A chapter from Edward Dorn: A World of Difference

Clark, Tom

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

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.

Davie was genuinely intrigued by Dorn's writing, with its rangy, gestural, highly individualized syntax-once at Cambridge he devoted a session of our tutorial on Wordsworth to a discussion of the comparative grammars of The Prelude and Dom's long poem about New Mexico, "The Land Below" -and its equally idiosyncratic views. But it was the moral depth and complexity of the work that plainly moved Davie most deeply. In an essay on the Dom novel The Rites of Passage for a magazine I edited with fellow Essex graduate student Andrew Crozier, The Wivenhoe Park Review, Davie spoke of the qualities in Dorn's attitude which particularly appealed to him: a curious humility and openness, a courageous willingness to moralize directly from experience. "What validates Dorn's lyric voice is, time and again, its humility, the instruction it looks for and gets from people and places and happenings. It reflects upon them, it moralizes on them; but the reflection and the moral are drawn not from some previously accumulated stock of wisdom, but (so the writing persuades us) immediately out of the shock of confronting each of them as it comes, unpredictably."

Dom had long suffered from an acute impatience with administrative bureaucracy. Two months into his stay at the University of Essex-he unaffectionately dubbed it "the Multiversity," after a Robert Duncan poem about the Free Speech movement at Berkeley-he reported to Olson that Davie struck him as "pleasant and I think he has a good mind, but it might split across the edge of Administration and scholarship. He will tell himself increasingly it can be done but it can't. Already it is a vast school with all the problems and preconditions that enforces. I see it as simply the concept-it isn't how, many students you have, you can have [just] one and still be a multiversity, if you think that way. Typewriters and secretaries, rubber bands and paper dips. They are already squeezed between the ultimate memo-pad. But one must say the game is not over, and they do have an idea to make a university civic, like a city, the dorms high rise right in the center of piazzas and enclosed courts."

Physically, "the multiversity" was as yet no more than a loose collection of windswept, ill-matched glass and concrete boxes scattered seemingly at random across an ongoing construction site, with big trucks and caterpillars still moving earth around the formerly well-landscaped grounds of an estate Constable had once painted. Dorn's own office was a spartan glass box in a sprawling concrete and steel compound. I shared a cube-clustered office space just around the right-angled corridor bend; my office partner for a while was a French literature specialist Dom would draw on in portraying Dr. Jean Flamboyant, the smug mutant-academic expert on "post-ephemeral" subjects who would boast to the hero of Gunslinger "I was the flame of my Lyceum / I can fix anything."

The shock of recognition that greeted Dom with his first taste of "refined" academic politics at Essex -nothing resembling this had come with his four-- classes-a-week wage slavery at Idaho State College -was recorded in his letters from England back home to Olson. To the considerable amusement of both poets, it seemed the latter's allegedly "barbaric" influence was an early issue of controversy in the Essex Department of Literature. "There is one American here who bugs me a bit," Dorn reported to Olson in January 1966, "George Dekker, who met Davie when Davie was at Santa Barbara, and both of these men then came somewhat into the very hesitating orbit of [Hugh] Kenner." The "Kennerites," Dorn learned in our weekly departmental seminars, were quite shy of Olson: "This Dekker said you were a Barbarian." Dom traced the source of the prejudice to basic political leanings-and the intrinsic dishonesty of the academic mind. "The faculty-they're sneaking academic bastards too, i.e. hip academic people-shows itself to me like this: if you seem anticapitalish and no communist they try then to see if you're as sophisticated a fascist as them, like literate and humane, dig you've got to be intelligent, and if you fail that sensual test you come out Zap! barbarian." He told Olson he had to tread a fine line of neutrality. "I just couldn't get stuck as the champion explainer of your to them (the faculty) abstruse points."

