecture entitled “On the Authority of Root Meanings and the External,” notable for, among other things, Ed Dorn calling for a poem that could be rapped, he declares “Writing, in general of course, is the chord emanating from the source which measures the length of how far the word has strayed from its origin.” A kind of plumb line as much as a vibration, this locationary metaphor evokes the centrifugal action of Dorn’s work outward to landscape. Throughout his oeuvre we find his gaze fixed on the material plane as the object of poetic attention: “there is a total journal / with the eyes” (“From Idaho Out”). For Dorn, all writing is literally earth writing — geography — the title of one of his most assured books, and the general mode of his address. Measuring that “chord emanating from the source…of its origin,” Dorn’s work assimilates the total journal of local incident and historical force into a body of work unique in American poetry. He is, in a variety of ways, the most public of American poets, which makes him both oddly prescient and anachronistic; his work is most certainly of his time, but that time is fugitive, topical, and so moving at great speed. This has made for difficulty in assessing his career, as many of his books are long out of print, and the minute particulars of his address are now forgotten by the public. Two new books — one, a new and selected poetry, the other, various forms of “live” prose — will hopefully remedy the situation, and show Dorn’s great precision in diagnosing our global disease.
But to return to that lecture of 1977, here captured in Joe Richey’s engaging Ed Dorn Live. The talk is concerned with the public landscape, the political inscape, and the sourcing of words in their generative contexts. It’s a way of considering language as environmentally embedded, site-specific, organic in its proliferations, proliferations that extend outward from texts and into the external landscape, and vice versa. Another way to say it is that words have habits that evolve from usage in particular places and histories; that there is a frontier mentality in language that operates most interestingly at its edges, and for Ed Dorn, that means the Western Edges. In his lecture Dorn shapes this public landscape towards his interest in the mechanisms of commerce, specifically truck culture and the movement of freight from wagon to rail to highway to airspace “Root meanings,” as such, are to be found not merely in dictionaries, but in the external grid or network of what is; “how you have to operate around a word according to its present problems.”
Dorn goes on to discuss geographer J.B. Jackson’s theory of the “public landscape,” that megastructure combining both human and natural environments. It’s an interest that aligns poetic function with public occasion, or more precisely, a linguistic attention to being-in-spacetime.
In the Jackson passage I see actually the same surroundings that one has in a poem in which the linguistic surroundings can prompt redefinition on the spur of the moment, according to one’s feel for the galaxies of words. They point forward, very often, these kinds of definitions within the poem. Certain words signal the deepest sense a word possesses, because its meaning is created in its environment and, in that sense, is way beyond and more vital to the word than the dictionary.
I take these statements to be the abiding attention in Dorn’s poetry and prose to the external, to the public landscape and the social forces that conscript our language uses and inscribe them literally upon the physical earth. Ever on the lookout for outward manifestations of our cultural preoccupations, Dorn is an occasional poet in the sense that places are occasions and produce language, poems. From “Home on the Range, February 1962”:
Flutes,
and the harp on the plain
is
a distance, of pain, and waving reeds
The
scale of far off trees, notes not of course
Upon
a real harp but chords in the thick clouds
And
the wind reaching its arms toward west Yellowstone.
Moving
to the east, the grass was high once, and before
White
wagons moved
the
hawk, proctor of the hills still is”
(Hands
Up)
Notice the situating title, landforms, inhabitants, histories. The shared force of Manifest Destiny “is a distance, of pain,” not the more platitudinous encomium we have come to expect. The intersection of range and time are particularly striking here as a manifestation of that emanating chord of language. “Strum, strum,” we might say, citing Gunslinger, and invoking the poet and his AbsoLute.
