Way More West
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An essential anthology of an innovative American poet
Edward Dorn was not only one of America’s finest poets but a rare critical intelligence and commentator. He was a student of Charles Olson, who helped him to see the American West as a site for his quest for self-knowledge; at the core of his work is a deep sense of place and the people who occupy it, underpinned by a wry ironic dissent. It was Dorn’s comic-epic masterpiece, Gunslinger, which began appearing in 1968 and had already become an underground classic by the time it was published in its entirety in 1974, that established his reputation in the wider world. This new volume brings together poems from Dorn’s entire career, including previously uncollected work.
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Best known for his chatty, satirical mock-western long poem "Gunslinger," Dorn (1929 1999) came to poetic maturity alongside Creeley and Olson, with whom he studied at the now legendary experimental Black Mountain College, though his fast-paced, angry poetry sometimes suggests the beats. Included in this volume are Dorn's poetic travelogues about the U.S. and Britain; a poetic history of the Apache nation; epigrams and commentaries against war, capitalism and environmental degradation; and a memorable verse journal of his chemotherapy (Chemo Sabe, his last book). Dorn specialized in acrid denunciations of Euro-American hegemony, with particular attention to the areas west of the Rockies: "We do not even yet/ know what a crisis is." "Gunslinger" here represented in a short selection itself records a saloon conversation among the titular cowboy, the poet, the saloonkeeper Miss Lil and an improbably wise talking druggie horse. Celebrated during the 1970s, there is nothing else like it in poetry. If there is sympathy and caution in Dorn's work, he directs it only toward the peoples American governments have tried to destroy: Apaches "embody a state/ which our still encircled world/ looks toward from the past." The breadth and fire of his denunciations still read beautifully, and have a lot to teach us.
