tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660090614793277371.post6071344616460991917..comments2024-03-19T21:14:01.007-07:00Comments on The Compass Rose: The Lyrics of Ed Dorn [Part III]Curtis Favillehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06213075853354387634noreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660090614793277371.post-55086078265204258082010-10-10T08:35:07.070-07:002010-10-10T08:35:07.070-07:00Actually, the guy I studied with I think his name ...Actually, the guy I studied with I think his name was Colin Walcott (in the band Oregon). I also studied with Jerry Granelli, who later ended up teaching at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. I thought I would learn something about rhythm that I could apply to poetry, but I don't think I learned anything applicable. I liked those guys and those classes, but should have done more poetry classes. I really wish I had taken Ed Sanders' course.<br /><br />I just felt I might get burned out at the time taking so many courses.Kirby Olsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05952289700191142943noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660090614793277371.post-86995526070391630252010-10-10T07:06:22.885-07:002010-10-10T07:06:22.885-07:00Dorn was at UC Boulder.
No shit. He taught Creat...Dorn was at UC Boulder.<br /><br />No shit. He taught Creative writing and on occasion lit. courses, which filled up quickly(We tried to add his course but it was booked up, mostly hot WASP schicksas). Dorn was regarded as an interesting jester --if regarded at all. The CU engineers/scientists/techies probably didn't know he existed. The jocks and CU athletic mafia would have liked to beat the sh*t out of him. The marxists and existentialists considered him a cowboy anarchist more or less--retrograde. The New Critics, tradition-mongerers, and shall we say Toynbee types considered him mad and dangerous like his beatnik-boodhist pals down in the gully at Nagropa . The poetics' life.<br /><br />(tho' apart from the drunken gurus and Bleat generation there were a few authentic jazz people at naropa--and what's a a freak like Burroughs or Ed Sanders compared to........ Coltrane, or Bill Evans).Jhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11567400697675996283noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660090614793277371.post-4587389497615152602010-10-09T15:29:05.136-07:002010-10-09T15:29:05.136-07:00Dorn was mainly a supporter of Clark and Sanders i...Dorn was mainly a supporter of Clark and Sanders in the G. Naropa Poetry Wars. To my knowledge, he never wrote directly on the fracas that Clark put into his book (now out of print, because Ginsberg asked Clark on his deathbed to let it go op), and Sanders put into his book The Party.<br /><br />Dorn was at UC Boulder, which is about a half mile from where Naropa had its campus at the time.<br /><br />I signed up for Clark's Poetry and investigation class for that summer, but it was cancelled. I should have transferred to Ed Sanders' class, which investigated everything (I knew a lot of people in the class, and talked with Sanders several times during that summer), but I took a course in jazz drumming instead from Jerry Granelli, who used to be in the band Oregon before he died on the Autobahn sometime in the eighties. <br /><br />So I only know of the phenomenon of what happened through those books, and what appeared in the local press that summer. <br /><br />Unlike many who only wanted to investigate the other side, Dorn, clark, and Sanders saw that their side could go bad, too. They had a journalistic credos that was different from the purely poetic side of things that the Beats were sworn to uphold.<br /><br />Clark, in particular, liked the pamphleting of Tom Pain (sic). Sanders lives about an hour away in Woodstock, where he still pamphlets on things like the use of salt on the roads. It's a kind of investigating that he continues -- it's a model out of journalism.<br /><br />How does this square with poetry? Just the facts, m'am, is part of poetry from Williams and the objectivists up through Black Mountain, and there are still some poets like these.<br /><br />Have women done this, too?<br /><br />Probably, but I don't know about it.Kirby Olsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05952289700191142943noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660090614793277371.post-1165406794433855012010-10-09T09:33:56.088-07:002010-10-09T09:33:56.088-07:00the personal is political as they say, and since K...the personal is political as they say, and since KO was making religious insinuations, I think it more than warranted to rebut them. He was more about outlaw persona <br />than actual outlaw. But no churchie, unless at the last few moments...Dorn hated the coors cowboys, the jockos and mormons who took over that pleasant freak village in the 80s<br /><br />his writing seems....sensitive...or per yr "'ism", romantic lyricism...ala DH Lawrence...still a hint of meter, isn't there---not the bric a brac school (Creeley et al). Ah..>Edward Abbey also an influence, and one of his cronies .Poetic im not but Dorn also seems a bit similar to Robinson Jeffers (a scribe Tom Clark tries to emulate at times as well. Mr Clark's a clever writer or was but he's not the final word on anything)<br /><br /> Dorn did write some about the ugliness of the WASP towns, and so forth . I remember the Boulder battles, Rolling Stock (tho' nagropa war before my time...maybe KO can fill us in on da details...oooo lalla lal lal alalala) and that's relevant to understanding Dorn.Jhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11567400697675996283noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660090614793277371.post-31081250791672445122010-10-09T09:20:50.539-07:002010-10-09T09:20:50.539-07:00J:
