Late Dorn.

Edward Dorn is the dead poet I miss most these days, when the poetry passing for political is about as forceful as a garden hose sans nozzle. In the last decades of his life, Dorn was mostly writing a topical poetry, and that is exactly what we need right now--a topical poetry unafraid of statement but refusing the easy solidarities of agitprop. Dorn's is a topical poetry grounded in a reading of history, a poetry in which history is made topical, as relevant to the present as a slash-and-burn cartoon. That kind of thing hasn't been at all fashionable of late--Vietnam is about as far back as most political poetry has recently been able to think. This is as true of the counter-discourses of post-constructivist poetry as it is of the poetry of witness employing normative representational modes. The politics of poetic form has mattered a great deal to Language Poets and other post-constructivists, but this is not what politics means in Dorn's late work, which can unabashedly make use of the simplest of poetic forms or explore more complex structures. Genre and form can seem mere conveniences for him, their premises easily abandoned, as if in these late poems Dorn is forever impatient to get to the point. This is not always for the better. In a poem like "El Peru / Cheyenne Milkplane" (published in Sagetrieb and High West Rendezvous) satire and farce nearly collapse beneath the weight of critique.

Less the pedant than his mentors Olson and Pound, Dorn rarely bothered with citation and never forwarded a bibliography, but he read widely and voraciously. He thought of himself, he said in one interview, as a "theorist." But he is like no theorist ever published in Critical Inquiry. Read Dorn's little essay "Adios Jefferson, Hasta La Vista Madison, Chinga Su Madre Adams: the scapegoating of the Angloamerican literary inheritance by the descendants of the Armada" in Way West and you get a taste of some of what occupied him in later years. That and the poems about heresy and heretics are one place to start. The essay seems to have been occasioned by widely publicized complaints about Columbus Day in the early 1990s. Like the poem "Ah Yes, Columbus Day, No Mail"--which begins

 A lot of Native Americans
 Blame Columbus--that's like berating
 Napalm while ignoring Dow Chemical
 (Sagetrieb, 52)

--part of its point is to show how trivial the protests about the holiday are, and how silly the scapegoating of Columbus is in light of the clashing of empires, peoples, and ideologies that made the New World. Dorn thought that "multiculturalism" in most of its discursive forms in "ethnic crazy" America ("Tribe," Chemo Sabe, np) is "the cult par excellence of late imperialism" (High West, 54), dogma easily made to serve the agendas of corporate internationalism. Dorn's late work is significantly informed by reading in the economic, religious, and legal history of Europe going back as far as the First Crusade, which is not only an historical event for him but a living, still relevant sign of the violence of religious orthodoxy and all that it represents as the legacy of Europe in the world: hierarchy, the management of difference and dissent, the power of corporate elites not so hidden beneath humble creeds. How many other poets are prepared to defend the legacies of the Common Law of "the arrogant islanders" (Way West, 269) as compared to the legal and cultural outflow of the Code Napoleon? Or, rather, how many know enough legal history even to argue with Dorn?

Dorn's chief enemies are authority, orthodoxy, and the production of conformity; the exploitation of the third and fourth worlds by the United States and Europe; the stupidity that tolerates all of this and tolerance itself as a mantra of political liberalism. Every-where Dorn looks and no matter how far back he sees barbarism (though he had what was for him a sentimental weakness for the eighteenth-century for its having given birth to the United States). Dorn's cultural analysis from Hello, La Jolla forward is squeezed out in epigrams or in epigrammatic passages, as in these lines from the late poem "Tribe":

 Governments always conspire against
 The population and often
 This is not even malice;
 Just nothing better to do.
 (Chemo Sabe, np)

This writing can seem to affirm little apart from what Dorn called the "Protestant principle," which he understood to mean criticism of authority with economy of expression. One definition is ventured in Abhorrences:

 THE PROTESTANT VIEW

 that eternal dissent
 and the ravages of
 faction are preferable
 to the voluntary
 servitude of blind
 obedience. (19)

The character named "I" in Dorn's Gunslinger says that "Entrapment is this society's / Sole activity" and adds that "Only laughter" is "able to blow it to rags" (155). Late work by Dorn is beyond even this hopefulness and not so funny. The lines above from "Tribe" are typical in their scorn and their knowingness. Laughter in late Dorn is more exploded than explosive, edged out by anger and pain, urgent, spinning at times into dogmatism, but dogmatism too eccentric to be easily reduced to system.