•
Born in 1929, six months before the stock market crash, Edward Merton Dorn had a way of being on the edges of things. Educated briefly at the University of Illinois, he was “corrected” at Black Mountain College in 1950-1, and 1953, under the tutelage of Charles Olson. Thereafter known as a Black Mountain poet, and Olson’s star student, Dorn labored and lumberjacked variously in the mountain West, marking a general course of migration from Idaho to San Francisco, Washington to Colorado. He made his initial mark in Don Allen’s New American Poetry, and with a trio of elegant books (The Newly Fallen, Hands Up!, Geography) in the early 60s. Combining lyric felicity with an anthropological attention to the local scene, these poems have an alternately elegiac and angry tone reflective of their often rural and economically challenged location. Continuing his wandering, Dorn spent the florid years of the later 60s teaching in Essex, England, where he wrote The North Atlantic Turbine and the first book of his mock-epic Gunslinger, and began lifelong friendships with poets Tom Raworth and Jeremy Pryne. Flamboyant, but oddly counter to the Beat aesthetic then dominant, Dorn inhabited a particular iconoclasm that delivered scorn equally to the Left and to the Right. His style evolved increasingly toward the statemental lyric as a means of exercising what he saw as a preoccupation with the personal in American poetry. A Swiftean figure who enjoyed savaging the establishment, be it government or poetry, Dorn’s “poetics of aggression,” as Joe Richey has called it, offers rhetorically elegant correctives to the “insufferances, intolerances and abhorences” of the literary arts in America and, more importantly, of American democracy in the last half of the 20th c. An itinerant professor for much of the 60s and 70s, he eventually spent twenty-two years teaching at the University of Colorado, Boulder, “correcting” lazy thinkers — including this writer’s — until his retirement in 1998. His peculiar way of publishing was “with persons…and not with houses” such that his poems rarely had major distribution. Nonetheless he published over forty books of poetry and prose quite distinct from anything written in that period of American letters. It is this writer’s hope that the publication of two Dorn books in a year will — with talk of a Collected Poems on the horizon — rectify the relative neglect of this major figure. Edward Dorn died of pancreatic cancer in 1999, still very active on three separate projects that had preoccupied his later years: Westward Haut, Languedoc Variorum and Chemo Sabe. I mention these specific volumes because they are well-represented in the Penguin new and selected and because they are emblematic of Dorn’s “western” status as an outsider “heretical” to the main currents of American poetry.
•
The title of this essay is “Ed Dorn and the Public American West,” and if Dorn’s work is concerned with such matters it is in the large sense of the West — Western Civilization and its legacy of texts and Western Expansion and its legibility on our landscapes. These twin meanings are deployed via a rapacious wit that seeks to diagnose the time-space predicament of both “here and formerly” (Gunslinger), and so get to the root of this thing called West. Hence the title of his New and Selected, Way More West is descriptive of both volume and direction: Ed is most West, we’ve got a lot of West still to deal with, and the way we’re headed is still West. It’s a play on a previous title in Ed’s oeuvre, the 1993 Black Sparrow edition of stories, essays and verse accounts, Way West, but it’s also an extension, a superlative accounting of Dorn’s subjects and preeminence. As hyperbole and declamation — two essential ingredients of Dorn poetics — I’d like to think Ed would be pleased.
Let me circle back to that original lecture again, when Dorn speaks of how “[Words] point forward, very often…to the deepest sense a word possesses.” I think this is evidence of Dorn’s formative education at Black Mountain under Charles Olson, and where he takes it. That is, Olson’s essay “Projective Verse” asserts, among other things, the outward cast of perception as kinetics, form and process, that “one perception must immediately and directly lead to another perception” and that the “poem is a high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy discharge.” (Collected Prose). These central methods are very much in play in Dorn’s work, but in a much more self-conscious manner. His “projective verse” is not embodied on the page as a kind of parataxical energy graph so much as it is displayed outward as a telos from self to landscape. Perhaps it is the relationship between millennia and quantity Olson speaks of in his Bibliography for Ed, its way of intersecting with person and process: “it is not how much one knows but in what field of context it is retained and used.” (A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn). Dorn is directional in precisely this ability to project personal coincidence outward into the simultaneous histories of any living landscape. Take the late poem “Tribe”:
My
tribe came from struggling labor
Depression
South Eastern Illinois
Just
before the southern hills starts
To
roll toward the coal country
Where
the east/west moranial ridges
Of
Wisconsin trash pile up
At
the bottom of the prairie, socially
A
far Midwest recrudescence of Appalachia
My
grandfather French Quebecois
Master
pipefitter in the age of steam
Indian
fifty percent, very French
Who
didn’t derogate himself
As
a breed, showed none of those tedious
Tendentious
tendencies. Came down
From
Chebanse, from the Illinois Central
In
Iroquios County, to the Chicago &
Eastern
Illinois line’s division at Villa Grove
In
one of the Twenties boomlets,
The
last precipitous edges of the great devolvement
These
forebears on my mother’s side
Owned
a nice clapboard house in old town
Where
I was brought up off and on during
The
intensity of the depression, parents
Wandering
work search, up and down
The
bleak grit avenues of Flint, following
Other
exodus relatives. Belgian in-laws
From
another French connexion
Michael
Moore-land from the beginning
Manmade
poisons in the cattle feed way
Before
Creutzfeldt-Jaoob disease and angry cows —
Governments
always conspire against
The
population and often
This
is no even malice;
Just
nothing better to do.