He felt little more sympathy with the department's Oxbridge-bred "liberal" wing, as he told his former teacher. "You can't imagine, or I suppose you can and did already but these types think you Use words, like wait a minute! ... Or, they got objections, which is even cornier. I thought at first because they were more 'intelligent' than the academic[s] I'd been used to in Idaho they were more interesting, but I dig now they're only more boring. I mean that objection is a bottomless well; they call it their `training.' I get so damn pulled apart trying to keep it straight because they are nice men and in no simple sense-they think because the Labor candidate yesterday in Hull won the biggest majority since 1945 everything is simply going to groove."

A poem Dorn gave me for Once, the first of a series of mimeograph magazines I'd be bringing out at Essex, showed him doing with his writing what he'd done in all his previous nomadic removals: trying to locate himself in the new place through a close reading of its cultural landscape, history and geography. Titled "A provisional fragment," the poem represented the cultural and historical meanings he'd detected in the air and under his feet during his first months in Colchester. His subject was the confrontation of autonomous local authority with the imposed authority of Empire. He linked the imperialist armies of Rome invading ancient Britain with those of America invading Southeast Asia in the mid-y6os: "Elephants at the Balkerne Gate. . . Elephants south of Saigon, under the lazy dog bomb." The heroine of the poem was the local revolutionary Queen Boadicea, celebrated by Dorn for her symbolic-and violent-- resistance against Empire. When he gave me the poem he told me he feared it might be too bookish. He'd been studying up on the history of Roman Colchester in C. F. C. Hawk's Camulodunum, he said. But there was as always a personal poetic motive informing his studies. His own relation to place was the determining interest. The old Balkerne Gate stood just up the street from his first English home, a Tudor-style cottage next to a rook-- haunted churchyard on Lexden Road, the last stage in the ancient Roman thoroughfare from London to Colchester.

"Colchester is an old Roman town," Dorn reported to Olson during this phase of preliminary investigation. His letter glossed his first "English" poem. "The wall is nice and largely intact. Claudius as you might know took this place first in the reconquest. I guess there was no re- to it, Caesar had no intention like that when he came. But I thought of Claudius the other night when I was looking out the window onto Lexden Road, which went to Stone Street and thence to London, a main Roman street. He had elephants with him when he led the attack. A.D. 43. And then that nasty Queen Boadicea sacked Camulodunum and tore the heads off all the figures of that deified Emperor." Six months later, on the first warm day of their first English springtime, he hiked with Helene up the road to a pub located at the site of the Balkerne Gate. As they basked at an outdoor table in the welcome sunshine, Dorn felt his mind adrift in an ancient past that was suddenly close and tangible, "saw it and heard it, like right under my feet.... Claudius and his chariots & whores were real to me, I could smell the dust."

Such moments of virtual presence were gleaned out of an overriding sense of cultural distance. Poking around the town, and trying to find himself at home in it, while yet so far from home, Dorn remained on the lookout for any signs of a familiar world. The son of a grain-rich prairie that had sustained an empire's growth, he decided (as he would later relate) that Colchester's parallel historical geoeconomic role as an imperial breadbasket made it a place he could understand-and thus survive. "Colchester is an old Roman grain port. It's where the Romans got their grain, in which respect the province of Essex is very much like Iowa, or Illinois or southern Wisconsin.... So Colchester was a Roman garrison then a British garrison. It was a grain port, and it's still a grain port. In Colchester, I could walk down the street and cross over the Roman wall, still largely intact, and actually know quite a bit about what was going on for the last couple of thousand years. The emotional and the psychological bedding that that gave one to work was just incalculable. To get connected with something Tacitus was talking about made things a lot more exciting. There was a woman named Boadicea here who rode into the marketplace and with her sword took off the head of the Emperor Claudius which had been put up by the Romans as a local deity. So, revolution was in the air. It was ... the mid-Sixties."