But if you look closely you will see that there is also much that Dorn affirms in these late poems, especially but not exclusively in the posthumously published pamphlet Chemo Sabe: the competence that allows a nurse to find the vein ("White Rabbit"), the peoples and nations carpet-bombed by imperialism ("Tribe" and many other poems), native Americans, whacked or whacked-out outsiders too stubborn or too far gone to surrender to the insidious and overt machinations of government and ideology. His interest in Bogomils and Cathars (see "Bogumil" and "Albi, A Day Trip" in High West Rendezvous) suggests a political gnosticism that posits freedom in the form of the negative image of what is. Some say there is little point in sorting out what is political from what is theological in heretical discourses, and since Dorn had little or nothing to say about his own religious beliefs this is especially true in his case. But there is a last poem in Chemo Sabe, "The Garden of the White Rose," that might be read for its theological content, and it shows us a poet who wants to affirm the goodness of the world not over and against but within its continuum, its continuing.

I wonder what Dorn would have said about Sam Hamill's website poetsagainstthewar.org, which seems to have conclusively demonstrated against the literary critical dogma of recent years that poets these days are all in the same camp, which is to say the scout camp. They're waving signs or they're waving signs that critique the sign: this corporate-created junta that calls itself a government is really bad! Since in "Tribe" Dorn writes that "I'm with the Kurds and the Serbs and the Iraqis / And every defiant nation this jerk / Ethnic crazy country bombs," I am certain that he would have despised the current administration with more than his usual ferocity and as the fulfillment of some of his worst fears about the robber barons of corporate-imperialist America and their background chorus of fundamentalists chomping on the language and the culture. If it was almost funny in 1999 to think a government might "conspire against the population" out of boredom rather than malice, I am not sure that it is quite so funny now. Looking back at his late work it's not hard to see how Dorn's pinball wit might have tilted toward despair. It's only difficult to imagine how we can bring wit back again.

Dorn's critique was total, running "culture" into economics and religion into "culture." That is, "culture" and religion are much the same thing for Dorn, or the latter a modern version of the former; he notes that both "the masses" and the Roman Catholic "Mass" require and thrive upon orthodoxy. Dorn seems more or less to have believed--though like much else that he wrote surely part of the point was to provoke--that the Inquisition was the founding event of the modern nation state. He believed that

 The struggle between the three dominant one-god systems has a great
 deal to do with class and oeconomic oppression and very little or
 nothing to do with religion or theology. And in fact the hierarchs
 of each system conspire at the top. They show up at one another's
 funerals and they all participate equally in the satellite
 auctioning of the public's 'private' property. (High West, 40)

I can't read the pages crossed out in the congressional report on 9/11 that apparently describe possible links between officials of the Saudi government and terrorist organizations, but I know that this statement by Dorn sounds uncomfortably close to conspiracy theory. Other statements in "Languedoc Variorum" are no less sweeping in their conclusions:

 The violence of a violent Church, now transmitted through a media
 in thrall to Rome, shifts attention away from Big Resentment of the
 Organizatzy and the Biznessmen (the priests of Corporation World).
 The 'mafia' is simply the wild (as in sync) subdivision of the
 corporate state. All of it is 'wiseguy fascism' and one of the
 engines of the rise in the popularity of enforcement--the Church,
 pulp fiction, fundamentalism, Bill as a lapsed Baptist in a skull
 cap, you name it. (High West, 41)

Whatever one makes of Dorn's observations and claims, more or less insightful or outrageous as they will seem to the polite, educated readers of poetry who are perusing this essay, the speed and synthesis of his mode can help the Left now. We are used to this kind of speech from the Right, but the Left has been hiding out in the university for so long holding onto the conventions of academic discourse that it can no longer distinguish between rigor and decorum. There is need for the former but no time for the latter--not now, not in poetry, which might once again try to be the last honest scoundrel among the refuse of political discourse.

I remembered statements like these by Dorn when I saw New Jersey's former poet laureate Amiri Baraka on Bill O'Reilly's Fox News show and saw that he understood the show's mechanism well enough to be effective in attacking it.

 O'REILLY: You know, I'm cloudy here because you're throwing a lot
 at me. You teaching schoolchildren ...
 BARAKA: I taught school for twenty years
 O'REILLY: ... is akin to me having Mussolini come in and teach
 children.
 BARAKA: Well, your being on television is akin to having Goebbels
 on television.
 O'REILLY: All right. Well, I guess we ...
 BARAKA: Joseph Goebbels. It's the same thing.

