Bill Sherman On Ed Dorn’s Collected

Cover of my well-traveled copy of Dorn’s “Recollections”

Been on the road for readings for nearly a week, thus no posts. Old friend Bill Sherman had sent me a review of the two Dorn reviews plus his own takes on the Dorn, which he graciously gave me permission to repost here on Nomadics — which I’ll do, as I catch my breath & sort out next week (which will culminate in an Occitan poetry & music performance on Sunday 21st at 3 p.m. at the Bowery poetry Club. More on that later in the week.) Here’s Bill’s take from his Marama:OmooPart5 blog:

Wikipedia notes that Aklavik wasn’t incorporated into a hamlet until 1974.  Dorn’s lead-off poem in “The North Atlantic Turbine” – quite rightly called a “great poem” by Iain Sinclair in his review of the new Collected (LRB, 11 April, “Collected Poems” by Edward Dorn) was written prophetically prior to that, since Turbine was published in 1967 by Fulcrum Press. Sinclair also writes of a time and place, when Compendium Books was still there in the now swarmed over Camden Town.  Mike Hart, a mutual friend, is mentioned, and the shadow of Nick Kimberly.  And the world of poets publishing poets in Limited Editions. Peter Riley’s two-part article in his “Fortnightly Review” overview of Dorn’s work, correctly, in my opinion, notes that “Recollections of Gran Apacheria” is the apex of Dorn’s achievement, another truly great poem, although personally I also love some of the early lyrics like “The Air of June Sings” and “The Rick of Green Wood” and “Like A Message On Sunday” and “Vaquero”…. However, Riley goes on to denigrate Turbine (the title poem in particular) as if Dorn had no right to criticize things English, and he finds Dorn’s forays into world politics to be a wrong turning foreshadowing misanthropy.  But then Riley has never lived in “the belly of the beast”. In both articles, Iain’s much stronger in his praise of Dorn, it is argued that “Gunslinger” set out be be comedic.  I believe this is not so.  That tone became prevalent more in “The Winterbook”, and then after, when cocaine sets in.  True, the talking horse (no doubt inspired by the smoke and the old American TV series “Ed, The Talking Horse”), and the Canterbury-like group assembling prepare one for mock-epic, but the tone is post-Zizekian if you will; back then when first published, I found it totally de-familiarizing. It is not only serious, despite its mixed tone, it is the first poem I know to have made discourse shifts, an insistent epistomological and cosmological changing of gears, sometimes within the line itself and the contiguous words, an integral part of a “spiritual address”, which Dorn said “The North Atlantic Turbine” (a crucial book) had freed him up for.  It is in Turbine that his Gunslinger makes his first appearance: “This is for your sadly missing heart…. it is the girl you left in Juarez,  the blank political days press her now in the narrow alleys or in the confines of the river town her dress is torn by the misadventure of                her gothic search ———- my mare lathers with tedium her hooves are dry Look they are covered with the alkali of the enormous space between here and formerly. ———- And why do you have a female horse Gunslinger?  I asked.  Don’t move he replied the sun sits deliberately on the rim of the sierra” It reminds one of early Godard (Band of Outsiders), and it was, to use Ralph Maud’s term “archaic postmodern” referring to Olson.  It was a new mode of poetic composition in a way, but “The Winterbook” begins its descent into satire from a loftier plane into the comic mode Riley and Sinclair say was its original intent.  I think the aim was higher.  He wanted to be “a classical poet” he had said, not “neo-classic” – though Byron too loved the eighteenth century poets, and attacked Keats for his dissing of them (“they swayed back and forth upon a rocking horse / and called it Pegasus”).  As Tom Clark, in his biography of Dorn, “A World Of Difference”  perceptively writes of “The Cycle” interrupting what was becoming of the epic turned mock: “Dorn extends the range of his symbolism into an area very close to moral allegory.  The extension is consistent with his working principles in the poem, which differs from his previous efforts in the multivalent density of the referential field it activates….” (p. 113).

And here is the opening of Book 2:

          “This tapestry moves

as the morning lights up.

And they who are in it move

and love its moving

from sleep to Idea

born on the breathing

of a distant harmonium, To See

is their desire

as they wander estranged”

In the later work: the sardonic aphorisms of “Abhorrences” and the under-rated “Languedoc Variorum” and the final poems of “Chemo Sabe” “spectacular rewards” as Sinclair writes, “are offered…as the strategic shifts and heretical inspirations of the poet’s long career are revealed.  First, his courage. Then his persistence….Dorn refined his ability to articulate a precise report from wherever he stood.  He mastered a ‘terrific actualism’.” Yes, he has moved from some beautiful early poems (almost Frostian at times), to original authentic voice, innovative and enduring, a lasting achievement.

(Bill Sherman, April 6th/7th 2013)

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