Dorn Undone

Way More West, reviewed by Ron Silliman on his blog, March 20, 2007

"Black Mountain Breakdown", August Kleinzahler, New York Times, April, 2007

Ron Silliman is often an interesting writer, and his blog a conduit for certain kinds of helpful information, but I've never had a lot of use for his combative, exclusionary poetics. Had Silliman, in his review of Ed Dorn's posthumous Way More West, attacked Dorn for poetic reasons, I would not have paid much attention since, as shall appear obvious hereafter, I regard Dorn as a master of American poetry of the First Empire—as opposed to Imperial American Poetry, which has Charles Bernstein. But Silliman attacked Dorn's human nature, and such extra-poetical stereotyping is too obnoxious to ignore.

The excrescences encumbering the notion of social rectitude are too disgusting to muck about in; I leave it to Silliman to critique poetry by means of character assassination, only observing that the absence of candor and frank appraisal must produce a poetics of, to adopt Silliman's cant phrase, quietude. It is shameful to slur a poet because you deplore his opinions, but to dismiss a major figure on grounds of social maladjustment is self defeating and inimical to art. Shelley and Whitman were ostracized by just such posturing Scotch Reviewers. I'll take Apollinaire, thanks, and Catullus and Villon and Rochester and Blake. You can have Milton and Tennyson and all the John Masefield you can stomach.

Silliman says Dorn is "easily [!] the most contentious and controversial of any of the New Americans", which makes me wonder if he's ever heard of Jack Spicer. Or Kerouac or Ginsberg, or, for that matter, Olson or Creeley. At least Dorn was never reduced to watching his friends through the window of a bar from which he'd been 86ed. Dorn never fit "easily" into any group. As evidence for his contention, Silliman gossips that Dorn, asked to read at a benefit in 1973, had requested that he be scheduled to appear on stage when he would be forced to encounter neither Creeley nor Joanne Kyger. This, Silliman suggests, was done in the spirit of one-upmanship, so Dorn could read last. Maybe. But, in the summer of '73, I sat at Richard Grossinger and Lindy Hough's kitchen table in Plainfield, Vt, all afternoon with Creeley and Dorn, who operated in easy comity. Dorn's personal distaste for Kyger has been reported in print for some time now, but nobody likes everybody, so Dorn's behavior hardly justifies extravagant claims of contention and controversy. The only notable difference between Dorn and the others I've named above is that none of them ever had anything negative to say about Silliman or his cohort. But why not give Dorn a chance? From a letter to Olson in 1964: "I can hardly get along with Creeley but sense that I can hardly not be a friend…."

Of the poetry itself, Silliman has nothing original to say concerning the work that appeared in the first Collected Poems (Four Seasons, 1974) or Gunslinger (collected as 'Slinger, Wingbow, '74), but he has plenty to tell us about the later work, his major objections to which are that it is "all over the map", with a "macho attitude toward violence". Well, Dorn was an old vines American, after all: vintage '29. Silliman takes as indicative of those flaws, though he misquotes it, the following epigrammatic gem:

one bullet

is worth

a thousand bulletins

which Silliman condemns as staking out "a position that captures the Bush foreign policy in Iraq all too presciently, though I'm sure that's not what Dorn intended". We can ignore the anachronism here, but the question remains: if Dorn didn't intend something that hadn't yet happened, how can he be charged with fellow traveling? The next question is: has Silliman read the poem? Take just a minute:

One picture is worth a thousand words.

One gram is worth a thousand milligrams.

one bullet / is worth / a thousand bulletins

The third of these statements examines the relationship between the first two in a conceit (what is "worth" worth?) that is evidently too complex to affect Silliman's predisposition to portray Dorn as a political thinker on the troglodyte order of Dick Cheney, but it won't wash. It's just a weak reading of an acute, telling little masterpiece that, like Picasso's drawing of Don Quixote, defines the nature of means without end. A bullet through Hitler's brain, after all, might have saved millions of lives and poetry its post-holocaust obscenity.

Silliman's assessment of Dorn's elegy for Petra Kelley is equally hampered by bourgeois manners. I won't quote the poem (you could, look it up) but here are some of Silliman's claims:

Item: that "Dorn's fascination with violence undercuts his green/libertarian tendencies repeatedly." Here is a classic example of begging the question; nothing in the poem can be cited in support of this assertion. But Silliman does score here; Dorn must be cursing in his grave at being categorized as anything other than a poet, since he thought for himself and joined no groups, especially none co-opted by interested parties of any persuasion.

