In WAY MORE WEST, editor Michael Rothenberg has compiled a selection of poems that portray Edward Dorn as a poet more complex than the sum of his Black Mountain parts. While Black Mountain inspired and educated him, Dorn expanded his work into areas outside its scope. His incorporation of typography (Gunslinger), concrete poetry (“Mesozoic Landscape”), and multiple-voiced text (Languedoc Variorum) placed him in a camp of his own, in which his abstract devices expressed his social concerns in a tone that grew increasingly activist with age.  As his style evolved, it incorporated foreign languages, regional dialects, word play and a sense of place that synthesized into a voice more projecting than projectivist in its command of craft and presence. Dorn’s Protestantism, simply an accident of birth in 1930 America, emerged as a force in his later work to the extent that Dorn positioned himself as a social and literary heretic so that he could articulate dissenting views rooted as deep in history as Martin Luther’s break with the Catholic Church, and the Spanish and English colonization of the Americas. Dorn is one of the few American poets whose work draws cogent comparisons between historic and contemporary events.

 

            If Dorn’s Black Mountain influence was evident in his Creeleyesque
use of rhyme

 

 

                        why don’t you feed them? I ventured.

 

                        She said she wasn’t indentured. [5]

 

 

so were his senses of satiric humor and social justice, as well as his underlying pessimism (even in everyday events such as the one hinted at in “The Rick of Green Wood”:

 

                                                in the november

 

                        air, in the world, that was getting colder

                        as we stood there in the woodyard talking

                        pleasantly. . . ) [2]

 

 

as well as an incisive self-awareness, first described in The Newly Fallen as “the great geography of my lunacy.” [13] Dorn, the Black Mountain child, was father to the stand-alone man whose craft and social protest evolved from

 

                        the breadlines of the deprived are here

                        Los Alamos 1960, not Salinas

                        not Stockton. [16]

 

 

to the “Rough Passage on I-80” on which

 

 

                        the Prontosauris Oil Company

                        sits next to the Horny-Toed Boot Factory [215]

 

 

while its punning neologisms keep militant pace with the encroachment of international corporations on America’s heartland.

            But Dorn’s sense of place wasn’t always physical, as Gunslinger indicates. The Slinger’s trip to Las Vegas runs

 

 

                                                            Across

                        two states

                        of mind, saith the Horse. [121]

 

 

Geographic place, so central to Dorn’s work, expands In this innovative longpoem, which absorbs and projects the free-wheeling spirit of the sixties into literary form. Place, other than the generalized location of the West, loses its literalness as Dorn transposes the Gunslinger myth of pulp novels, radio, movies and early televison into an elevated reality, part mocking and part metaphysical. The poem’s characters include a semidios Gunslinger who lives outside the boundaries of time, a talking horse named after two postmodern philosophers, and a character named “I” whose style and destiny Dorn uses to overturn the conventions of viewpoint from the opening lines

 

                        I met in Mesilla

                        The Cautious Gunslinger [91]

 

 

in which “I” can either be the first-person narrator or the subject of a third-person  narration. Undermining the conventions of narrative enables Dorn to extend reality beyond the period’s post-naturalistic realism into Gunslinger’s multi-leveled reality, which  surfaced concurrently with The Wild, Wild West televison show and anticipated such satires of the Western genre as Ishmael Reed’s Yellowback Radio Broke-Down.

            In Book I, the bold, enlarged font of the guitar “strum” establishes a musical and visual presence that helps lift the work off the page. Visually, the “strum” marks dramatic pauses in a narrative that could as easily fit a television screen as a pulp novel.

