Collected Poems: 1956–1974 by Edward Dorn, and: Gathering The Tribes by Carolyn Forché (review)

70 Western American Literature The Collected Poems: 1956-1974. By Edward Dorn. (Bolinas, Calif.: Four Seasons Foundation, 1975. 277 pages, $5.00 paper, $10.00 clothbound.) Gathering The Tribes. By Carolyn Forche. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. 58 pages, $1.95 paper, $6.00 doth.) Volume 71 of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Here are two poetic generations, the generations who succeeded the great modernists; they represent, then, the history of American poetry in the last twenty years or so— the first poems of Dorn reprinted here came out originally in 1956; Forche’s book w7 as published in 1976. There are differences, of course, despite both’s writing out of the spoken word and making use of an occasional surrealism or deliberate confusion of language. Dorn isobviously the more considerable of the two at the moment, but this is no guarantee of permanence. There w'ould have been a time when Dorn might have been called Beatnik; he himself suggests a sense of a spiritual link with the Beats. But he is essentially Black Mountain and Black Mountain was not Beat: Walt Whitman and that American tradition did not have that much effect. Black Mountain is not anti-Modernist, although it is anti-Eliot, whose sin seems more cultural and political than poetic, despite his “anti-personal” esthetic. Dorn’s poetry is personal, some­ times nearly confessional, although never so in the manner of Ginsberg nor, for that matter, of Lowell. It is also often deeply felt. But it is learned, even pedantic, smacking of Olson who echoed Pound — and, despite certain critics, Pound’s meaningful tradition was purely European. Dorn’s refer­ ences to Heorot, Schliemann, Hector, Zeno of Elea, Fenrir, etc., demand our knowledge as Europeans; the death of Meriwether Lewis in “Death While Journeying” gives him an American subject but it is treated as though it were something else. Too, Dorn’s poetry runs to the abstract; he generalizes easily, makes “ideas,” fitting himself far more into an intellectual Establish­ ment than he seems to want to admit. Even “Gunslinger,” the “dramatic narrative” that isn’t reprinted here, isn’t that particularly dramatic. True, the content of Dorn’s poetry is morally correct American; it has the positive virtues of asserting the values of the land against its exploiters; it attacks all the anti-life disvaluers. But too often these positive moral attitudes do not serve the poetry; or, rather, the poetry does not always serve these moral attitudes, for most of the poems expressing anti-war opinions, liberal racial attitudes, are sincere but hardly realized; they are the voices of the crowd, not the poet. Where wit could have saved more of Dorn’s poetry, he is remarkably uncomic: a poem like “The World Box-Score of 1966” is dreadful. Good political poetry must be earned; Dorn has tried to steal his. But this is all extreme. Dorn can write movingly, especially when he concentrates on the image, as in “Six Views from the Same Window of the Northside Grocer.” There we truly experience the poem. But Dorn isn’t a thinker; he shouldn’t try to write as one. Reviews 71 Carolyn Forché’s ambitions seem much less lofty. And her poems are accordingly less daring but more often successful. The first section of her book, “Burning the Tomato Worms,” is warm, moving towards senti­ mentality but avoiding it. However, this is the best section of her book; when Stanley Kunitz, in the introduction, describes her “imagination” as “passionate and tribal,” his terms rightly apply to her own world, her Slovak grandmother, even that European peasant world; but when she begins to give us images of the world of Indians one cannot accept her as tribal. She is not; there is a lingering paternalism in the present move of so many young white poets to give depth to experience by seizing upon the world of the American Indian. Fórche is an outsider and I think she sometimes recognizes that, although her poems are ambiguous, like her book’s title. Too, Mr. Kunitz suggests that her “Kalaloch” “may very well prove to be the outstanding Sapphic poem of an era.” The poem...