Edward Dorn

American poet

• Born: April 2, 1929
• Birthplace: Villa Grove, Illinois
• Died: December 10, 1999
• Place of death: Denver, Colorado

Biography

Edward Merton Dorn is generally regarded as one of twentieth century America’s most brilliant satiric poets; he wrote more than twenty books. He was born in 1929 into a poor Illinois farm family. He never knew his father, who left the family during the Depression. His mother was of French ancestry, and his grandfather was a railroad man. Dorn attended a one-room school and, after graduating from high school, spent two years at the University of Illinois. He finally ended up at the renowned Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1951, where he studied with the poet Charles Olson; Olson strongly influenced his work both spiritually and intellectually.

Because of his association with Black Mountain College, Dorn is usually grouped with other well-known poets and artists such as Joel Oppenheimer, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Jonathan Williams, John Wieners, and prose writer Fielding Dawson. Other members of the student body and faculty included dancer Merce Cunningham, composers Lou Harrison and John Cage, and painters Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Rauschenberg. All these diverse aesthetic and cultural influences contributed to the development of Dorn’s unique poetic vision, one that responded with particular vehemence to social and political injustice. He was especially concerned with the plight of American Indians and addressed their degrading treatment by European colonists in several of his finest works, such as The Shoshoneans and Recollections of Gran Apachería.

After a few years at Black Mountain College, Dorn decided to leave school and go exploring. He wandered around Kansas, Wyoming, and Washington State, where he worked and met his first wife, Helene. He returned to Black Mountain to finish his degree in 1955 and then returned to Washington State to work in the Skagit Valley in 1957. Dorn recorded those experiences in a novel, the highly regarded By the Sound. His reading of cultural geographer Carl Sauer’s “Morphology of Landscape” crucially influenced his poetic stance and caused him to regard humankind’s interaction with the natural environment as his primary subject matter for the rest of his writing career.

Dorn moved from Washington to work in various jobs in New Mexico and Idaho, where he accepted a teaching position at Idaho State University and continued to publish poems that drew serious critical attention, collected in such volumes as The Newly Fallen, Hands Up!, and Geography, as well as short stories. Dorn moved to England in 1965 to teach at the University of Essex at the invitation of English poet and critic Donald Davie. An important poem that came from his English experience is the now-famous The North Atlantic Turbine, which documents the negative effects of American capitalism on England and Western Europe and explores the devastating effects of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

While teaching at such American institutions as Kent State, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Kansas, and North Eastern Illinois State, Dorn was composing what was to become his masterpiece, the infamous long poem Gunslinger. He published parts of it in the years between 1968 and 1972. The complete poem, known as Slinger, was published in 1975. It is a highly diverse set of satiric observations and meditations on the heart of the American Dream-become-nightmare, and it is one of the truly original mock epics in American poetic history. Dorn’s attack on American values is at times savage in its Swiftean parody of traditional American character types from literature and popular culture. The Gunslinger becomes the prototypical mythic quester who is searching for the authentic American hero Howard Hughes (whose projects in the poem include buying Las Vegas and moving it to the Pacific Coast). Gunslinger is full of surrealistic figures such as the Gunslinger himself—who dies and reappears as an articulate, dope-smoking horse. Kool-Everything is a strung-out hippie who befriends Lil, the madame of a house of ill-repute. Other comic characters include Dr. Flamboyant, a typical academic blowhard, and “I,” Dorn’s parodic remedy for the ever-present ego of the proliferating confessional poets of the American academy.

In Hello, La Jolla, published in 1978, Dorn moves from the sprawling epic form of Slinger to an aphoristic style reminiscent of the eighteenth century Augustan Age. Many of the poems are short epigrams, such as “Chicken Relativity”: “Two thighs are better/ than one/ where one is better than none.” Though the poetic form has tightened, the target of Dorn’s venomous rage is, once again, the military-industrial-corporate powers that control virtually everything. Throughout Hello, La Jolla, Yellow Lola, and Abhorrences, Dorn attacks language as the primary tool of the powers of government and multinational corporations. The tendency of language toward abstraction, a movement which the computer has made irrevocable, is a particular target of Dorn’s splenetic raids. At the beginning of Abhorrences, he lists what he calls a “Baseline Vocabulary,” creating neologisms such as “Airforseoneery, Blastoffic, Rivercide, Optimostery, Asskickery, Deep Coma Aroma, and Hollywooden.”