I don't think either one of us is in a po...J:<br /><br /><br />I don't think either one of us is in a position to speak authoritatively about Dorn's private life, or private character. One works backwards from the texts. Beyond that, there's the Tom Clark bio, and the rumors and anecdotes. <br /><br />I think it best if you read the work, and talked about that, since it's the subject of the post. <br /><br />I would love to have been a fly on the wall when he caroused with Thompson!Curtis Favillehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06213075853354387634noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660090614793277371.post-32372285178091534002010-10-09T09:14:23.082-07:002010-10-09T09:14:23.082-07:00Baloney. Dorn was friends with the natives, and u...Baloney. Dorn was friends with the natives, and usually condemning the western WASPs,their hypocrisy and their dreary puritan towns<br /><br /><br />The WASPishness may be part of the problem of his writing---sort of like John Wayne. <br /><br /><br />(and really Sir F., Dorn may look sort of macho in that pic (maybe from his chemo-days? ) but in terms of character he was sort of ...dandyish--some of his writing also...a bit sensitive. Drugstore cowboy, not ...a rogue or rowdy. There was a trace of a ...british accent to his voice . And...he was known to par-tay with Hunter S Thompson when Hunter rolled into Boulderberg....and BPD promptly notified. Also ...lets ask Ward Churchill about Dorn's politics...perhaps not perfectly PC and a bit anarchistic...but not with the GOP, or mormons or fratboy WASPs...)Jhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11567400697675996283noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660090614793277371.post-2451681598574112272010-10-09T08:49:48.824-07:002010-10-09T08:49:48.824-07:00Also, this one:
THE PROTESTANT VIEW
that eternal...Also, this one:<br /><br />THE PROTESTANT VIEW<br /><br />that eternal dissent<br />and the ravages of<br />faction are preferable<br />to the voluntary<br />servitude of blind<br />obedience.<br /><br />This is a big part of what animated him. <br /><br />I think it's also what drew he and Creeley and Charles Olson together. Creeley had been raised Baptist. He told me it still mattered to him. I never knew Charles Olson, but his Max is shot through with church references and wonderings. They never let go of the shores near Jerusalem. <br /><br />Tyre isn't that far to the north, even if it's currently in other hands. That notion of holdouts, against popular thinking. <br /><br />It's this heretical strain that united the Black Mountain poets. <br /><br />I don't think they knew this.Kirby Olsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05952289700191142943noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660090614793277371.post-45696768274925653162010-10-09T08:44:55.796-07:002010-10-09T08:44:55.796-07:00I relate to Dorn as a fellow Protestant. I think ...I relate to Dorn as a fellow Protestant. I think his meanness even is Protestant -- his attempt to SAY EVERYTHING, with no holding back, as a vision of honesty, fierce and unrelenting honesty. The first poem appears to me to be a description of a crayon drawing by a child. But note that the individual is present, the fierce honesty of an individual.<br /><br />By the last years, and in the last poems, his Protestantism is seeping up to the very surface.<br /><br />His honesty is something like Theo Van Gogh's in Amsterdam (the film maker who was stabbed for calling Muslims goat fuckers, among other things). Ian Burumi's book Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam and the Limits of Tolerance (Penguin, 2006), details this very Protestant and yet outlandish truthtelling in which the fierceness of the blast is evidence of its honesty, and thus evidence of its unbridled truthfulness, even among those who have somewhat lapsed from churchgoing itself, the trend continues and is perhaps even magnified by no longer being modified by a congregation, as splintered congregants confront their secularist, mad neighbors, and do so without the reminder of neighborliness, and confront other religious traditions (such as Islam, or Marxist feminism) with a vitriolic intolerance that is doubled by its hatred for religion, and specifically for any other religion.<br /><br />Dorn's final poems reference Luther, among others, as clear influences. In the biography, it becomes clear how important Dorn's childhood in Protestant churches was to him. We never quite get over those early influences, even if they morph into things nearly unrecognizable.<br /><br />"Religious wars are the only real wars" Way More West, 290.Kirby Olsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05952289700191142943noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1660090614793277371.post-49350973742662093252010-10-08T20:39:45.959-07:002010-10-08T20:39:45.959-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Jhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11567400697675996283noreply@blogger.com