I’m
with the Kurds and the Serbs and the Iraqis
And
every defiant nation this jerk
Ethnic
crazy country bombs —
World
leaders can claim
What
they want about terror,
As
they wholesale helicopters
To
the torturers —
But
I’m straight out
Of
my tribe from my great grandma Merton
Pure
Kentucky English — it would take more paper
Than
I’ll ever have to express how justified I feel.
Now it would take more paper — and more space than this essay affords — to fully unpack the socioeconomic propulsion of this “projective verse,” but its important to note that the poem begins and ends in identity, was written in the flush 90s of identity politics, and yet avoids the essentialism of that stance for a more nuanced sense of how migration was shaped by glaciation, the Depression, ethnicity, the trades, the westward expansion of the railroad. And it carries these facts all the way forward to contemporary Michigan economics, the cattle industry and, most importantly, the war in Iraq. For Dorn’s identity is trans-historical, moves in place and time such that he can identify with “every defiant nation this jerk / Ethnic crazy country bombs.” That we are all ethnic at some remove, and that that remove moves, is the fact of the poem for Dorn. His tribe suffers no tedious tendentious tendencies, no reduction in complexity, even as teleology flings the poem outward into the landscape.
This projectivity can also be seen as a refusal of the personal, of the autobiographical subject as the sine qua non of the contemporary poem. Dorn had no patience for a confessional, or post-confessional verse and, while “Tribe” is an unusually disclosive poem for him, it resists the fall into psychological speculation. We get the facts of his family tree and the labor that placed them in a particular environment, but it stops far short of identifying the art of poetry with the personal. Dorn says as much in a telling remark from a late lecture, included in Richey’s book:
The habit of considering personal expression or “lyric” as something that strives for compassion with all of the artifices which make up a poem, is in many ways a loathsome instrumentation that leads you into dishonesties and lies and pretenses and so forth that are damaging. It is damaging to the ability to absorb reality. (117)
Dorn’s “difficult labor” was to turn the subject of poetry to political reality. In order to be effective, to be of some central use, the poem should “shed as much of the self as possible and let the actual state of affairs do more or the work” (“A Correction of the Public Mind,” Ed Dorn Live). In this way the poem might be judged not by its emotional synthesis but by the field of its public reference. The personal is to be resisted insofar as it collapses the world to a chain of analogous feelings indexed to self; to be described, as such, is to be closed and to be projective is to be external. We have only to think of that scene in Gunslinger when the stranger tries to get the drop on our eponymous hero:
the
greenhorn pulled
the
trigger and his store-bought iron
coughed
out some cheap powder,
and
then changed its mind,
muttering
about having
been
up too late last night
______________________
strum
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.
To be so contained is the sin of the obvious, the commodified, the categorized. Or it is to confuse a personal experience with a public identity. The stockholder’s reduced to sputtering, ‘I’ dissolves in a vat of acid, our band of travelers maunder into simulacra: “It is dangerous to be named / and makes you mortal. / If you have a name / you can be sold / you can be told / by that name leave, or come / you become in short / a reference” (Gunslinger). Commodity status is as possible in the poem as it is in the public arena. As Dorn put it succinctly in an interview in Contemporary Literature, “sensibility is no substitute for consciousness.”