It would take Dorn a while yet to find-or forge-- a place for himself in local revolution. In the meantime the rather staid day-to-day life of the provincial town would have to do. In the parlance of his neighbors "the local" meant not a geographical concept but the pub across the road. And indeed the poet spent many idle-hours that first year at one such establishment, which moreover was located literally right across the road. One night after we'd flung many darts and consumed a pint or two he tried to explain the pub mystique in a letter to Olson. "Does this sound terribly dull? It sort of does doesn't it. But I assure you the Nation, England, is backward and funny but alert in some weird way and it is mostly a strange pleasure to be here."

Still he admitted the secret to the amazing drinking habits of the British remained as yet beyond his ken. He told Olson about the amusing queries he and Helene had received from some neighbors they'd invited to a party following a reading at the university by an American visitor, Tom Parkinson. "These English types are purists-we invited a few of the townspeople (as well as university faculty) ... they all according to their own lights tried to find out if they had to go to the reading in order to come to the party (read: drink Booze). My gracious wife s[ai]d no, of course not! Oh wow! Charles this is a weird place-this is the Home of Alcoholism -and yet they, as a nation, keep the drinking places closed-they open around ii am then close 2:30 pm (the pubs that is) then open ab[ou]t 6 pm and dose 11 pm (Sunday 10 or 10:30)-the consequence is they drink like motherfuckers in their Homes -and the English have Homes! And strangely the drunker they get the more sober they seem to get & hence the funnier & stuffier as 'English' they are. I often think I've yet to really see thru any one of them."

"Seeing through" me, on the other hand, was easier for him: we shared a world view, he believed, because we hailed from a common glacial swath. ("We're from the same alluvial fan," he would say to me in a late letter, meaning there were certain things that did not have to be explained between us, and that separated us from others.) By Dorn's culture-geographic reckoning of character, he himself was an escaped sod buster from the tall-corn prairie, I-as he would inform Olson in a late January 1966 letter-"a sharp kid in many ways, a Chicago buster as we used to call 'em, anyway he has a kind of edge of intelligence, spontaneous and practical like how many apples are in the basket and if you take, etc., [which] I like in the middle of the English mind which still is in the more immediate and important ways therefore strange, initially, to me. So we whoop it up once in a while."

We did do a fair share of harmless time-passing according to our lights; hanging out at his house, the pub across the road, the no-frills campus pub at the university, or in his university office, where the whooping got a quantum boost from reel-to-- reel tapes of highlights of the 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference-Olson, Ed Sanders, Robert Duncan, Ted Berrigan, et al.-played over and over on a banged-up recorder that had survived many an epic Dorn journey. As Ed didn't have a car, he was able to visit my own digs in the sleepy fishing village but once, and that only by force of circumstance, one night when he had stayed too late at a party out in the wilds beyond the university and had to hike home with me all the way to the coast. By the time we got to Brightlingsea he was so infuriated by the remoteness of the place and the primitiveness of the accommodations-he'd by then had enough of that sort of thing to last a lifetime-that he refused ever to consider returning.

Once when I'd missed the last bus from Colchester to Brightlingsea the Dorris hospitably returned the favor by offering me the floor of their low-beamed front room to sleep on. I awoke to the flutterings of rooks in the sycamores and bucolic sounds of cowbells from the pastures beyond the adjacent Lexden churchyard. Out the window, North Sea mists were still drowning everything close to the ground. From the other side of the house, where Ed kept his writing office, I heard the intermittent clicking of his typewriter, interrupted periodically by the loud opening guitar chords of the Beatles song "Paperback Writer." He had appropriated his kids' copy of the 45, with "Day Tripper" on the other side, and had evidently discerned the sound of coming revolution. He would type for a while, then play the Lennon-McCartney tune again. His hipster's disdain of pop music had been suspended to entertain a change of sensibility. He already had an inkling he wanted to be part of that change, perhaps.