When I watched this exchange, I wasn't thinking that it was a little inexact or unfair to compare O'Reilly to the famous Nazi; I was cheering Baraka for managing to fluster the boorish O'Reilly enough to shut him up for a second. I leave aside the poem Baraka was on TV to talk about, its opinions much closer to crank conspiracy theory than anything Dorn says in the passages above. There is a difference between a sweeping claim and a paranoid one, just as--I will flourish my academic credentials--there is a time and a place for more careful analysis and argument.

Most of Dorn's opinions as cited above are expressed in that Schifanoia fresco of a poetic sequence called "Languedoc Variorum" from the mid-1990s, which gives us the history of crusades and heresy as the top third of the page while offering the kind of discursive commentary I have quoted above as its middle, leaving the bottom for Dorn's "Nazdak Footnotes," real-time banner headlines registering cultural values in the university and the larger society it serves in the compressed, capitalized language of the stock market. Those footnotes are the distilled essence of Dorn's late work, a rolling stock-taking, quick appraisals positively thick with attitude:

 TELEFONUS INTERRUPTUS--BREAKFASTUS INTERRUPTUS--MENUMENISCUS
 LUNCHCHECK--UPCHUCK--DUMP IT--EERIE THEORY UP AN EIGHTH--DREARY
 THEORY UP A QUARTER--LEERY THEORY UP A HALF--QUEERI UP A QUARTER--
 DUMP IT QUICK--SPEED OF THOUGHT DOWN A FIFTH (High West, 37)

Anselm Hollo has remarked on the special pleasure Dorn took in attacking liberal beliefs and causes, liberals making up the majority of his readers and the majority of readers of poetry these days, those readers including of course many who work in or around universities. Dorn says someplace that he thinks he's met most of his readers (the late poems are so invisible and difficult to obtain that one wonders if there are readers now), and that might be remembered when pondering this tendency in his work. Why tell your friends what they already know? Aim instead for their blind or soft spots; make them intellectually tougher. We might call it the Johnny Cash principle (and yes Dorn's gender politics might also match the late singer's). It's 97% uncut negativity, and at its worst 100% theatrical negativity. Hesiod's muses say that it's up to the reader to sort the truth from the lies (fiction) in poetry, and one can wonder how often Dorn looked to upset a consensus not because it was harmful or lazy but because it was consensus.

"Languedoc Variorum" uses one epigraph taken from Thomas Hobbes about the "years before the civil wars did rage" when England was "boiling hot with questions concerning the rights of dominion and the obedience due from subjects" (High West, 36), and Dorn's late work can seem like the war of the poet against all. But Dorn's relentlessness scores many points. With his eye on the Balkans he insists that we stop acting like the Serbs are the only criminals in that conflict. While some gave Clinton a pass during Monicagate for fear of the "short haired puritans," Dorn ridiculed the entire spectacle with lewd puns--"Forget Acquittal/or quitting of any kind--'I entered,/but I never came'"--while remembering to look for Clinton's "Havana Viejo" and hand on "the Iraqi button" ("Chemo du Jour: The Impeachment on Decadron," Chemo Sabe). "I suppose I made a smart remark / as usual, my tongue has been / my genius and my downfall" he writes in another poem in Chemo Sabe, and in still another impishly asks why Bob Geldof (impresario of big media benefit rock concerts) has shown no concern for the poor in North Korea, sardonically insisting that "Poetry is waiting for an answer" ("The Dull Relief of General Pain--Oxycontin, Roxicodone and Codeine in General"). Insistent and funny is hard to manage; Dorn echoes a television commercial while associating poetry with truth and judgment. Or there's the remark he made in a preface written at the height of the poetry community's infatuation with email and related technologies: "Email is MEmail" (High West, 5). Imagine what he would have made of the more recent blog phenomenon, where a young and well-connected critic lists the books of recent poetry he reads, often one a day, thereby revealing to the world that he doesn't read anything more than a year old, and where a verbose older poet whose poetry I sometimes admire and whose opinions I occasionally share is perfecting literary criticism as self-congratulatory autoblography.