One very real way in which Ed Dorn is concerned with the public American landscape is in his précis on the local. The visibility of our languages is particularly evident in the West, in a western landscape that has, in its youth and visibility, stratified our histories. They reside in Dorn’s work in a variety of personalities and subjects: labor history, the railroad, mining and logging history, fur trapping, land treaties, migration vectors, water wars, native American history, animal uses, highways, the implements of empire. This is a material West where “It’s minus 3 degrees / on the Count Fahrenheit scale. / It would be Boraxo country / except there ain’t no Boraxo. / And no mule teams. Here the mules drive” (“Rough Passage on I-80,” Abhorences). Again, counter-narratives to the mythic homilies of Manifest Destiny. By contrast, a pattern of naming and dating locations is pervasive in Dorn’s work and attests to the public citation of locality. “Trail Creek, Aug. 11, the Reason for Higher Powers,” “Hawthorne, End of March, 1962,” “Morning Letter, March 29, 1963,” “From Gloucester Out,” “Idaho Out,” “West of Moab,” “A Notation on the Evening of Novemeber 27, 1966,” “When Geronimo was in Washington for the Inauguration,” most of Captain Jack’s Chaps/Or Houston, MLA, all of Abhorences, Westward Haut, Rocky Mountain Spine and thematically, Languedoc Variourum. The public landscape is, for Dorn, a particular place conscripted by history, and it tells its dark story through a multidimensional layering of disciplines. But the narrative itself comes from the physical place, is happening as we speak, fertile and toxic. While the eye quickly roves over the data of the scene, it assays culture via a local accretion of facts. Where does this drainage go? Who wintered here? Who built that road, and what was bought and sold, labored over and believed? How are the abstract vectors of history also game trails and migration paths, the commerce road to Reno? We are caught in a weft of material history rich enough to be called earth writing. To use Carl O. Sauer, whom Ed epigraphs in one of my favorite poems in Geography, the remarkable “Idaho Out,” “The thing to be known is the natural landscape. It becomes known through the totality of its forms.”
That the West itself is the both a real and imagined subject is significant in how we might interpret the totality of its forms. Cue music. In one long stylized ride, Edward Merton Dorn rides out of Depression Illinois into the postmodern deserts of the Southwest, a Chemo Sabe to the end. His poems are rife with western figures, real and surreal, and they ape movies and absorb cultural idioms like a thirsty man adrift on a golden calf. Drawn from a variety of media, the effect is locationary:
If
it is where you are,
the
footstep in the flat above
in
a foreign land
or
any shimmer the city
sends
you
the
prompt sounds
of
a metropolitan nearness
he
will unroll the map of locations”
(Gunslinger, Bk I)
There is something fundamentally theatrical about Dorn’s voice, and the pastiche is Public Domain. And when he is not being satirical he is being anthropological, measuring distances, edges of contact, conflict and conflation. As he says in “Idaho Out,”
So
he goes anywhere apparently
anywhere
and space is muddied
with
his tracks
for
ore he is only after,
are
ore.
He
is the most regretful factor
In
a too miniscule cosmic
the
universe it turns out your neighbors are
Mobility is the key term of this western “play.” Our thirsts are evident in our landscapes, which turn out to be both universal and local. Regretably, the “cosmic universe” is just too small. And we, as Americans, emblems of millennial desire, are foreigners anyway: “An American foreigner is everybody / navajoes play iroquois / the American myth is only “mental” a foreigner is Anybody” (“A Notation on the Evening of November 27 1966”). In this manner real and simulated realties collapse into an historical present authorized by forces external to fact. In “Notation” it is a movie — The Magnificent Seven — that gives Horst Buchholst his American identity, which is as a German playing a Mexican. This makes present Manifest Destiny as a continuously moveable front, which is to say Nietzsche’s eternal return is a time-space continuum as Roman as it is American. Again and again Dorn plays fast and loose to get this mythic edifice moving. The local scene is quite often the trigger for the excursion: “The mission bells are ringing / in Kansas,” he tells us, which enables the observation that
Time
is more fundamental than space.
It
is, indeed, the most pervasive
of
all the categories
in
other words
there’s
plenty of it.
And
it stretches things themselves
until
they blend into one,
so
if youve seen one thing
youve
seen them all
(Gunslinger, Bk I)
Unfortunately what we see is “Low trailers hunkered in the Winde / the big snau-blower. Scrap rock, like deinosaur fins / strung along the saurian freeway.” (“Rough Passage on I-80,” Abhorences). I think of this too as external, the very edges of our towns and freeways evidencing the radical (dis)continuities of American history. If Dorn was on the scene, he was also on the road, “inside the outskirts,” (Gunslinger, Bk IIII) examining the conflict zone of the ecotone.