Change was in the air, Dorn had been caught up in it. His writing and thinking of the time reflect a new sense of the possible relations between poetry, pop culture and history, including personal history. The creative, subversive and revolutionary activities of poet Ed Sanders provided him a significant example. Dom had been strongly affected by his encounter with Sanders at the Berkeley Poetry Conference. He greatly enjoyed the outrageous comedy of the Fugs, and also admired the curious phenomenon of Sanders's instant celebrity. "Whereas movie stars think of themselves as movie stars, Ed Sanders is a movie star," he wrote in a report on current cultural developments for The Wivenhoe Park Review ("The outcasts of Foker Plat: News from the States"). "A true Fug-star," Sanders appeared in Dorn's view the forerunner of a New Reformation. "Ed Sanders is John Wyclif 1380 announcing the end of transubstantiation, or the beginning, which[ever] way you choose to look at it." Suggesting Sanders's "Total Assault on the Culture" qualified him as a genuine radical dissenter in the great tradition of the Protestant Revolution, Dorn quoted in full the Fugs song "Coca Cola Douche." "I'm obviously turned on by the paradoxical aspects of thinking," he would say a few years later. His connecting Sanders with Wyclif, he now paradoxically contended, represented "no special conflict." "Groping is not violent, but it isn't, equally, non-violent."

Staying with his paradoxical linking of Reformation history and Sixties Revolution as he turned later in the essay to Robert Duncan's poem about student protests at Berkeley, Dom boldly traced the origins of that rough beast, "the Multiversity," back beyond the current suppression of academic freedoms through the Oxford town vs. gown battles of the fourteenth century to the "real hydras," the twin heads of arbitrary power and centralized authority. In what Dom described as a kind of archetypal historical "dash" over the sites of learning, the true heroes had consistently been those dissenting "academicians who defended the liberties of their university against papal interference." In the current struggle only the names and "cover" of the agencies of repressive control had changed; the real malign identities remained. "What in our day, is the Pentagon if not the Papacy. It is also the Church. Everyone must have noticed on TV what a fine pair the Pope and Johnson made."

This particular fine point of paradox seemed less seriously meant at the time than it now appears in light of the later course of Dorn's thought and writing, in which his counterposed convictions regarding his own "Protestant" dissenter heritage and the historical evils of the Papacy evolved into something resembling a fixation. At once an expression of a deeply ingrained habit of mind and a deliberately cultivated rhetorical strategy, Dorn's insistent embrace of such paradoxical or "difficult" positions in his work of the later Sixties anticipates the against-the-grain quality of his highly individualized intellectual presence of later years-"a relentlessly perverse skepticism," as his University of Colorado colleague and friend Peter Michelson terms it, "practiced with something like philosophical discipline ... and bordering on being its own faith." The pure products of that perverse approach would include the self-proposed "unrelenting dryness and stiffness of the moral rigidity" of Abhorrences (a "corrective" gesture in epigrammatic verse meant to counteract "the abysm of greed ... the moral nadir ... the abandonment to banality" of the 1980s); the impassioned, courageous defense of heresy (historical, and, by implication, personal), of Languedoc Variorum; and the challenging, often confrontational, sometimes downright outrageous conversational style that would earn the later Dorn the dread of fools wherever he went. A "cranky cantankerous contrarian," as longtime friend Anselm Hollo would fondly describe him, Dorn was "as dialectical as they come (and then some), conversation with him was always or as long as I can remember (back to the Sixties) a matter of testing the interlocutor's received ideas, or ideas Ed suspected of being such. Almost any take endorsed by the U.S. media, and perhaps especially by the 'liberal' wing of same, was instantly suspect, and Ed's m. o. was to assume the diametrically opposed position."