Together with Dorn's late fragments--the unfinished "Languedoc Variorum" and "Westward Haut" for instance--there are discrete, fully realized poems, and not all of them in Chemo Sabe, which principally features poems written while Dorn underwent treatment for pancreatic cancer. There are poems which in a form of shorthand I'll call "traditional." "Languedoc Variorum" is visually and otherwise "experimental" (another shorthand) in its use of the page and otherwise. But there are cowboy songs too with the pop rhyming that Dorn developed in the 1960s out of the folksy border ballads he seems to have begun with. "Sketches from Edgewater," which is in Chemo Sabe but predates most of its poems (it also appear in High West Rendezvous and the volume of Sagetrieb featuring Dorn's work), begins with a description of a suburban Denver supermarket and its "stacks and stacks of snacks," its muzak washing shoppers with Bob Marley tunes above the vegetable misters. The first couplets set up a parallel syntax with the clean edges we expect in a Dorn poem, the period at the end of line unnecessary:

 Thin sheet-ice on Sloan's lake
 "dark white" shine, late February sun

 Big red balloon tethered over Cub Food
 winterpale shoppers, struggling with the load

Description sets the season and location in a cluster of noun phrases. Then a turn at the end of the second couplet and over into a third couplet that syncopates the syntactic pattern now established with a simile refusing to pity or admire the "struggling" of these shoppers:

 like overweight ants dragging their take
 away from an abandoned sandwich

No problem here in locating authorial perspective, not to mention "subjectivity"! But if we're always afraid to be as arrogantly honest as Ed Dorn we might as well be ants.

We move down the page with the couplets, following the eye of the poet from the parking lot into the supermarket, description as faux-bewilderment sampling the spoils on view, a phrase like "incredibly naive shoppers" both effusive and surprisingly thoughtful: these shoppers are not greedy or innocent victims or dupes, not exactly. Even "naive" is insufficient without its modifier, which gives us the poet as if in the present time of recognizing something about them. "Incredible" we say as an exclamation, and some of that usage is echoed here. It's as if Dorn can't quite believe these shoppers are real until he sees them. Since the violence attending or enabling corporate internationalism is never long out of mind for Dorn, the poem moves out of observation and reflection to imagine the power in this supermarket cut after bombing like the bombing of Iraq in the first Gulf War:

 Twenty-five yard long strips of freezers full of Stouffers
 which should smell like cat-puke if the power gets cut

 As in the Gulf War, when Iraqis had to throw
 thawed food to the dogs who soon got fat and ran in packs

 like the customers, maybe, in Edgewater
 if it ever got bombed and the power got cut
 (High West, 28)

These "Idle comparisons at the checkout" work as a transition between description of the supermarket and what emerges as the crucial narrative event in the poem, the arrival of an old man at the checkout. The old man is chanting "Alzheimer's Alzheimer's, I think I got it!" (29), echoing a famous television commercial I almost remember. A gentle, extended comic close-up gives us the old man and the poet and clerk's delight at his behavior as he claims that the model on a magazine cover is his wife. This old man is either a little "off" or he is joking. He is a pure product of the banality that is total in the supermarket or he floats beyond it in a glinting rapture of joie de vivre. As the poem sees its speaker out to the parking lot it concludes with a few comments on the sugar-soaked consumer culture of Denver there in the distance beyond Edgewater. It is thoroughly worked, quite conventional (another shorthand) in its trajectories and closure, an expertly made poem of the kind that more often results in lilting domestic epiphany than critique of culture. Arguably the poem struggles to affirm the happy idiot or wise fool and all of the absurdity and silliness that might allow poet and reader to imagine an existence somehow apart from life in Denver and America. But the ending shows escape to be temporary.

Then there is "The Garden of the White Rose" in Chemo Sabe, the poem that was (perhaps) intended as a final poem. It will probably have Dorn's readers wondering how to read its pivot line for some time:

 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.

The "pivot" line is "for the relief of my singularity," which ends one sentence (the poem's second if we count the opening phrase as a complete sentence) while beginning another--a statement only obliquely responding to the question posed. Critics will also be wondering about the "White Rose" and what it means in this poem, this prayer. This is not, I think, Dante's white rose in paradise, intricate in its folds and big as a Super Bowl stadium. A filmmaker would have to shoot this rose as lonely and a little common, film it at some distance there in the garden rather than zooming in to explore the complexity and sublimity of its petal-system. There is a tradition of dissent that takes its symbol of the White Rose from the name of a group of anti-Hitler pamphleteers in Munich in the early 1940s, but I don't want to tie the White Rose to a specific historical referent any more than I want to suggest that the rose is a symbol belonging to religious or esoteric tradition. For the time being anyway, reading might remain open. The poem clearly expresses hope for enlightenment, and hope for the hope that is embodied in the Lord, who is in turn identified with the return of the rose in the garden. The Lord's Prayer is a prayer for the kingdom, for the world: "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." "Your faith" in "The Garden of the White Rose" refers not to the poet's but rather to the Lord's faith, which the poet can only hope to acknowledge. Dorn does not ask the Lord for mercy but instead how he can presume to solicit mercy, a circumlocution that humility requires. Mercy is "spread thin" but evident in the return of the rose in the garden. The Lord's faith is the rose; faith must be faith in the world. Dorn had little use for the complacency and terminological confusion that claims to know transcendent divinity--"Jehovah is The Lord's hand puppet" he writes at the end of "On The Question of God's Tolerance," a poem that asserts that that "The Lord is Everywhere," present in the drive-by shooting as also in "the heretic's explosion" (Sagetrieb, 48).