In a very real sense, Dorn was ‘Slinger, a drifter outside the mainstreams of power and communication, and so a reliable witness to the degradations of the “American century.” His consistent refusal of any abiding allegiances made for a difficult publication history, a choice that enabled his “poetics of aggression,” but one that, to this day, is responsible in part for his relative invisibility. This is a strange fact, in some regard, for Dorn’s sympathies lie with the dispossessed. Dorn not only roots for the underdog, he digs him up. In his hands the random players of history are dignified by naming. Take for instance the early poem “Mourning Letter, March 29, 1963”, quoted here in its entirety:
No
hesitation
Would
stay me
from
weeping this morning
for
the miners of Hazard Kentucky.
The
mine owners’
extortionary
skulls
whose
eyes are diamonds don’t float
down
the rivers, as they should,
of
the flood
The
miners, cold
starved,
driven from work, in
their
homes float through and float
on
the ribbed ships of their frail
bodies.
Oh,
go letter,
Keep
my own misery close to theirs
Associate
me with no other honor.
The public accounting of the miner’s plight stretches place, here to there. And it is an occasion marked by a general attention to the political scene. Characteristically, it is with labor that Dorn’s sympathies reside; his “misery” extends outward as an aligning intelligence or honor. And yet it is to the “frail” bodies of the miners, in contrast to the “extortionary skulls” of the owners, that his humanity attends. To be swept up in this missive is to see our own complicities in the political economy of late capitalism. And how they affect physical bodies in a particular space. What a strange and moving context for an elegy, and what a difficult service to poetry.
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That service can clearly be felt in the books here under review. Way More West is thoughtfully edited by Michael Rothenberg, and includes an excellent introduction by Dale Smith which sets in context Dorn’s “public mindedness.” A complete bibliography is also very helpful, as is the short biographical note. Overall, the book is stylishly put together, employing Michael Myer’s original cover for Dorn’s Recollections of Gran Apacheria, and generally evoking the Dorn aesthetic in font and layout. One only wishes a hardcover were available. Of course, as a new and selected, the question of what to include remains difficult. The inclusion of all of Recollections is a wonderful surprise (read: good Apache, more outsider alignment), as is the generous sampling of Westward Haut, Chemo Sabe, and the major book of the late period, Languedoc Variorum. One wishes for more of Gunslinger than the brief sampling of Book I and Book IIII, but that is a work entire, and so poses special problems. Less satisfying is the relatively sparse sampling of Hello, La Jolla, Yellow Lola and, to a lesser extent, Abhorences, books that mark the mature transition in Dorn’s work toward a statemental poetics. I think this is unfortunate for the fact that these are difficult books that span a particular period of time. Their “correction of the public mind” depends on a sustained view of an historical period that, in hindsight, was a warning preamble to our morally bankrupt present. To read the books in their entirety is to see how prescient Dorn really was. Still, it is deeply satisfying to have such a large chunk of Dorn’s work back in print. And Penguin’s commitment to reasonably priced editions means a new generation of Dorn readers will hopefully emerge. It will be to some university press that the Complete Dorn possibly issues forth.