Dom's obsessive phobia involving the President and the Pope is a prime instance of the contrarian disposition to which Hollo refers. One recalls the vigorous anti-papist paranoia and prejudice of his later hero Milton, lamenting in Areopagitica (a text he would propound in his late teaching) how "the Popes of Rome engrossing what they pleased of Political rule into their hands, extended their dominion over men's eyes." See, for the full flowering of this attitude, Dorn's remarkable 1999 death-watch poem, "Chemo du Jour: The Impeachment on Decadron"-written during a chemotherapy infusion shortly after his first visit to Rome-in which the Roman Pope and American President (in this case, Clinton) converge in a hallucinated TV image, the poet's nightmare vision of the Terror of Authority. "Ever since his initial recognition in 19 54 of the potential of the proliferating one-eyed beast of the "antenna forest" to indefinitely self-replicate, producing more and more monsters in its own image, television had appeared to Dorn an insidious-- and dangerous-form of thought control.

"What is freedom but choice?" asked Milton. The televised sporting event, the Hollywood western-- forms of public myth, popular democratic spectacle -were the vehicles Dorn chose, in several important transitional poetic efforts of 1966, for discovering the meanings of an intense sense of cultural distance brought on by his self-exile from America. The modes of expression he now adopted-comic, ironic, dramatic-ran stubbornly counter to- the painfully singular and earnest sincerity that had distinguished his earlier work.

That summer he provided "coverage," after his decidedly idiosyncratic fashion, of the World Cup soccer series, for two issues of my ongoing mimeograph magazine series, Thrice and Slice. He'd become intrigued, as he told me, by the idea that poems might be not only new but "news"-instant, topical, immediate. (A fewyears later, when he started a periodical called Bean News, he would reverse the assignment, appointing me his sports reporter.) The results were two long, windy "Quarters," plus an extended "Half-time Script," of a poem of some 800 extremely elongated lines titled "Box Score" (this fragment, all he would complete of the work, appears in his 1983 Collected Poems under the title "World Box-score Cup of 1966"). The broadly funny polyphonic political-satire "sportscast" narrated the contemporary struggle between the "Haves" of the "Developed World" and the underdeveloped "Havenots" in the mutated voices of broadcasters remembered from the poet's mid-American past, Bill Stern ("Stern Bill") and Harry Caray ("Harry Kamikaze"). "It represents an initial attempt to get speech into a poem but still inside that narrative thing which has hung with me all along," Dorn would later say of the "Box Score" experiment. "Tom Clark wanted some poems, so I just wrote them. I thought I'll try this out. It seemed like an immediate sort of situation. He'd just mimeograph them ... it was very quick. I carried that on until it didn't interest me any more. I was just trying to make a sportscaster talk in a plausible way, not about sports necessarily, but to turn that into another kind of latitude.... By that time I had become very convinced that the direct onslaught in that sober sense of the political poem was not only very boring but completely valueless." The exploration of "another kind of latitude"-that supplied by the dialogic imagination-would make this abandoned project a significant learning experience for Dom, a prelude to new freedoms to come. The internal competition or conversation of voices in Gunslinger, as it would turn out, would be not quite new for Dom, having been rehearsed in the quick, casual, low-pressure site of experiment that was "Box Score."

By this time the Dom family had been wandering from place to place for so long that the lack of a stable home had almost achieved the status of a family joke-"we've been married all these years and we still don't have a pot to put on a window," Ed would tell Olson. In that summer of 1966 they moved from the small but bucolic Lexden Road cottage to a larger, rather gloomy Victorian Gothic flat nearer the center of town, on Victoria Road. The place was dark and chilly, with interior effects out of Poe's "The Raven," or perhaps a scene from The Addams Family: "high ceilings-great windows" and "cobwebs built in." It was never quite comfortable to inhabit. In poetic terms, however, the domestic atmosphere, conjured by Dom in a letter to Olson as cinematically spooky ("I would reckon this flat to be CRYPTO-DANO-IRISH-- TRANSYLVANIAN REVIVAL") would provide an entirely appropriate stage for the theatrical entry, in the poem "An Idle Visitation," an enigmatic 114-- line dramatic narrative written early in the family's only winter there, of a mysterious visionary gunslinging stranger. That apparitional visitor's knock upon the poet's chamber door would spark the brilliant, bewildering seven-year epic comedy of Gunslinger, a work credited by Dom's fellow poet Robert Duncan as a major breakthrough from "the poetry of process or organism" to a new genre-bending mixed-media poetry having "to do with scenario and masque" and driven by the verbal devices of "a screen-narrative voice that takes off as a movie scenario [in] the Western, Marx Brothers style." The project would develop the polyphonic narrative technique Dom had tentatively experimented with in "Box Score" into a creation of another scale altogether, one that would bring him temporary fame and be proclaimed by novelist Thomas McGuane "a fundamental American masterpiece."