There are poems in late Dorn that it makes every bit of sense to call terrible. I wouldn't have it otherwise because I think that they show us that for Dorn poetry wasn't the most important thing. He wanted to say something; he could be in a hurry. That's the topical thrust we need now. Art can wait, which is not to say we don't need it or that it's over or we need agitprop or some of the rant that we know all of our friends will agree with. Tom Raworth sent his topical poem "Listen Up!"--a satire of the xenophobic anti-United Nations and anti-French rhetoric that was even louder than usual during the run-up to invasion--to a website featuring poets for the war, hoping to sneak it through and leach a little acid subliminally, or perhaps merely to determine how dumb these folks really are (they kept the gate up).

I'd like to think that site-specific, tactical thinking about publishing is the reason that "Dismissal," Dorn's poem about Ezra Pound, was sent to Sagetrieb. Sagetrieb is published by the National Poetry Foundation, which has been for many years an important center of Pound studies. Dorn's interest in Pound's work dates back to his beginnings as a writer, and he would have known about (though I don't know how closely he followed) the vicissitudes of opinion and value in Pound studies, as these also would have been evident in and more or less reflected by Sagetrieb. "Dismissal" has none of the polish of "Sketches from Edgewater." It presents a few opinions about Pound and modernism and Pound's trial and confinement with little or no attention to artifice, to rhythm or line or anything else that might deflect statement. It complains about the scapegoating of Pound and belittles academic critics who would like to imagine they are finished with "modernism" (on the evidence of "Languedoc Variorum" we are not "finished" with the First Crusade). It seems to start and then to start again with lines folded into the middle of the poem about "the anti-trial." I hope the executors will allow me to quote it in its entirety:

 The Greatest Poet of this expendable century
 was also its greatest, most public Heretic.
 He made anti-Semitism a heresy,
 although he wasn't the greatest anti-Semite of his time.
 Or even close.

 A Modern gang of cutthroats
 in cartoon berets, with sumo champions
 like Gertrude Stein and that
 giant abbreviator from Oak Park
 who wrote, stuttering
 pseudo-wise hymns to war, and
 its effects on the adventurous sector
 of the lower/upper middle class.

 the anti-trial

 The hearing of arraignment
 has been described elsewhere.

 He was detained not because
 he was the Greatest Poet,
 they couldn't have known that anyway
 nor would they have given a hoot
 far from it.

 There was no trial because everybody
 knew it would be a witch trial--
 an actual, sticks-around-a-post burning.
 It was too historic, too soon after
 great upheaval between the Europeans
 and the cast-offs of the Europeans. Besides,
 insanity is the ultimate dismissal

 It was too familiar, a fitting end
 to the old, uniformed fascism of the two wars
 gliding in to the transpace of the new
 hierarchical oriental fascism of beehive
 conformity, industry devoted only to survival
 and ruinous increase. Singularity,
 the swamping of the gene swamp.

 All of it fondly called
 the Modern Movement by those
 who fervently hope it is over
 and that their banal attempt
 to get rid of a whole period
 by driving a stake through it
 will finally give them an end
 to their belaboring the scapegoat
 (Sagetrieb, 45-6)

