{"id":9840,"date":"2013-02-04T08:46:49","date_gmt":"2013-02-04T12:46:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=9840"},"modified":"2013-02-04T08:54:04","modified_gmt":"2013-02-04T12:54:04","slug":"peter-riley-on-ed-dorns-collected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/peter-riley-on-ed-dorns-collected\/","title":{"rendered":"Peter Riley on Ed Dorn’s Collected"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Fortnightly Review<\/strong> just published the first instalment of Peter Riley’<\/strong>s review of Edward Dorn<\/strong>‘s Collected Poems<\/em> (Carcanet Press 2012). It’s one of 3 or 4 “big bokes” on my desk that I wanted to talk about on this blog \u2014 happy that Peter Riley did it so splendidly. Below the opening 1\/4 of the first instalment of a review that promises to be a major assessment. Part II will be added in a week or two, according to Peter (should be two if “Fortnightly” does what it means):<\/p>\n

The relentless fury of Ed Dorn 1.<\/b><\/h3>\n
\n

A Fortnightly Review of<\/p>\n

Collected Poems\u00a0<\/a><\/i>
\nEdward Dorn.<\/b>
\nEdited with a preface by Jennifer Dunbar Dorn.<\/b><\/p>\n

Carcanet Press 2012 | 1023pp.<\/b>\u00a0|\u00a0$\u00a0<\/a>40.00\u00a0\u00a3\u00a0<\/a>25.00<\/p>\n

Two Interviews<\/i>\u00a0<\/a>
\nEdward Dorn.<\/b>
\nEdited by Gavin Selerie and Justin Katko.<\/p>\n

Shearsman Books 2012 | 102pp | \u00a39.95<\/p>\n

By Peter Riley.<\/b><\/p>\n

\"Edward\u00a0<\/a>A\u00a0COLLECTED POEMS<\/em>\u00a0of Edward Dorn, the American poet who died in 1999, is a necessary and overdue publication, and, whatever the circumstances, the fact that it was not published in U.S.A. suggests that there is something very wrong with the local culture over there, a fact of which Ed Dorn was very much aware.<\/b>\u00a0In fact most of the time it dominated his writing.<\/b><\/p>\n

It has often been said that a \u201cCollected Poems\u201d is a dreadful thing, and when it is 1000 pages long it is certainly a daunting thing, and there are all sorts of problems in how to use it.<\/b>\u00a0When Frank O\u2019Hara\u2019s\u00a0Collected Poems<\/i>\u00a0appeared in 1971 I got rid of all the original books, and now can\u2019t find a poem I want unless I can clearly remember the title or incipit.<\/b>\u00a0The first collected poems of Charles Olson (Archaeologist of Morning<\/i>, 1970) had only a non-alphabetical chronological list, no indexes, and above all no page numbers (pagination being evidently considered bourgeois) \u2013 I had to pencil my own in.<\/b><\/p>\n

But Dorn\u2019s\u00a0Collected Poems<\/i>\u00a0is very professionally edited and produced in these respects, indexed and sourced, everything dated, and the original volumes are kept distinct, so the reader\u2019s conceptual problems are reduced to the effects of sheer bulk.<\/b>\u00a0For me the principal of these is that a poet\u2019s entire work over a long period (in this case 55 years) becomes one solid lump (or \u201cSllab\u201d as Dorn might have called it).<\/b>\u00a0You don\u2019t of course have to read it from cover to cover \u2013 only the hapless reviewer has that obligation \u2013 but nevertheless it is formed into a unit and will be thought of as such whether in adulation or doubt.<\/b>\u00a0Everything however various becomes equally validated, and the extremes of the writing are inhibited from challenging each other.<\/b><\/p>\n

There are some poets (e.<\/b>g. W.S. Graham, Pierre Reverdy) whose work tends towards a sense of unity because it is the product more of a single-minded drive, as if attempting to write the same poem over and over again.<\/b>\u00a0Edward Dorn is not one of those. There is an immense variety of modes, scale, and pitch, from high elegiac seriousness to casual jokes, and from lyric to narrative and polemic, and there are latent contradictions.<\/b>\u00a0But all these strategies are conjoined in his insistent purpose as poetical radical, hater of establishment and commerce, towards which verbal projectiles of many kinds never stop being directed, bearer of a fury which never relents.<\/b><\/p>\n

IN MANY QUARTERS, Dorn has become a hero of the new, and the adulation is total, \u201ca master among masters\u201d as Iain Sinclair says in his blurb.<\/b>\u00a0Although younger than most of them, his reputation sits comfortably with the poets of the \u201cnew American poetry\u201d of the 1960s \u2013 Olson, Creeley, Duncan, O\u2019Hara, Ginsberg et al.<\/b>, inheritors of the techniques (modes of attack) and purposive scope of Ezra Pound, but never of his politics.<\/b>\u00a0These are the masters he sits among. And for all their differences they do stand together in opposition to the entire drift of American politics and society in the twentieth century,1<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0none more so than Dorn.<\/b>\u00a0Naturally in present conditions, many poets and readers experience a dependence on these pioneer radical poets which makes them sacrosanct, just as for many of us the light beaming towards us from Americans such as Dorn in the 1960s seemed the only channel to a future for poetry worth thinking about, however much we later learned what our native strengths were.<\/b><\/p>\n

I think that in Dorn\u2019s case this was justified, and much of the work he did up to and including his first move to England in 1965 could well bear the adulation.<\/b>He went into Black Mountain College at the age of 21 and was taught there by Olson, but the manner he developed in the next two decades was his own, obviously influenced at first by Olson as well as by Williams and Stevens, but not drawn into Olson\u2019s cultural agendas, nor apparently tempted to run for the academy.<\/b>\u00a0In fact for a decade he moved around in the western states, which is where he came from, getting various manual labour jobs.<\/b>\u00a0The poetry comes straight out of this.<\/p>\n

Now it is winter and the fallen snow
\nhas made its stand on the mountains, making dunes
\nof white on the hills, and the cold cover
\nhas got us out to look for fuel.<\/b><\/p>\n

\u201cLos Mineros\u201d p.85 (1960)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So evidently not in a great rush to be an avant-gardist, nor to rush the poem through its own excitement, but happy and able to take on a centuries-old calm elegance of landscape conjuration which you\u2019d think any well-read young poet could do at the drop of a hat, but strangely they don\u2019t.<\/b>\u00a0Nor is it without verbal subtleties (contrast of fallen \/ stand, and an ABAB quatrain end-rhyme in the vowels only).<\/b>\u00a0It is an introductory passage, and the poem goes on into a more prosaic realist account of the failed quest for coal, ending<\/p>\n

Madrid is a gaunt town now.<\/b>\u00a0Its houses stand unused
\nalong the entering road, and they are all green and white,
\nevery window has been abused with the rocks of departing children.<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

[continued here<\/a>]<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Fortnightly Review just published the first instalment of Peter Riley’s review of Edward Dorn‘s Collected Poems (Carcanet Press 2012). It’s one of 3 or 4 “big bokes” on my desk that I wanted...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,91],"tags":[1350,1230],"class_list":["post-9840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-poetry","tag-edward-dorn","tag-peter-riley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9840"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9848,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9840\/revisions\/9848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}