Way More West

Edward Dorn's work is driven, turbulent, acute; there are tender moments too of course (eg "Song: Europa"), often interlaced with a poignant irony and a searching view of the contemporary. From the early reflective poems, writing himself out of rural Illinois, to the first flush of inspiration at Black Mountain (Olson, Sauer) to the time in the UK (esp. at the then new University of Essex) to the late reflections on heresy and chemotherapy, the sense of groundedness in a living tradition, but wanting to expand out of it, is clear. As he writes in the late poem "Tribe," his "tribe came from struggling labor" and this struggle to articulate the new is characteristic of his best work. This volume greatly expands the 1997 "sampler" "High West Rendezvous" and includes a generous selection from his parody epic "Gunslinger," not included in the much earlier "Collected Poems" (but available through Duke UP); yet "Way More West" shows that Dorn is much more, and other, than--as the cover has it--"the author of 'Gunslinger.'" Unlike its "Ur-text," Black Sparrow's 1993, "Way West: Stories, Essays and Verse Accounts : 1963-1993" this volume has no prose (ok, it's in a poetry series). Given however the range of Dorn's work, his classic narrative of Puget Sound, "views," "interviews" and prose commentaries and accounts of all kinds, and the abiding interest of this material (published through smaller houses), could this also be licked into popular shape? A strong line of rather quizzical comedy runs through the volume, and a little poem like "the hazards of a later era" with its pastiche of Williams's icebox poem adds a reflection on the state of agribusiness, etc. (again, the rural). Dorn plays with his sources and influences, among them D. H. Lawrence, whose work can be detected at times from "Los Mineros" of the '60s to the "Languedoc Variorum" of the '90s. Always searching, probing, listening; "way more west", yes, but also never west enough.

From his early lyrics like "The Air Of June Sings" and "The Rick Of Green Wood" and "Like a Message on Sunday" through his first experiencing England: THE NORTH ATLANTIC TURBINE, the long poem "Oxford" most specifically, to his breakthrough "spiritual" address in GUNSLINGER (notably Books I & II), and his gem, RECOLLECTIONS OF GRAN APACHERIA, on through LANGUEDOC to the brave work of CHEMO SABE, Ed Dorn has created a body of lucid and resonant and controversial poetry, in which there is often an effortless shifting of discourses within the poem, a mode which he developed into a postmodern way of usually hard-edge jump-cut justaposition. Tom Clark's impressionistic biography of Dorn is a useful accompanying text.