The poem seems to identify two "dismissals": the decision not to try Pound for treason and the writing off of Pound as a poet by those who righteously dismiss his work. The poem makes little sense outside of the context of the university culture Dorn inhabited in his later years. It addresses a specific audience--scholars of modern poetry--insofar as it assumes that its reader knows most of this story and requires only a new interpretation of it. The only people for whom Pound made anti-Semitism a "heresy" in the sense that I think Dorn means are scholars of literature, though it is true that Pound has become a poster child for a buffoonish far right that has never read him, a martyr rather than a heretic. But if anti-Semitism is now altogether unacceptable in the contemporary forms of the "suburban" society Pound spoke of when he repudiated his prejudice late in life, that isn't owing to Pound. The scapegoating of Pound by scholars and poets allows them to flatter themselves that poetry matters, when one of the things that Pound's life should show us, Dorn insists, is that it doesn't, not for most people anyway and not for the powers-that-be. That awareness that poetry had been altogether marginalized or put aside in the cubby-holes of the aesthetic, useless beside more active and effective modes of discourse, drove much of Pound's literary production, helped push him not only past symbolisme but also eventually into extremist and dangerous rhetoric. Dorn knew the temptation only too well. The most difficult lines in Dorn's poem are the final ones in the penultimate stanza, which seem to be about the mixing and blending of populations in modernity (remember the opening of The Waste Land), which the poem either reads as a threat to "singularity" or--more likely--as a concern that occupied more than one racist modernist. Here the poem is cryptic, nearly incoherent.

By the time Dorn wrote this poem he had earned something of a reputation for outrageous gestures and statements, most notoriously by handing out (or helping Tom Clark hand out) "Lemon/AIDS" awards in Rolling Stock, awards that were a kind of over-the-top thumbs-down sign handed out for behavior Dorn and his cronies in the poetry business didn't want to tolerate. The choice of name for these awards was sophomoric, stupid, and cruel, to say the least. A few writers who had been close to one poet who'd been given an "award" and later died of complications of AIDS were understandably outraged and called Dorn vicious and "homophobic," campaigning against him at poetry events. This was and is Dorn's own Pound-like scandal, and its wounds will be some time in healing. I can't say whether Dorn thought that a kind of political correctness had "dismissed" him or his later work, but the effort to acknowledge and to push against poetic inconsequence surely explains a lot of his late poetry. His poem "Tribe" explains "how justified I feel" to have come from a people of "struggling labor/Depression South Eastern Illinois ... / A far Midwest recrudescence of Appalachia." These ancestors included "My grandfather French Quebecois / ... / Indian fifty percent, very French / Who didn't derogate himself / As a breed, showed none of those tedious / Tendentious tendencies," but Dorn identified most closely (he wrote) with the "Pure Kentucky English" (Chemo Sabe). These are the people, he suggests elsewhere, who are unreconstructed: "They are impervious to engineering because they already have a culture extending from the 17th century, like the transplanted Africans who they understand and with whom they sympathize" (High West, 48).

I hope that before too long we'll have the late poems collected in a decent and available edition. Maybe then Dorn's poems--early, middle, and late--will appear in future editions of Jahan Ramazani's Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry or Cary Nelson's Anthology of Modern American Poetry, including passages like the following, one of those prose middles in "Languedoc Variorum":

 [T]he nonempowered just try to get on with their jihads or the daily
 reading of the Bible as a realtor's prospectus to the Holy lands.
 Unlike the hierarchs, they haven't got theirs, have never had and
 won't ever have. To them, "Peace Brother" is just another
 exhortation to cease and desist from messy and disruptive attempts
 to take a little weight off the other end of the balance. Hijack a
 Concorde with a kitchen-knife would be the ultimate low-tech
 solution. So it is, so it increaseth. (High West, 40)

Of course I'm kidding. It's a little too blunt. It's not even poetry. Editors like Ramazani and Nelson with their ears tuned to academic orthodoxy will never go for work like this. I'm sure Dorn wouldn't have cared. There's just no category available to contain most of these late poems, unless it's "rant," and the poems are too smart for that. There's no category for Dorn himself, unless it's "crank," and that won't serve in the end, not at all. He had style, as Tom Raworth said in his Dorn obituary, but he also had substance.

Thanks to Nate Dorward, Tom Raworth, and Eirik Steinhoff for reading early drafts of this essay and to Burt Hatlen and Bob Perelman for comments on an earlier version of the essay delivered as a conference paper in Paris. Needless to say, these people are not responsible for the opinions and readings offered here.

WORKS CITED

Dorn, Edward. Abhorrences. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1990.

_____. Chemo Sabe. Boise: Limberlost Press, 2001.

_____. High West Rendezvous: A Sampler. South Devonshire: Etruscan Books, 1997.

_____. Way West: Stories, Essays & Verse Accounts: 1963-1993. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993.

Hatlen, Burton, ed. Sagetrieb 15:3 (Winter 1996).

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Author:	Tuma, Keith
Publication:	Chicago Review
Article Type:	Critical essay
Date:	Jun 22, 2004
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