In 1980, Dorn began to teach in the University of Colorado’s creative writing program. He published and edited with his second wife, Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, the newspaper Rolling Stock, a journal addressed to political and literary issues in the western United States. He died in 1999 at his home in Denver as a result of pancreatic cancer. Edward Dorn was one of the most brilliant satiric poets in modern American literature, maintaining his integrity and high moral standards.

Bibliography

Clark, Tom. Edward Dorn: A World of Difference. Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 2002. A sympathetic biography by Dorn’s close friend, a fellow poet. Relies heavily on letters from family and friends and on Dorn’s work, both published and unpublished. Contains an epilogue—drawn from letters, journals, and poems—that describes Dorn’s losing fight with cancer.

Costello, James Thomas. “Edward Dorn: The Range of Poetry.” Dissertation Abstracts International 44 (July, 1983): 167A. This ambitious work examines Dorn’s poetry in relation to his contemporaries and the influence in his work of the American West, politics, the Plains Indians, and even theoretical physics. Many major ideas in modern American writing are identified and explored. The range of works cited spans The Newly Fallen to Yellow Lola.

Davidson, Michael. “Archeologist of Morning: Charles Olson, Edward Dorn, and Historical Method.” English Literary History 47 (1980). Davidson compares Olson’s and Dorn’s method of redefining history as geography.

Dorn, Edward. “An Interview with Edward Dorn.” Interview by John Wright. Chicago Review 39, no. 1 (1993). A forty-four-page interview in which Dorn discusses his past and his work as a poet, teacher, and scholar.

Dorn, Edward. “An Interview with Edward Dorn.” Interview by Tandy Sturgeon. Contemporary Literature 27 (Spring, 1986): 1-17. In this compelling interview, Dorn discusses the difficulty of characterizing and judging the effects of political poetry. Dorn also explains his scorn for the flaccid academic tradition in writing and expresses his desire to invigorate the genre. This extensive and well-conducted interview offers an extraordinary glimpse into Dorn’s mind and art.

Elmborg, James K. A Pageant of Its Time: Edward Dorn’s “Slinger” and the Sixties. New York: P. Lang, 1998. This critical study explores the poet’s depiction of life in the 1960’s. The author argues that Gunslinger is best read as a reaction to the state of the nation in the 1960’s. Bibliography and index.

Foster, Thomas. “Kick(ing) the Perpendiculars Outa Right Anglos: Edward Dorn’s Multiculturalism.” Contemporary Literature 38, no. 1 (Spring, 1997): 78-105. Examines the book-length poem Gunslinger.

Paul, Sherman. The Lost America of Love: Rereading Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, and Robert Duncan. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. A personal and intimate reflection on the power of these poets as experienced by the author. Paul explores Dorn’s creative relationship to Walt Whitman, the effects of the Great Depression and World War II on Dorn’s work, and the bedfellows of poetry and politics as they relate to Dorn’s poetry.

Von Hallberg, Robert. “This Marvellous Accidentalism.” In American Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985. This excellent chapter on Dorn details the effects of his education, life experiences, and politics on his poetry. Dorn and his correspondence are frequently quoted, thereby giving authority to Von Hallberg’s assertions. An accessible account of the many influences at play in Dorn’s poetry.

Wesling, Donald, ed. Internal Resistances: The Poetry of Edward Dorn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Wesling asserts that this collection of essays is the first book to address—as its sole concern—Dorn’s poetic achievements. All phases of Dorn’s poetry are represented in these lucid observations that illustrate Dorn as a self-reflexive, historical, ironic and, finally, post-postmodern poet. Dorn’s opus, Slinger, is especially well studied in this book.