The Lyrics of Ed Dorn [Part III]

Ed Dorn [1929-1999] had a lean, rugged visage, the kind that Hollywood has always loved, sort of the Clint Eastwood look. The "rugged, lean" hero, the tall, silent type, a loner, wary of compromise, with private codes of honor and simplicity, independence and toughness, secretly romantic, successful in love, a failure in society. 

 

In some fairly obvious ways, the real Ed Dorn, the poet, was a little like this. He was difficult in may ways, sarcastic, severe, cranky, with several personal demons. An uncompromising recalcitrance is often expressed as a gestural flair in his early poems, work in which he appears to have been trying to define himself, while exercising his facility, showing off his talent.          

 

 

This precocious lyrical virtuosity underwent transformations during his middle age, as he became increasingly preoccupied with radical ideation and somewhat disillusioned. As his view of the world became more cynical, the content of his work began to reflect a frustration with the effects of traditional nativist symbols and modes. He had always written and thought about the settlement of the American West, but his sense of its usefulness as subject-matter changed over time. The first phase of his work shows in a poem like--

 

 

Vaquero

 

The cowboy stands beneath

a brick-orange moon. The top

of his oblong head is blue, the sheath

of his hips

is too.

 

In the dark brown night

your delicate cowboy stands quite still.

His plain hands are crossed.

His wrists are embossed white.  

  

In the background night is a house,

has a blue chimney top,

Yi Yi, the cowboy's eyes

are blue. The top of the sky

is too. 

  

  

--from the late 1950's. This diverting, cliché'd, cartoonish portrait might be of a motorcycle dude standing outside a bar in Laramie--all effect and no substance. Which is often how Dorn thought of the American West, a tawdry habitation, scrub and scrabble, cheap and phony, a forlorn aspect. This vision would in due course be converted into the graphic surrealism of his pop Western meta-epic Gunslinger. "Vaquero" in fact seems like a kind of early profile of Gunslinger, a character in search of a story. The dry pan of the plains--Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Nebraska, Montana, Washington, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Kansas, Texas--informs many of Dorn's sweetest lyrics, made out of the arid clarity of desert air, the lost expanse of space, the flat bottom basin. 

 

 

Daffodil Song

 

The horns of yellow

        on this plain resound

    and the twist on the air

of their brilliance

                            Say where

say where I will find find

a love

             or an arabesque

of such rash fortune.  

 

 

Love Song

 

        for Lucia

Captured, her beauty

would not leave her

thus inclined by the railing

she never lifted her head

from the waters

a blue gull drifts

         she moves from the rapture

of the ascending fog.

Lost in the moving passengers

she left the ship

and entered the city. 

 

 

Song

 

Oh Gods of my disembarked soul this is sad

a merriment of unteachable waywordness

I tell you the gleaming eye

is a mirror of

                         the green hills

where love struggles

                                      against the drought

in the desert

in the spring

in the quickness

of the fresh bush

                  over the cove.

 

 

As with Cummings, Dorn's twin concerns--romantic lyricism (or lyric romance)--and biting sarcasm (or burlesque, or diatribe)--usually seem mutually exclusive, repelling any resolution, like the opposite ends of a magnet. As here, in

 

 

Parlor Car Beer

 

They look coach, in the morning

pants wrinkled.

And I am coach, CHICAGO spelled out

across my front teeth.

Don't want to be sleeper.

 

     They 

look sleeper

coming in from the other end, the

dirty & tired

have a beer

with the rested & clean.

 

     Get this:

we talked of the all England

ice skating championships, 1959

     How

some skills pass the understanding

of the uninitiated

right in the middle of Nebraska.

 

 

--where the satiric voice dominates an otherwise High American Gothic train poem, complete with sleeper cars and a parlor car scene. The parlor car beer trope, one might say, the symbol of a whole way of life passed inexorably into history, which the hip poet--his prickly hyper-sensitive feelers set to the dud frequency of decadent mid-century dilapidation--summarizes as a Wild Wild West in true television consciousness.

 

The great thing about Dorn, what sets his work apart from 99% of the rest of the poets of his time--especially those domiciled west of Chicago--is his refusal to cash in on, to invest in the romance of, the American Dream of the "West." Even as he abandons the straightforward lyric voice for the camp satire of Gunslinger in the 1960's, his view of America, even when bizarrely exaggerated and weird, is so much truer to its spirit, than, say, the work of William Stafford, or Rexroth, or Snyder. For those other poets, the West was what one might make of it--their effort was not unlike the exploiters and frontiersmen of the 19th and early 20th Centures, for whom the wide-open spaces represented opportunity, raw material, and several kinds of ethical potential which might do service as aesthetic properties. But for Dorn, the West wasn't a mystical notion, or dreamscape of future fulfillment. He saw its ugliness as our ugliness, its ambition and selfishness as expressions of intent, not as the accidental or unfortunate accompaniments of a greater vision, cooked up in New England or Virginia and packaged for immediate delivery to a waiting audience. The pollution and waste were us, we had made them, there was no place to hide, no one to blame, no ethic of "wilderness" and "stewardship" to salve our complacent consciences. 

 

If Dorn became bitter and thorny in later age, it may be observed that he had been driven by these realizations into emotional or artistic dead-ends. But these were certainly truer places to have come to, than the easy condolence and tired resolutions of the mildly coerced. If Dorn came in the end to see villains and devils under rocks, that paranoia may be understood in the context of the total annexation of half a continent, by a people selfish and pompous beyond imagining.     

You can see in the man's early lyrics a loveliness and sternness, an innocence and loneliness that are purer than anything.