The Early Lyrics of Ed Dorn [Part II]

The first, and I think the only, time I heard Ed Dorn was on a KPFA broadcast way back in the 1970's, and quite by accident. Dorn had given a reading of North Atlantic Turbine, the whole book, and it was a very clear occasion, his enunciation was immaculate and clear and intelligent, except that he sounded like one of, maybe one of the most, sardonic men I'd ever listened to. Just filled with anger and bitterness and hard ironies. Certainly it rivaled Olivier's performance of Richard III's opening speech. Did he mean well? Could he be so perturbed about a system of trade that had exchanged rum for sugar for slaves, round and round, a hundred years late, and later? How was care to find its object?

The Air of June Sings

Quietly and while at rest on the trim grass I have gazed,

admonished myself for having never been here

at the graveside and read the names of my Time Wanderers.

And now, the light noise of the children at play on the inscribed stone

jars my ear and they whisper and laugh covering their mouths. "My Darling"

my daughter reads, some of the markers

reflect such lightness to her reading eyes, yea, as I rove

among these polished and lime blocks, I am moved to tears and I hear

the depth in "Darling, we love thee," and as in "Safe in Heaven."

I am going off to heaven and I won't see you anymore. I am

going back into the country and I won't be here anymore. I am

going to die in 1937. But where did you did my Wanderer?

You, under the grave grass, with the tin standard whereat

I look, and try to read the blurred ink. I cannot believe

you were slighted knowing what I do of cose and evil

yet tin is less than granite. Those who buried you should have known

a 6 inch square of sandstone, flush with the earth 

is more proper for the gone than blurred and faded flags.

Than the blurred and fadded flags I am walking with in the graveyard.

Across the road in the strawberry field two children are stealing

their supper fruit, abreast in the rows, in the fields of the overlord.

Miller is his authentic name, and I see that name represented here,

there is that social side of burial too, long residence,

and the weight of the established local dead. My eyes avoid

the largest stone, larger than the common large, Goodpole Matthews,

Pioneer, and that pioneer sticks in me like a wormed black cherry

in my throat, No Date, nothing but that zeal, that trekking

and Business, that presumption in a sacred place, where children

are buried, and where peace, as it is in the fields and the country

should reign. A wagon wheel is buried there. Lead me away

to the small quiet stones of the unpreposterous dead and leave

me my tears for Darling we love thee, for Budded on earth and blossomed

in heaven, where the fieldbirds sing in the fence rows,

and there is possibility, where there are not the loneliest of all.

Oh, the stones not yet cut.

(--from Collected Poems 1956-1974)

I once had an argument with Marvin Bell in his office, when I was at Iowa in the early Seventies. Dorn was another of those forbidden names I pulled from my personal pantheon to offer as example for my own efforts to find voice and identity as a writer. Marvin said, blandly and with condescension, "Dorn writes prose, it's just prose broken into false lines, don't you see?" I was not able to understand this view of his work then, and I don't see it now. It seemed a misreading, a dully unperceptive take.

It would be hard to imagine a more stately and measured line than "Quietly and while at rest on the trim grass I have gazed". It's like something out of  Wyatt, or Campion, filled with air and angels, as they say. Is such affected phraseology over the top? "I am going off to heaven and I won't see you anymore. I am/going back into the country and I won't be here anymore. I am/going to die in 1937." Dorn imagines himself into the dying generations of settlers, rather like Marshall Dillon walking disconsolately up on Boot Hill, ruminating on the vicissitudes of law and order, fate and death, on the wild frontier.

For the first third of his life, Dorn lived poor. His early collection of stories By the Sound, was an important update, for me, of the intinerant labor culture of the 1930's, which I'd read about in The Grapes of Wrath. Dorn's sympathies in those days were all for the downtrodden, but inside he was an impressively sophisticated, elegant and prideful man. Drawing upon the pop Western and early Modernist hero traditions, he embarked upon an ambitious camp narrative poem in the 1960's, Gunslinger, which gradually, after much fanfare at the outset, petered out in a series of half-hearted tangents. Does Gunslinger, with its over-arching rhetorical flourishes and hip burlesque tone, undercut or subtract from Dorn's early straight lyricism? That's very much, I think, what people tended to think, as Dorn morphed, in the late 1960's, into the eccentric contrarian of his middle- and late age, scornful and contemptuous of post-Modern cultural paradigms. 

But an author may undergo successive transformations of character during a lifetime. Literary history is full of examples: John Dos Passos, or John Steinbeck, two serious novelists who began as sympathetic populists, and ended as cantankerous old reactionaries. Over a lifetime of dispute and critical haggling, fatigue and frustration often set in. "The Air of June Sings" strikes my ear as pure and unadulterated, the young parent walking with his children (much as in the other poem "The Rick of Green Wood"), inspired to meditate in an antique mode, like a wreathe of spirit-mist among the lichen-encrusted gravestones, "lead me away/to the small quiet stones of the unpreposterous dead and leave/me my tears for Darling we love thee," (addressed to whom?). 

It's a poem every bit as formal and serious, in its way, as Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead" though forsworn against such stricken pieties, defeated and discouraged.