it is dangerous to be named
and makes you mortal.
If you have a name
you can be sold
you can be told
by that name leave, or come
you become, in short
a reference, or if bad luck
is large in your future
you might become an institution
which you will then mistake
for a defense.
So says Ed Dorn early in his mock-epic Gunslinger. It’s a reply to “I’s” insistence in asking what things mean, what things that have been actually experienced mean. Of course their meaning is in the experience just as the semidios Gunslinger’s authority arises from his protean ability to never be fixed in placetime. Always moving, always parrying, “To eliminate the draw/permits an unmatchable Speed/a syzygy which hangs tight/just back of the curtain/of the reality theater” (30).
In his refusal to be described Ed Dorn enters a long line of separatist figures who resist being absorbed into the literary canon and/or cultural archive. Political and polemical, Dorn’s particular brand of “offshorenss” maintains an independence that is unique in post-war American poetry. Refusing, for instance, the anointed role of Olson’s star-student, his elegantly sprung early lyrics of place and labor morph into the cultural satire of Gunslinger. Once lauded as this witty ‘hand,’ he swerved again into an increasingly topical statemental poetry that eschewed conceptual humor for vicious indictment. This continues, more or less, until one expected it from Dorn, and then he swerved again. The late books—Languedoc Variorum, Rocky Mountain Spine, Westward Haut and Chemo Sabe, all offer something different from the previous period. Dorn keeps moving. A poet of genuine protest against the universally cooperative mechanism of capitalist power, his poetry refuses both the authority of the Chambers of Congress and the Halls of Poetry. It is a strange and thorough iconoclasm, always responding to, and poised upon, some external event. As such, Dorn’s work pays acute attention to the world and its occasions, offering a diagnostic intelligence focused on the particular outcomes of general abstractions—economics, religion, technology, transnationalism, the Self, etc. The curious assumptions of our “freedom” are exposed, and the ways in which we too easily settle for peace.
“The Protestant View”:
that eternal dissent
and the ravages of
faction are preferable
to the voluntary
servitude of blind
obedience
Lest one think Dorn was unpleasant, let me say that he was the most generous thinker and listener I’ve experienced as a student. And he was hilarious, a quotable wit about just about anything. His contrarianism was always generative, and his provocations meant to prod one toward independent thought. I considered it a great honor to study with him, and considered him a friend.
But what is it about his method, about his peculiar “practice of the outside,” as he put it in his essay “Some Notes on the External.” Certainly it is a commitment to investigation, whether it is the field immersions of The Shoshoneans, or the textual rehabilitation of the Aubergensian papacy in Languedoc Variorum. But it is also something of what he learns from Olson in “A Bibliography of America for Ed Dorn.” To wit, “PRIMARY DOCUMENTS. And to cool on here is a lifetime of assiduity. Best thing to do is to dig one thing or place or human until you yourself know more apt that than is possible to another man. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Barbed Wire or Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa.” This command to saturate yourself with your subject produces work of enormous depth and penetration. And it involves an attitude of radical openness, a willingness to put one’s person in the field of dynamic particulars. As he says in The Shoshoneans, “Only in the instance of exchange can you find sense.” Paradoxically, it is through an originary dissent that one begins the exchange. And it is only in this exchange––existential, linguistic, economic, racial, cultural–that the transactional nature of reality comes alive. Multiplicities, neither subject nor object at rest. Stakes raised about where and when you are.
These arise from historical particulars. As such, ask yourself: to whom and to what and where and when are you allied, aligned? What unit of organization (lyric poem, family encounter, road trip, documentary photograph, bebop, etc) do you respond to? What forms of resistance do you possess? What are the forms of daily life that are open to you? What image of the world (or of place) do you move and orienteer by? What bioregion is yours as given, and what bioregional is calling you? What is the key, the legend to your place? Where is your history, what is the inductive door to it? What words block or control you? What received beliefs? How is the legacy of America (frontier individual and colonial conquest) in you, both individually and through your family? Where does the process of exchange begin?
csuecopoetics 