Ed Dorn [1929-1999] had a lean, rugged visage, the kind that Hollywood has always loved, sort of the Clint Eastwood look. The "rugged, lean" hero, the tall, silent type, a loner, wary of compromise, with private codes of honor and simplicity, independence and toughness, secretly romantic, successful in love, a failure in society.
In some fairly obvious ways, the real Ed Dorn, the poet, was a little like this. He was difficult in may ways, sarcastic, severe, cranky, with several personal demons. An uncompromising recalcitrance is often expressed as a gestural flair in his early poems, work in which he appears to have been trying to define himself, while exercising his facility, showing off his talent.
This precocious lyrical virtuosity underwent transformations during his middle age, as he became increasingly preoccupied with radical ideation and somewhat disillusioned. As his view of the world became more cynical, the content of his work began to reflect a frustration with the effects of traditional nativist symbols and modes. He had always written and thought about the settlement of the American West, but his sense of its usefulness as subject-matter changed over time. The first phase of his work shows in a poem like--
Vaquero
The cowboy stands beneath
a brick-orange moon. The top
of his oblong head is blue, the sheath
of his hips
is too.
In the dark brown night
your delicate cowboy stands quite still.
His plain hands are crossed.
His wrists are embossed white.
In the background night is a house,
has a blue chimney top,
Yi Yi, the cowboy's eyes
are blue. The top of the sky
is too.
--from the late 1950's. This diverting, cliché'd, cartoonish portrait might be of a motorcycle dude standing outside a bar in Laramie--all effect and no substance. Which is often how Dorn thought of the American West, a tawdry habitation, scrub and scrabble, cheap and phony, a forlorn aspect. This vision would in due course be converted into the graphic surrealism of his pop Western meta-epic Gunslinger. "Vaquero" in fact seems like a kind of early profile of Gunslinger, a character in search of a story. The dry pan of the plains--Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Nebraska, Montana, Washington, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Kansas, Texas--informs many of Dorn's sweetest lyrics, made out of the arid clarity of desert air, the lost expanse of space, the flat bottom basin.
Daffodil Song
The horns of yellow
on this plain resound
and the twist on the air
of their brilliance
Say where
say where I will find find
a love
or an arabesque
of such rash fortune.
Love Song
for Lucia
Captured, her beauty
would not leave her
thus inclined by the railing
she never lifted her head
from the waters
a blue gull drifts
she moves from the rapture
of the ascending fog.
Lost in the moving passengers
she left the ship
and entered the city.
Song
Oh Gods of my disembarked soul this is sad
a merriment of unteachable waywordness
I tell you the gleaming eye
is a mirror of
the green hills
where love struggles
against the drought
in the desert
in the spring
in the quickness
of the fresh bush
over the cove.
As with Cummings, Dorn's twin concerns--romantic lyricism (or lyric romance)--and biting sarcasm (or burlesque, or diatribe)--usually seem mutually exclusive, repelling any resolution, like the opposite ends of a magnet. As here, in
Parlor Car Beer
They look coach, in the morning
pants wrinkled.
And I am coach, CHICAGO spelled out
across my front teeth.
Don't want to be sleeper.
They
look sleeper
coming in from the other end, the
dirty & tired
have a beer
with the rested & clean.
Get this:
we talked of the all England
ice skating championships, 1959
How
some skills pass the understanding
of the uninitiated
right in the middle of Nebraska.
--where the satiric voice dominates an otherwise High American Gothic train poem, complete with sleeper cars and a parlor car scene. The parlor car beer trope, one might say, the symbol of a whole way of life passed inexorably into history, which the hip poet--his prickly hyper-sensitive feelers set to the dud frequency of decadent mid-century dilapidation--summarizes as a Wild Wild West in true television consciousness.
The great thing about Dorn, what sets his work apart from 99% of the rest of the poets of his time--especially those domiciled west of Chicago--is his refusal to cash in on, to invest in the romance of, the American Dream of the "West." Even as he abandons the straightforward lyric voice for the camp satire of Gunslinger in the 1960's, his view of America, even when bizarrely exaggerated and weird, is so much truer to its spirit, than, say, the work of William Stafford, or Rexroth, or Snyder. For those other poets, the West was what one might make of it--their effort was not unlike the exploiters and frontiersmen of the 19th and early 20th Centures, for whom the wide-open spaces represented opportunity, raw material, and several kinds of ethical potential which might do service as aesthetic properties. But for Dorn, the West wasn't a mystical notion, or dreamscape of future fulfillment. He saw its ugliness as our ugliness, its ambition and selfishness as expressions of intent, not as the accidental or unfortunate accompaniments of a greater vision, cooked up in New England or Virginia and packaged for immediate delivery to a waiting audience. The pollution and waste were us, we had made them, there was no place to hide, no one to blame, no ethic of "wilderness" and "stewardship" to salve our complacent consciences.
If Dorn became bitter and thorny in later age, it may be observed that he had been driven by these realizations into emotional or artistic dead-ends. But these were certainly truer places to have come to, than the easy condolence and tired resolutions of the mildly coerced. If Dorn came in the end to see villains and devils under rocks, that paranoia may be understood in the context of the total annexation of half a continent, by a people selfish and pompous beyond imagining.
You can see in the man's early lyrics a loveliness and sternness, an innocence and loneliness that are purer than anything.
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