            In subsequent works, Dorn’s return to a less rarefied atmosphere allowed him to explore the theme of love that threaded through his earlier works. Twenty-Four Love Songs blends intimacy and metaphysics in ways that render them part of the same continuum:

 

                        My speech is tinged

my tongue has taken

a foreigner into it

Can you understand

my uncertainties grow

and underbrush and thicket

of furious sensibility

between us and wholly

unlike the marvelously burning

bush which lies at the entrance

to your gated thighs

 

My dear love, when I unsheathe

a word of the wrong temper

it is to test that steel

across the plain between us [126]

 

 

            If Gunslinger  remains Dorn’s magnum opus, Twenty-four Love Songs reveals his more intimate side while its topical poems continue the thread of his social commentary. But the selections from Abhorrences: a Chronicle of the Eighties reveal the book as a pivotal work in Dorn’s career.  In Abhorrences, Dorn’s underlying Protestantism finds full expression.

 

 

                        The Protestant View:

 

                        that eternal dissent

                        and the ravages of

                        faction are preferable

                        to the voluntary

                        servitude of blind

                        obedience.

 

 

In this poem, Dorn virtually lays out his future role as a poet: a dissenter and heretic in the tradition of Martin Luther separating from the Catholic Church. Dorn assumes the heretic mantle for much of his later work, including Westward Haut and Languedoc Variorum, two works that would have rivaled and possibly surpassed Gunslinger in their scope, ambition and achievement, had he lived to complete them.

            “Rough Stretch on I-80” from Abhorrences employs a heightened sense of place that differs from the realism of “Idaho Out” and the near-psychedelic sense of location of Gunslinger. Its satiric tone and acidic neologisms caricature the world of commercialism that has consumed locations such as I-80, once a somewhat pristine route through America’s heartland. But the running documentary of rampantly spreading commercialism in “Rough Passage on I-80” concludes with

           

Martyrs are a dime a dozen around here.

The best ones have been dead a long time. [217]

 

 

which suggests that the voice filling the poem with images of protest knowingly risks becoming a martyr for protesting the “religion of capitalism” and the other orthodoxies contributing to the creation and development of the rough passage. Dorn implies that he intends to be one of “the best ones” and that he knows the consequences he will endure because of the increasing element of protest in his work.

            Westward Haut continues and builds on the satiric elements of “Rough Stretch on I-80”. Odin, a god cast in canine form (god=dog), while flying from Peru to Cheyenne, draws parallels between the brutal Spanish and British colonization of the Americas in the sixteenth century and the relation between 1990s terrorism and business practices in “an assembly of images awash in avarice.” Odin, “a dog of Judgment,” explains the ways of god to dog in relation to the “homocorps,” a word that employs the implied pejorative overtones of “homosexual” to further diminish the stature of human beings who, in canine discourse, could appropriately be called “homocorps” as in “homo” from homo sapiens” and “corps” as a mass population, the group primarily affected by the god/dog’s world view of business. The view seems uncannily prescient:

 

                        Business is a form of terror— you leave the victim,

                        the customer, even the mere low-end shopper wasted,

                        drained of cash and will and shackled to the future—

                        wage slaves of cash and will shackled to the future

                        wage-slaves of les Rentiers.

                                    The difference is you don’t kill’em,

                        you just pillage the village—

                        it’s a license operation. [241]

 

 

            If Westward Haut consolidates Dorn’s singular blend of literary techniques and heightens his sense of place, Languedoc Variorum: a Defense of Heresy and Heretics features Dorn assuming the heretic stance as he rages against the Crusades,  particularly the Albigensian Crusade against the heretical Cathars of Languedoc, and draws analogies to the political activities of the 1990s, using a multi-voiced approach that finds ready counterparts in televison news broadcasting and contrapuntal music. Dorn divides the page into three sections. The poem per se appears in the top third of the page. In a news broadcast, it would appear as the anchor speaking. In a musical performance, it would appear as the central melodic line. What Dorn calls “SUBTEXTS & NAZDAKS” occupy the center and bottom thirds of the page. The subtexts underscore the text with present-day commentaries. “Jerusalem,” for example, links the brutality the Christians inflicted on Moslems and Jews in the First Crusade to contemporary acts of murder and genocide:

 

 

           