"It came with no thought at all," Dom later said of "An Idle Visitation." "That particular poem just came and I wrote it and I didn't know what I was doing. In fact, it was very peculiar for me to have done . . . later reading it I thought that it, in fact, was a due to a chamber of my mind that I wanted to go into very much ... I did want to make another exploration."

From reading Dorn's poetry and editing it (for The Paris Review as well as for my own modest mimeograph productions) I'd learned that his signature form of lyric realism, variously tender and tough but always and above all true, was a style that had never allowed much room for making things up. Yet as was immediately evident, in "An Idle Visitation" he was doing exactly that. An indication of the novelty for him of this surprising "Visitation" came in the early December 1966 note that accompanied it and another occasional poem Dom gave me at the same time for Spice, my latest mimeo venture. "Here are two for Spice," he wrote. "The cowboy one I don't know what to make of yet, which I'm choosing to take as a good sign."

The second poem in the package was "A Notation on the Evening of November 27, 1966." This poem, which he indicated had been the first of the two to come to him, provides a useful anecdotal gloss on the origin of the gunslinger figure. "A Notation" was written on a night of watery moonlight and chilling North Sea mists, after we'd gone with some student friends "to see / an old classic flick at the Odeon" in downtown Colchester. Ed's poem was about senses of home, an issue of no little complexity for him at that time.

The moon is a rough coin tonight

full but screened by lofty moisture

bright enough to make sure

of the addresses

on the letters I drop in the red pillar box

Frost is on the streets. A soft winter breeze

comes from the North Sea into my nostrils

I am at home here only in my mind

that's what heritage is.

Turning the corner, only our windows

along the ribbon of road are lit

I know that my wife has gone to bed

and that the gas is burning

and that my heart and my veins

are burning for home. Yet those abrupt times

I hear the voice of home

I am shocked, the hair on my neck

crawls.

The haunting "voice of home" that particular evening spoke in a confusing multiplicity of accents. The movie we'd seen was The Magnificent Seven. A gunslinging re-make of Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai by John Sturges, a master of the cowboy-picture genre, this spectacular, romantically lyrical Western had a different look for Dom at his present remove from America and all that was most-familiar.

The magnificent seven introducing

Horst Buchholz, I'd seen it before

and had not got it that a german

played a mexican, of course!

An American foreigner is every body

navajoes play iroquois

the American myth is only "mental" a foreigner

is Anybody. Theoretically at least

an Italian could play

an English man or a London jew

if nobody knew.

Tom and Jenny were there

and Nick Sedgwick.

Tom remarked, on the evidence of

the last scene when the Mexican

Japanese said Vaya con Dios

and Yul said a simple adios,

"that was philosophical."

Then the five of us went home

singing Frijoles!

twirling our umbrellas

and walking like wooden legged men in a file

one foot in the gutter

the other-on the sidewalk.

The "I do this, I do that" occasional quality of this relaxed account shows Dorn deliberately letting down his rhetorical guard-or anyway seeming to do so. In fact the casual nonchalance of the poem is to a large extent a calculated appearance; the poet, as often before, is wandering to a purpose. The subtle weave of rhymes-streets / breeze / Sea; Dios / adios / home / Frijoles!; jew / knew / Yul-represents a vintage Dom lyrical tactic, concealing an intuitive but real formal pattern within apparent informality. Far from casual, the poem's implications of cultural displacement indirectly signal the poet's real burden, a problematic confusion of identity.

