Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn: The Collected Letters

Preface

Preface xiv I say this because for my generation that stuff with Eliot and Pound, though we had admired them earlier, was part of the reason that we came to think and write the way that we did, because we were putting both restraints of their excellence as well as the simplemindedness of their social backwardness behind us. It was Ginsberg who I wrote to at Git le Couer in Paris when I moved to the lower East Side asking him was he for real on a piece of toilet paper. He replied he was but he was tired of being Allen Ginsberg. He used a better grade of toilet paper. He also sent me lists of poets who I should contact and ask for poems, he also sent me some of his own. The list was actually a menu for what would some years later form the core of The New American Poetry, edited by good friend Don Allen. The magazine thus began as a loose amalgam of new young writers, eclectic and fresh. By Yugen 4, which features a cover by Black Mountain’s Fielding Dawson, there was a less eclectic but still diverse grouping of poets, but now with a more conscious attempt to work with writers from what I had now perceived as different schools. ThereweretheBeats,Ginsberg,Corso,Kerouac,Burroughs;TheSanFranciscoSchool, Whalen, Snyder, Duncan, Lamantia & younger ones like Loewinsohn and Meltzer; The Black Mountain folk Creeley, Olson, Dorn, and their acolytes Finstein, Oppenheimer , Sorrentino, Early, and the New York School, O’Hara, Koch. And while the first issues of Yugen included several Black poets, Allen Polite who had been my high school hero and 1st mentor in Greenwich Village, and Tom Postell, a surrealist from Cincinnati who went into Bellevue, from the third issue on all the poets except LeRoi Jones were white. I had thought to bring those various schools together in a sort of United Front against the tired academic poetry that dominated the establishment reviews. Interestingly enough, I wrote a defense of the so called Beat Generation in Partisan Review, in answer to Norman Podhoretz who most recently has been one of Bush’s Certified nincompoops. So you see it was not just a few of the New American Poets who became “Political” as a silly man has written recently criticizing Dorn. During the Yugen run which went to 8, I began publishing separate volumes under the rubric of Totem Press, and then in collaboration with the 8th street bookstore , Ted and Eli Wilentz, we began Totem/Corinth Press and published some of the most important young writers of the time. Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder, Whalen, Sorrentino, Oppenheimer, O’Hara (w/ a cover by Larry Rivers), Loewinsohn, di Prima, and Ed Dorn’s first volume, The Newly Fallen. What was most impressive to me about the work was Ed’s breathing lyricism, not vatic or from the pulpit of some chosen emotional “I,” but a simple saying, some heartfelt observation. As disciplined as we were then by Olson and Creeley, since the poets I ran with every day downtown and got wittily wired with were indeed their sworn posse, it was Dorn’s “What I see in the Maximus Poems” that intrigued me. That here was one of the insiders, a Black Mountain voice who spoke of a way into Maximus and a self determined way beyond. Remember Fee Dawson and Joel Preface xv Oppenheimer used to crash in my house on the far west side regularly, I mean crash. Painter, Basil King, Sorrentino, Finstein—all BM troops—and I used to swallow tons of ale at the Cedar Tavern, along with O’Hara, Kline, de Kooning, Norman Bluhm, Bob Thompson. I had published Olson’s “Projective Verse” as a separate volume and “Proprioception ” in the magazine. I had gone to Gloucester to see Charles a couple times and talked into the mornings about America and indeed about the “Western World.” So his prescription of a poetry that reached beyond the bounds of literary obsession were hard in my thinking. He was talking about a poetry that used history and place as an engine to wrest meaning from the present. To see how now got to be now and where was it going and where had it been. At the time, these were the most important theoretical directions that I took seriously to heart. Plus the general celebration of Williams was important...