                        The savagery was Ruandan and Ugandan. [267]

 

 

            The subtexts function as sidebar commentaries or counter-melodic lines, offering religious and historical  commentary that supports the heretic stance against the Crusades and contemporary war

 

                        ¶ Looking back over the tyranny of Rome and Constantinople,

                        heresy is the only honorable mode and response. [266]

 

 

 and mocking the media’s priorities, such as broadcasting Ted Kennedy mixing dust from his brothers’ graves with the soil of the late Prime Minister Rabin’s grave while a disaster in the Philippines goes virtually ignored. The nazdaks function like a running subtitle, updating the news moment by moment, or serving as a third contrapuntal line:

 

            gender fascism up 90%, investment in pogrom for euroamerican

            males– academic marxists steady entrenched pricing– repression

            of the market in standard works–nazdaq plunges, literature

            forced into bankruptcy–burghers of theory replace samurais

            of literature– .   [270]

           

           

            Dorn blurs the line between poem and commentary by running his subtexts and nazdaks through five poems, establishing a thread of continuity through the acts of the heretics portrayed, not only stressing the need to criticize the existing powers but also pointing toward a redefinition of what constitutes a poem.

            The heretical statements that follow the multi-leveled “Languedoc Variorum” demonstrate the continued need for heretics because, as Dorn points out,

 

                        . . . the Lutheran Prize for Literature announced in Stockholm

                        predicably went to an Irishman of the Roman faith...

 

 

which suggests that Luther’s break with the Catholic Church ultimately followed the path of many political rebellions, in which the rebel ultimately re-assimilates with the institution rebelled against. If this is the case, then, in Dorn’s view, the heretics are those who, at great risk to themselves, kept the world “honest.”

            Honesty is the key to Chemo Sabe, Dorn’s last published work, in which he knowingly lays down his last pieces of wisdom. The title resonates with meanings, starting with Kemosabe from the Lone Ranger, at once suggesting a kind of gallows humor and the intimacy, however grim, that a Cancer patient develops with the drug of survival during chemotherapy. If interpreted as  “Chemo Knows,” the title suggests the poems contain the terminal awareness that one develops from staring death in the eye on a daily basis, as Dorn implies during “Infusion Day”:

 

                        the measure of the mystery of what

                        remains the life and times

                        of the victim, condemned but not delivered,

                        just the keeper of the count, slowly

                        joining the counter. [306]

 

 

“White Rabbit” gives a graphic account of getting blood drawn. In describing his reactions, he offers, after a fashion, a summary of his life:

 

                        as usual, my tongue has been

                        my genius and my downfall. [313]

 

 

            Although some of the poems in Chemo Sabe continue to rage against social injustice, Dorn’s final poem of his lifetime shows the humility of his final awareness:

 

                        The Garden of the White Rose                

 

                        Lord, your mercy is stretched so thin

                        to accommodate the need

                        of the trembling earth—

                        How can I solicit even

                        a particle of it

                        for the relief of my singularity

                        the single White Rose

                        across the garden will

                        return next year

                        identical to your faith —

                        the White Rose, whose

                        house is light against the

                        threatening darkness. [317]

 

 

            In the moments before dying, Dorn, ever the heretic railing against the orthodoxy of his time, returned to the humility at the core of his Protestant roots. A poet whose authorial voice was so strong he could virtually “hold court” over his audience from the printed page, Dorn softened his tone to private prayer while gaining perspective on his humble place in the universe.

            Dorn’s work represents his own personal and poetic evolution, and his statements, both strident and loving, evolved in the manner of his work, developing in the Black Mountain environment but evolving into modes of address that rendered him an American Original. While providing  a valuable introduction to his work, WAY MORE WEST attests to Dorn’s stature as one of the most powerful and unique voices in American poetry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WAY MORE WEST: New and Selected Poems by Edward Dorn. Edited by Michael Rothenberg. Penguin Books, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-14-303689-6. $20.00. Paper,

 

 

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