Item: that Dorn may not realize "that more than half of [Kelly's time in the U.S.] was spent in Columbus, Georgia". Is this some kind of code? What does Columbus stand for other than the object of a certain kind of snobbishness that Dorn apparently eschewed, but that Silliman does not? At any rate, Silliman never connects this observation with any critique of the poem.

Item: that "Petra Kelly didn't shoot herself [Silliman's emphasis]…& whether it was a murder-suicide or a joint suicide is one of those unknowables [would this be a known unknown or an unknown unknown?] of history." Then he accuses Dorn of "misreading a sad act of depression and domestic violence". I leave it to you to determine just who is doing the misreading here. We have under discussion a poem, not a reasoned argument, observing that those who throw themselves against the machine are doomed, while those who famously abet those acts of self destruction are bankable. Silliman never approaches the interior values of the poem, a courtesy he routinely extends to his friends, as for example the careful examination of short vowel progress in recent poems of Rae Armantrout's (whose work I admire, and I mean her no ill in naming her as one of Silliman's group—I mean only to suggest that there is an apparent correspondence between those to whom he gives careful attention and those with whom he has personal links).

No charge seems too petty. Silliman quotes the line "…with sumo champions / like Gertrude Stein…" as "cheaply explicit homophobia in making fun of Gertrude Stein's weight…." How could anyone who has seen Picasso's portrait of Stein ensconced, hair pulled back into a bun, not have recognized the similarity of placid demeanor and enormous, floating presence? Is that homophobia? Silliman's attack is ad hominem criticism with a vengeance. The point of Dorn's stanza is that only Pound's anti-semitism was egregious enough to put such an attitude in bad odor among artists. But that is not opprobrium enough, evidently, for the attitudinizers of "the fascism of beehive / conformity" (to quote Dorn from the same poem). I have long respected Ron Silliman's perspicacity as a political thinker—his response to Baudrillard, c. 1989, available through his blog, is especially prescient—but his standing as arbiter of morals among American poets is, in my estimation, dismal.

I have often enjoyed August Kleinzahler's poems for their modest, workmanlike clarity. His "Over Gower Street" is very fine. That in mind, I turned to his NYT review of Way More West with some anticipation that I might be offered the antidote to Silliman's nasty blog bite, only to find the same sanctimonious dismissal: a bow to the precision of the early work, always careful to attribute its felicities to the influence of Black Mountain; left-handed praise of Gunslinger, not the "major twentieth- century long poem…some serious critics claim it to be"; abrupt, contemptuous dismissal of all that came after.

The early poetry, which Kleinzahler calls Dorn's best, he also labels "Black Mountain influenced", and says Dorn "identified himself throughout his career with Black Mountain". What does "identified himself" mean? He acknowledged his time there? He was, as Kleinzahler quotes him admitting, "somewhat corrected" there? He was forever an acolyte? It's a weasel phrase; in fact, the finest poems in Dorn's early work owe little to Black Mountain. As a favorite instance, "The Land Below" is well over six hundred lines of discursive observation of his contemporary America as Dorn turned thirty, seen from the then oblique perspective of Taos. The skill and disinterested passion with which Dorn sets that narrative prefigures the intellectual acuity of Gunslinger. It is instructive to hear the rhythms of the earlier poem morph into mock epic.

Kleinzahler ignores Twenty-four Love Songs (Frontier, '69); perhaps he can't connect them to Black Mountain. It is difficult to find a cycle its equal in the past half century. #6 is representative of the collection:

The cleft in our ages

is an echoing cañon—look

I insist on my voice

Archeus become my life

and as any other extension

not to be ignored—

if you were my own time's possession

I'd tell you to fuck off

with such vivid penetration

you'd never stop gasping

and pleasure unflawed

would light our lives, pleasure

unrung by the secretly expected

fingers of last sunday

Do you hear me, can you

please only agree with me

because poems and love

and all that happens in the street

are blown forward

on the slightest breeze

That the collection was immediately followed by a second, comparable, set suggested that only Patchen's love poems were equal in their ability to accumulate the progress of desire.

Of Gunslinger, Kleinzahler's faint-praise "glorious mess" belongs in a movie review. In the inexorability of its organization, Dorn's poem is much closer to the Odyssey than "The Rape of the Lock" is to the Iliad. No recent American has so honored the epic by mocking it, with the dissimilar exception of Welty's Losing Battles.