Joe Richey’s Ed Dorn Live is a more difficult book to assess. How to capture “live” Dorn? These lectures, interviews and outtakes inevitably suffer from lack of context, though Richey’s explanatory remarks are quite helpful in setting the scene (and the players). Indeed, these “framing” comments do their best to put us in the audience, and they periodize Dorn’s career from the late 70s forward to an excellent degree. This is particularly helpful, as Tom Clark’s truncated biography of 2002, A World of Difference, leaves off Dorn’s career just as he begins to publish his first books. So too, a good deal of the focus in these lectures is on the “difficult” poems of the “abhorrent” period. These middle-late books have been misread, I think, for their seemingly caustic condemnation of all things American. But they are, crucially, the ferment for the late explorations of heresy. Having such gems as “Abhorences concerning the State of American Poetry,” “From Imperial Chicago,” “A Correction of the Public Mind” and “Poetry is a Difficult Labor” show Dorn working out a suddenly inevitable recursion of Manifest Destiny; read in this context, the persecution of the Cathars is in 12th c. France is postlude to the Reagan 80s. “Time is more fundamental than space.” There is also a nice balance of lectures — outward, performative — with interviews — more reflective, dialogic. And these stretch from the late 70s to the late 90s. As such, Ed Dorn Live fleshes out the trajectory of Dorn’s thinking, and offers a continuity to the earlier poetical statements of Dorn’s career, the Don Allen edited Views and Interviews. As Peter Michelson points out in his trenchant introduction, Dorn’s language, “whether in verse or conversation, had what the Greek’s called arête. It stopped you in your tracks. What seems exclusively extemporaneous turns out to be not merely witty but substantive and considered. Ed’s surfaces are quick and sharp, but they also cut deep.” Dorn’s gift was an “improvisational intellect” that manifested most actively in speech. To possess these transcribed documents is therefore priceless in their capacity to bring Dorn’s acerbic wit alive; we hear his voice, his stunningly quick shifts of address and subject. The give and take and posture of Dorn’s locutionary intellect comes alive in the range of these “outtakes” more fulsomely, I suspect, than any systematic criticism could offer.
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In the poem “From Gloucester Out” Ed Dorn declares “(there is never / no there is never a small complaint) / that all things shit poverty, / and Life, one wars on with / many embraces.” Brutal, economic, concerned with personal and political ethos, it is also an elegy for Charles Olson. The poem’s traffic is of the street: Sousa celebrations, Gloucester fishermen and their women, stickball games in NYC, cars headed to Jersey. It is a poem of leavings — Dorn’s imminent departure for England, but also his separation from Olson — and in that “currency of which is / parting and, and glancing” we find a ritual of truest ethics; how to honor and articulate the complex associations of person and place any of us is prone to. In the end, Ed Dorn speaks to the public landscape in the sense that it is available to everyone; life, with all its exigencies and ablations happens to everyone. It ain’t pretty, in fact, it’s often mundane. But we should care. “To play, as areal particulars can out of the span / of Man.” In the poetry and prose of Ed Dorn we find a welcome humanity. There is a refreshing sense of candor as we watch Ed read the news, eat Mexican peaches, note papal conspiracies, savage our politicians. The topicality of Ed’s poetry, particularly from Hello La Jolla on, means history is always specified. Or that the historical progression of western history always collides with the contemporary scene. “We are a gross and chronological people,” Olson tells us in his Bibliography for Ed. In the cultural exchange of Dorn’s “literate projector” people are reading their washing machines spread out all over the landscape. Poetry, as such, should incorporate these areal particulars. There is a good deal of Williams in this. And Rexroth. And Pound. And Gibbons and Samuel Johnson and Cioran, too. Dorn’s topicality is deeply synchronic, and his books chart an unusual course of sociopolitical conflation. Languedoc Variorum, with its triangulating of Crusades annals, academic and papal politics, and NAZarene economics, is a tour de force of this mode, experimental in the best sense, and historiographic in method. It’s also incredibly funny and a major book. And Abhorences, with its decade-plus build up of occasional verses, relentlessly documents what others would aestheticize, or worse, ignore. Book by book Dorn charted out life in a country and a region and a zipcode that was happening to everyone. I know of no other poet so occasional in this classical sense. He said and wrote some pretty amazing things, some pretty outrageous things. I’ve always admired the highwire act of this exposure, even in its cruelty. It is a positioning by voice public in its commitments, and so crucial as example. In America everyone is, hypothetically at least, free to read the landscape, go anywhere, say anything and Dorn exercises his First Amendment rights such that to be a world citizen, not to mention a good American, is to offer dissent. One of the few resources left to the writer is this freedom of expression and, especially in these late works, freedom functions as the instrumentality of the poem as social critique, a resistant figure luminous in its heresy. As he says in “The Protestant View”: “eternal dissent /and the ravages of / faction are preferable / to the voluntary / servitude of blind / obedience.” A Western American poetics is a decidedly a global poetics. We’re not done, there’s more to say, Way More West.
© 2009
Salt Publishing Limited 
