Kirjahaku

“Ed Dorn’s achievement has been to create single-handedly a language of public reference, and to have brought within the sphere of expressive language and poetic experience objects and feelings which had been, literally, unimaginable in those terms. It is in this context that he is one of the masters of our contemporary language.”—Peter Ackroyd“Ed was one of the most thoughtful but penetrating thinkers. There was no PollyAnna in him at all. And that’s what I liked about him.”—Amiri BarakaAlong with Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, William Carlos Williams, and others, Edward Dorn taught at and became associated with the Black Mountain school in North Carolina. Although influenced by Charles Olson, Dorn’s poetry was really like no other’s. The Virginia Quarterly Review called him “an experienced and accomplished poet who has absorbed Olson, Williams, and Pound and moved beyond them.” This book is especially important for the way it synthesizes Dorn’s views on poetic experimentation, the distinction between consciousness and sensibility, and “heretical” intellection, which is to say the components of his poetics of aggression.

As its title announces, this book collects two interviews with the American poet Edward Dorn (1929-99). 'The Peak Interview' (1971) was published in a Vancouver student newspaper and contains contributions from Ralph Maud and J.H. Prynne, among others. Following it is a selection of four texts from The Day & Night Report, Dorn's unpublished daybook from 1971. 'The Riverside Interview' (1981) was intended for publication in the Riverside Interviews series and is supplemented here with an introduction by Gavin Selerie, the interviewer. Following it is a selection of two chapters from Dorn's unpublished prose work Juneau in June (1980-81), as well as three uncollected poems from the English magazine Spectacular Diseases, 6 (1981).

Derelict Air gathers over 400 pages of previously uncollected poetry gleaned from ephemera, correspondence, and notebooks housed at numerous archives in the USA and UK. From Dorn's first Beat poems in 1952, to visionary juvenalia from his study at Black Mountain, to the long poems that were central to the development of the British Poetry Revival, and to translations of native texts from the Mayans and Aztecs, the transatlantic roots of Dorn's anti-capitalism are here fully visible. Robert Creeley wrote of Dorn that "No poet has been more painfully, movingly, political". Whereas Dorn's Collected Poems exhibits the poet that he became, Derelict Air reflects a career of becoming, full of unacknowledged successes in the diverse forms of the lyric, the pronouncement, the mock-epic, and the epigram. Recovering four lost books, Derelict Air significantly expands Dorn's oeuvre, including impassioned outbursts written during the Cuban missile crisis, illustrated bucolics for an unfinished children's book, "confetti poems" meant to shower the 1968 DNC, outtakes from his sci-fi epic Gunslinger, and a relentless extension of his nineties "stock ticker". Complete with scholarly endnotes, manuscript facsimiles, and a cover by the painter Raymond Obermayr, this substantial offering of Edward Dorn's poetry is a must-have for any reader interested in post-War American modernism.

The first definitive collected edition of American poet Edward Dorn s writings, this irrepressibly offbeat volume marries the old West with American counterculture. As it celebrates Dorn s epic poem "Gunslinger, "this collection which is both wonderfully resourceful in tone and idiom puts Edward Dorn on an equal footing with his masters."

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.