But the post-Gunslinger work is dismissed as "tasteless", "ugly" and prosaic. I wonder how Dorn could have fallen so precipitously. And why his work kept appearing in such handsome editions. What so fooled the editors at Wingbow, Turtle Island, Cadmus and the others who competed for the opportunity to publish him? Why has his reputation in England and among "some serious critics" not suffered? If his late work is "splenetic", why is that not an appropriate response to the muzzy, sentimental politics of the MFA poets who are allowed to think that it is adequate to write like WCW? If he was pointed ("epigrammatic, satiric, and political", says Kleinzahler), what better correction to the passionless and obtuse? If Dorn is lost in spleen, how does Kleinzahler account for the playful invention and endless musicality of Captain Jack's Chaps, Yellow Lola, and Abhorrences, for instances? Is "Broadcide", his elegy for Richard Brautigan, "commonplace"? And what of Recollections of Gran Apachería (Turtle Island, '74), from which I ask you to consider the following:

And when, above Janos

we asked permission of the women

to strangle the children

the women consented

and the suicide gripping

of the throats of our own children was done

and those delightful voices lay silenced

in absolute sacrifice

in the burrows where we hid

we slipped out through the light

from Captain Garcias raging grass fire

once more to the Sierra Madre

once more past the jaws of your hungry god

the frenzy of survival rushing from our pores

If that defines spleen, maybe we ought to order all our generals—not to mention our poets—a barrel.

θεωρια means "to look at" or "examine", so when Dorn states, in the preface to Collected Poems (Four Seasons, 1974), that his work is "theoretical in nature", it is clear that he is not talking about speculation nor any other notion separate from the actual. He adds that his work is "poetic by virtue of its inherent tone". Any examination of Dorn's work cannot help but conclude that its intrinsic voice is congruent from "A Rick of Green Wood" to "The Garden of the White Rose", including all of Gunslinger. If Kleinzahler believes that Dorn's later work "falls off precipitously", he should demonstrate—rather than assert—the way the inherent tone of the work changes. Instead, like Silliman, Kleinzahler attacks Dorn's politics. It has always seemed to me that Dorn's politics were based on the refusal to suffer fools at all. He made no exceptions, including Olson and Creeley, whose follies he critiqued with the same sardonic levity that so exercises these critics when his contempt is directed at shibboleths to which Silliman and Kleinzahler currently pay obeisance, good taste and fawning over victimhood included. His stance is ironic, edged with the contempt one feels for those who act against self interest for the sake of hurting others. His theme is often the violence that attends such disjunctive behavior. His characteristic concern is for the polis.

And aren't we starving for a poetry that is both artistically masterful and politically wise? "Sniper on the Roof" models an all-too-plausible rule of engagement that may be employed when taxpayers get tired of housing the unruly in prisons, though we might disagree about who among us is in that disposable class. Here's the ending:

This is

palpable desperation, this targeted man

doesn't have a computer, or even a primitive

weapon, this man's hunter is Raytheon of course

via killer personnel in full swat combat dress

fresh from an Abudabi arms fair. Every

jerkwater police force will apply for the grant

of a state sniper who can eliminate

the non-cooperative, those who are now

the public nuisance, the epidemic of just

plain trash, to be picked up, put on the stretcher

and hauled away to the dump of postmodern

American madness by the lackeys picking up

after the Central Force—anyone with

a good eye test and a steady finger and

no conscience at all can apply.

It's one step from turning out those in need of sanctuary to shooting them when they disturb the shoppers. But that's my opinion; what Dorn sees is exemplified by rimfire plosives—twenty of them in twelve lines—and the chiasmic rattrap of "fresh from an Abudabi arms fair". Throughout this poem as elsewhere in Way More West, Dorn allows phanopoeia—so deft that one scarcely notes the image imparted, melopoeia—as noted in the preceding sentence, and a penetrating logopoeia to create a poetry that only presents, never preaches. Though inattentive readers may take this apparent indifference to outcomes as bad character, it is the mask of an intelligence that won't flinch.

Let me end by quoting Dorn's final published poem:

The Garden of the White Rose

Lord, your mercy is stretched so thin

to accommodate the need

of the trembling earth—

How can I solicit even

a particle of it

for the relief of my singularity

the single White Rose

across the garden will

return next year

identical to your faith—

the White Rose, whose

house is light against the

threatening darkness.

Does this poem deserve any of the modifiers that Kleinzahler uses to describe Dorn's late poetry? Does it sound like something Mel Gibson might say? These two have seriously misevaluated Dorn's work. In Kleinzahler's case I'm inclined to think it might have been sloppy reading or, at worst, a swollen appetite. Silliman, on the other hand, appalls me by his campaign of personal defamation. Whatever the guiding principles of their respective reviews, we can only hope they never encounter Jonathan Swift.

Brian Richards

May 15, 2007