The Dictatorship of the Environment by Charles Potts (review)

260 Western American Literature Sex and procreation are the major themes in this collection, as they are in Mormon culture, and also as they exist in the “gentile myth”of Mormon culture as well. Young missionaries return home after months of sexual repression seeking wives for release; a lonely young widow living in rural isolation has an adulterous relationship with her married community protectorate; a young man quarrels with his wife and unsuccessfully seeks solace in the arms of an old girlfriend. These characters sound like a pretty common human lot to any sophisticated reader but there’s an additional dimension to these stories. Un­ derlying his characters’ humanity, Bennion weaves the web of Mormon dogma which smashes these characters against what they believe they should be feeling with what they really feel. The two most chilling and successful pieces in the book are “Dust” and “Jenny, Captured by the Mormons.” “Dust,” the lead story, tracks the disinte­ grating mind of a young man tortured with images of Armageddon in the Utah desert. This story’s style is intriguingly disjointed, mimicking the disturbed mind recounting this all too “true” tale of irresponsible military chemical and nuclear testing and its victims. “Jenny, Captured by the Mormons” allows us to enter the mad world of a young wife terrorized by her husband’s religious fanaticism. Her isolation and the blame inflicted upon her by those whosejob it is to help her is powerfully dealt with. As the writer goes inside this frantic young woman’s mind and captures her struggle, we see and feel how her freedom can only be reclaimed as subversively as the fanaticism which originally drove her out of the mainstream. This bizarre phenomenon in the western desert—nearly a century and a half of Mormonism—exists as an indigenous and undeniable chapter in the unfolding of western American literature and will eventually join the canon devoted to such subjects as growing up Catholic,Jewish, Chicano, black, female, etc. Bennion’s skill, though slightly undeveloped, seemingly seeks to add Mor­ mon experience to the universal literature of humanity. PENELOPE REEDY The Redneck Review ofLiterature TheDictatorship oftheEnvironment. By Charles Potts. (Ephraim, Wisconsin: Druid Books, 1991. 64 pages, $25.00/$10.00.) Despite the diligence of his example as practiced in Gloucester, the meth­ ods and influence of Charles Olson in reforming a basis of assumptions toward the creation of a genuinely American poetics has curiously found its most fertile ground in western soil. This influence is considerably broader and even more idiosyncratic than the writing of Sulphur-ized approval will ever admit, and it is a testimony to the intrinsic generosity of Olson’s vision that so many writers of Reviews 261 isolated originality—which is to say, those writing outside the comfort of any canon’s complete approval—can claim him as a central impetus for their own concerns. On the Mexico-Arizona border, Drummond Hadley’s deep oral narratives continue to cut an edge no cowboy poet of trendier affiliation has come close to approaching. The wide open road feminist free verse of Sharon Doubiago increases the political content of contemporary poetics while challenging and blurring a number of divisions in the current writing social hierarchy. And the impact of Olson’s influence via the four years Edward Dorn spent inciting the writing community of Pocatello circa 1961-65 isjust now beginning to receive the attention it deserves. Foremost among Dorn’s students was a young native Idahoan named Charles Potts, who subsequently found himself publishing a dozen books while more or less rampaging through the literary scenes of Seattle, Berkeley, and Salt Lake City. Potts didn’t exactly renounce his allegiances to the Black Mountain team in a milestone review condemning Robert Greeley’s Pieces in 1970, but he did intuit a decisive and seminal break in two lines of influence coming out of that school. The so-called Language poets have tended to express their version of a postmodernist aesthetic in terms of syntactical experimentation. The route suggested by Potts and the other writers who could very loosely be claimed to represent the other side of the forking path have maintained a much closer connection with...