In its foregrounding of cross-cultural identity dilemmas "A Notation" may offer some hints as well about the equally complicated question of the identity of the fictional hero of its companion poem -the gunslinger of "An Idle Visitation." A composite image, part stock figure, part personal projection, that hero may have at least "accidental" origins in The Magnificent Seven, the hidden link that connects these two poems. Over a post-movie dinner of curry at a Colchester Indian restaurant that late-- November evening we had discussed the code of conduct of the Hollywood Samurai, a matter which Ed insisted, in typical out-on-a-limb fashion, had been treated satirically in the film. In further debate on the comparative merits of those lethal dudes' six-shooter techniques, he adjudged the anxious, edgy, elegant quick-draw delivery of the character portrayed by Robert Vaughn "impeccable"-as I remember-while those played by Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Charles Bronson and Yul Brynner also received style points. Trivia buffs may harmlessly or perhaps even usefully ponder just which movie cowboy's "slender leather encased hands" made their way into "An Idle Visitation." With this author the proverbial categorical boundary line between "real" and represented worlds was around this time becoming less and less immutable: the "ritual of my own person" that in a 1968 prose sketch ("Driving Across the Prairie") Dom cited as his private form of salvation included a curiously privatized relation to his own writings, which seemed for these years paradoxically to incorporate more and more of his "inside real" existence the more cosmically provocative and "outsidereal" they became. Thus, in a similarly literal reading, it's possible to discover numerous points of nexus between the gunslinger's otherwise obscure statements about his experiences in "An Idle Visitation" and Dorn's own biography-as when the poetic stranger, explaining the exhausted condition of his horse and himself, the result of covering "the enormous space / between here and formerly ... we have come / without sleep from Nuevo Laredo," comes very close to describing a particularly stressful chapter in the author's extra-textual personal history, a frantic 1955 exodus across the Sonoran deserts from Mexico City to the Rio Grande.

However, though it's possible to begin to get a referential handle of sorts on the gunslinger figure here in Dorn's early presage, that purchase does not last us very far into what would become an often difficult, sometimes imponderable poem. In its subsequent unfolding into comic romance, epic comedy or mock epic- Dorn's project would increasingly defy or evade conventional genre boundaries as well-the poem's far-traveling hero, here first encountered up close, at a "metropolitan nearness," "in a foreign land," would expand into a character of mythic, even cosmic presence, his interesting movements across the fluid elastic distances of the verbal range not only keeping "the sun, the moon and some of the stars" in their courses but concurrently governing the entire enlarged metaphysical dimension of a text whose deepest engagement, directly opposing that of Dorn's earlier work, is with not geography but ontology . . "a movie scenario in the Western, Marx Brothers style" whose props and jokes would include the philosophies of Parmenides and Heidegger.

In Dorn's persistent comic confrontation with Being, the personal elements of the early start on the large poem would gradually become diluted into its whole meaning; in the end the personal significance of the apparitional stranger in "An Idle Visitation" must remain, like almost everything else about the Gunslinger project, impossible to discriminate, open to speculation. The 1966 newborn "cautious Gunslinger / of impeccable personal smoothness," carrying in his slender gloved hands a rolled-up "map of love" (later the poet would revise this to a "map of locations," thus burying from view a clue to his poem's personal emotional meaning) appears in the light of retrospect a bearer of diverse private runes and auguries-the figure of Dorn's future, arriving at his door?

TOM CLARK's latest books are White Thought (The Figures) and The Spell: A Romance (Black Sparrow). His biography of Edward Dorn is due out in February 2002 from North Atlantic Books.

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Jan/Feb 2002
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