Contemporary Pastoral

Page 29 November–December 2007 Olson continued from previous page sunny. Allen Ginsberg was continually on the make, but he was pure as a nun. Dorn’s writing is wildly entertaining and yet lyrical.Alice Notley says in a blurb that she’s “come to value his fullblown grace and crittery mean edge more and more since his death.” “Crittery” is right—he had his nose out like a coyote—his dinner would never be the gravy train— he was a survivor in open spaces, but “grace” is right, too. I love the solitary-desert feeling in Dorn’s work. I personally find it very different: no grand theories— Dale Smith writes in the excellent introduction, “he always argued for the principles of locality against the self-interests often embedded in social and political abstractions.” The early poems are almost beautiful. In “Vaquero ” he writes, 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. The collection opens with such a simple celebration of the open space and the singular cowboy. Dorn was never a collectivist. He preferred the anarchists to the communists, the solitaries to the glad-handers, the coyote to the cattle, the ranchers to the aesthetes. Even when his poems are beautiful, the first impression is that it’s like looking at reality through a gun-sight. There is no program in place. He makes quick assessments. He was never a Christian, but was for fundamentalists over secular progressives. [T]hey are enlightened compared to the progressives, who assume they must administer to those who have been forbidden by their God to submit to the argument that they are just an extension of the apes of the Leakeys and the Heart of Darkness. Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, southern Illinois to lower Mississippi , forget Alabama, from Brecht to von Braun—those plantations will never be beat into submission. They are impervious to engineering because they already have a culture extending from the 17th century, like the transplanted Africans who they understand, and with whom they sympathize. The wildness of these statements leads us into the wilderness of the unsettled and unsettling mind of Dorn. Had he come undone? No more so than in the beginning. And there is sense in it, and perhaps there is nonsense, too. For instance, in the last part of the sentence, he argues that the fundamentalist Christians sympathized with translated Africans. That’s clear: the abolitionists were often Calvinist firebrands. But how does he link rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and Bertolt Brecht except through alliteration and being German? Dorn was a puzzle: he enjoyed recalcitrance. He stood against the MLA, against the Catholic church, for Geronimo, for von Braun and Brecht, for fundamentalism, for the anarchists at Kronstadt, for poor miners, for the Cathars destroyed in the neighborhood of a million during the Inquisition, for Arabs destroyed in the Crusades, for outsiders of every kind. Here’s a short haiku from the middle period titled “Success?”: “I never had to worry about success / Coming from where I come from / You were a success the minute you left town.” I love the solitary-desert feeling in Dorn’s work. You don’t have to like Dorn to love the poems . They have to be read to be believed. There’s implacable wit. In the poem “The Octopus Thinks with Its Arms,” he describes a completely inhuman and unsentimental sex act between octopi which will never find its way into the canon of the greens: The male Octopus Vulgaris fucks by putting the tip of his third arm inside the mantle of the female who sits several feet away looking like Nothings Happening for about a half hour The females are impregnated before they are mature the spermatophores survive until the eggs are ripe Both animals are covered with vertical stripes during their session and move not at all. They say that creative people have their blinkers off and can see, therefore, what others would rather not. Dorn must have developed this in his insecure childhood moving a lot and trying to see what hit him before...