A chapter from Edward Dorn: A World of Difference

American Poetry Review, The, Jan/Feb 2002 by Clark, Tom

Prologue: We Were There When It Was New (1965-1968)

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After two years of correspondence between Idaho and England Ed Dom and I finally met up in person in 1965 at the then-- brand-new University of Essex. I arrived from Cambridge in the spring of that year and took a room in a cottage in the North Sea fishing village of Brightlingsea, a half dozen miles from the still-in-construction university site at Wivenhoe Park. Early that autumn Dom and his family-his wife Helene, son Paul, II, stepchildren Fred, 16, and Chansonette, crossed over from America on the Queen Elizabeth. Coming off a dozen trying but illuminating years of wandering "throughout the trans-mountain west following the winde," the family, a tight-knit little group brought closer together by long experience of pioneering, was making its first trip to Europe. Dorn's initial glimpse of the Old World came at Cherbourg on September 13. It was a large moment for him, setting his sense of himself as a poet up against his sense of cultural identity in ways he did not yet fully understand. The next day, rounding the Isle of Wight on the great ocean liner, he thought of Keats's letters-as thirty-three years later, dying, he would retrace Keats's last travels to the Spanish Steps and the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. Five minutes later the tide of feeling had turned in him again, and, as he would report in a letter to his erstwhile mentor Charles Olson, "for some reason the whole thing welled up in me and I started asking abstract questions like do I really want to go to England, do I want to be here on this ship."

By then both questions were purely academic. At the end of a bewildering trail of "altogether nagging occupations" that stretched back to his Illinois prairie adolescence, he now stood at the brink of the first job that would befit the years of intensive autodidactic labor he had put into turning himself from a poor farm boy into a writer and a thinker. That job would provide the credential to enable a peripatetic career in academia. (Ever restless, Dom would in the decade to come wander from school to school-Kansas, Essex again, Northeastern Illinois, Kent State, Riverside, Essex yet again, San Diego-performing the kind of intellectual migrant work he once spoke of as "'casual labor'-where there's a job you show up," before settling in 1978 at Colorado, eventually to become a tenured professor of English.) With his first "respectable" job would come other transformations he could hardly have suspected in his equivocal moment aboard the liner off the English coast. Those changes are only hinted at in Dorn's capsule autobiographical accounts of these years: "In 1965, a Fulbright Lectureship at the University of Essex turned into an odyssey of upheaval and exile." "We were there when things were new," Dom would remind me in a letter on the occasion of returning to the University of Essex in 1990 for a conference commemorating the school's twenty-fifth anniversary. Back in 1965 he had been appointed to lecture "on the nature of westward expansion" by the head of the thennew university's Department of Literature, Donald Davie. The department was Davie's brainchild; a highly respected poet, critic and teacher, he had left his secure position as a Cambridge don to take up the comparatively risky work of founding a new kind of English Literature program-including in its scope American and European literary studies -at a fledgling provincial school where (as Dom reported back to Olson shortly after arriving) "the buildings [were] not yet finished, even the ones being used."

Both Dorn and I were Davie recruits at Essex; 'both of us had come to England as Davie-ored Fulbright Fellows. During my two years in Davie's Cambridge college, Gonville and Caius (where he was supervising my Ph.D. research on Ezra Pound), I had observed Davie's growing interest in Dorn's writing. Given the obvious disparity in their training and tastes-Davie had been a disciple of the fiercely canonical F. R. Leavis, Dorn of the equally dogmatic anti-canonist Olson-that interest seemed at first quite unlikely. But there were strong underlying reasons for it. Coincidental similarities of background created surprising common ground between two men of seemingly divergent style and sensibility, the polished don and the hard-edged migrant worker. Both were self-demanding, ambitiously driven sons of Protestant families of the industrial working classes. In his youth Davie had attended a Yorkshire Baptist chapel, a class-parallel with the Methodist congregation of Dorn's childhood: the message in both venues could be summed up by the words of a Scottish-Reform Methodist preacher born considered his earliest intellectual influence, "It's not okay, and it's not going to be okay." Davie's primary role model as a child, like Dorn's, had been a grandfather who was a lifelong railway man (Davie's was a signalman, Dorn's a mechanic and pipe fitter). Early instruction in the pains of upward mobility had left each man with his own particular distance from and distrust of the middle classes: Davie for his part had chosen to express his sense of difference from above, through an enlightened intellectual elitism that had allowed him to prosper in his career among the academic intelligentsia, whereas Dorn had stubbornly maintained an oppositional stance, his identification with the dispossessed of the socioeconomic "basement stratum" not surprisingly retarding his career progress. But Davie would not easily forget his own class history, nor Dorn easily accept the fates apparently attendant upon his.

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A chapter from Edward Dorn: A World of Difference

American Poetry Review, The, Jan/Feb 2002 by Clark, Tom

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