Edward Dorn Books

The epic is conceivably the endpoint of the modernist implosion into premodern aesthetics and anti-formal/anti-perspectival tribal art. Whether that makes GUNSLINGER modern, postmodern, or premodern is anyone's guess, 5 of 8 dentists prefer "postmodern." The book smears semantics and Heidegger and cocaine into a psychedelic, post-industrial dreamscape. Ed Dorn studied an americanized version of "psychogeography" at the Black Mountain College with Charles Olson and Robert Creely which contributed to the development of his slow-acid-laced-western-sound poetry aesthetic: "I have no wish to continue my debate with men, my mare lathers with tedium, her hooves are dry. Look, they are covered with the alkali of the enormous space between here and formerly."(Gunglinger, Book 1). This should be read with some cigars and cactus and MM's cover of Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show's "Get My Rocks Off" and Beck's parenthetical "Lazy Flies" ("The skin of a robot vibrates with pleasure, Matrons and gigolos Carouse in the parlor").

Dorn has crafted a hysterical political allegory. Swift would've busted a gut at his work.

It's great that Ed Dorn's poem (in book form, though it was originally published in a sequence of smaller parts, and assembled) is back in print, after the single-volume version took a short drop to the OOP lists. There are few poems that so effectively capture a decade -- and a century. Read it; fight with it; enjoy the sensibility. This is a book about the American West and, like the work of Charles Olson (one of Dorn's teachers), it is about poetry as a means of understanding aspects of the psyche, motivation, and acquisitiveness that is so American.

That's the good new; you'll read this and laugh about parts, and agonize over others, and relish still more. But be wary of the "Introduction," which is a heavy bolus of words (read the back cover excerpt, if you doubt me). Yes, the folks at Duke (a University Press) felt it necessary to drop a scholarly "Introduction" on the book, but Perloff's offering will inspire you to reach for your Metamucil. As a scholar, she is accomplished (publications on Beckett, Plath, Pound, O'Hara, Lowell, Stevens, Yeats, Williams, Berryman, Rimbaud, Zukofsky, Blackburn, John Cage, Goethe, Ginsberg, Ashbery, and a dozen others), but her treatment of Dorn is at best wooden, and with 35 years of writing on poets she musters great range without summoning either a notable depth or enthusiasm.

Buy the book for Dorn's own work and fight to cherish the results.

The late Ed Dorn wrote a masterpiece with "Gunslinger", an anti-epic poem that prefigures many post-modern gestures from its 60s era starting point. Funny, cartoonish, erudite to the extreme, it also locates a tuned lyricism in the Western vernaculars that Dorn uses: the metaphysical aspect of our legends, the sheer questing for answers as Euro-Americans come treading closer to a West coast that will stop them and force them to settle and create lives from dust and ingenuity, comes alive in way that never escapes the zaniness of Dorns' narrating inquiry into the nature of the search.

A masterpiece

An epic poem so richly filled with wisdom, wordplay & laughs that a little of it is often enough. Dorn's characters - who are derived from both John Bunyan & Paul Bunyan - wander through a landscape that feels like a spaghetti western existing inside a Star Trek wormhole. All of the rituals of the Great American Desert are honored & performed in ways that surprise & delight. The cinematography is nonpareil. Does the Zlinger fall in love with Lil? Does he ride off into the Sunset of Happy Trails? Does Walter Brennan make a cameo appearance? Read on, fellow pilgrims, read on.

Bob Rixon

Edward Dorn's work is driven, turbulent, acute; there are tender moments too of course (eg "Song: Europa"), often interlaced with a poignant irony and a searching view of the contemporary. From the early reflective poems, writing himself out of rural Illinois, to the first flush of inspiration at Black Mountain (Olson, Sauer) to the time in the UK (esp. at the then new University of Essex) to the late reflections on heresy and chemotherapy, the sense of groundedness in a living tradition, but wanting to expand out of it, is clear. As he writes in the late poem "Tribe," his "tribe came from struggling labor" and this struggle to articulate the new is characteristic of his best work. This volume greatly expands the 1997 "sampler" "High West Rendezvous" and includes a generous selection from his parody epic "Gunslinger," not included in the much earlier "Collected Poems" (but available through Duke UP); yet "Way More West" shows that Dorn is much more, and other, than--as the cover has it--"the author of 'Gunslinger.'" Unlike its "Ur-text," Black Sparrow's 1993, "Way West: Stories, Essays and Verse Accounts : 1963-1993" this volume has no prose (ok, it's in a poetry series). Given however the range of Dorn's work, his classic narrative of Puget Sound, "views," "interviews" and prose commentaries and accounts of all kinds, and the abiding interest of this material (published through smaller houses), could this also be licked into popular shape?
A strong line of rather quizzical comedy runs through the volume, and a little poem like "the hazards of a later era" with its pastiche of Williams's icebox poem adds a reflection on the state of agribusiness, etc. (again, the rural). Dorn plays with his sources and influences, among them D. H. Lawrence, whose work can be detected at times from "Los Mineros" of the '60s to the "Languedoc Variorum" of the '90s. Always searching, probing, listening; "way more west", yes, but also never west enough.

From his early lyrics like "The Air Of June Sings" and "The Rick Of Green Wood" and "Like a Message on Sunday" through his first experiencing England: THE NORTH ATLANTIC TURBINE, the long poem "Oxford" most specifically, to his breakthrough "spiritual" address in GUNSLINGER (notably Books I & II), and his gem, RECOLLECTIONS OF GRAN APACHERIA, on through LANGUEDOC to the brave work of CHEMO SABE, Ed Dorn has created a body of lucid and resonant and controversial poetry, in which there is often an effortless shifting of discourses within the poem, a mode which he developed into a postmodern way of usually hard-edge jump-cut justaposition. Tom Clark's impressionistic biography of Dorn is a useful accompanying text.

This is the ONLY Danielle Steel book I have ever gotten into. It's a real tearjerker, and I have read it 5 times and I can read it another 5 times, it's that good!!!

Danielle Steel is simply Brilliant! I sincerely recommend this novel to anyone who has ever lost someone they love!

My mom told me about this book so i decided to give it a chance since I am not a big fan of romance novels. I read this book in a couple days and when I got to the end I cried for a long time. I have told everyone I know to read this book. They all tell me how much they loved it and how it made them cry also. I would recommend this book to everyone.

This book is a perfect `gift' for you or anyone that love romance.

This was the first of Danielle Steel's books that I read. It was very well written and she is a great story teller. You won't be disappointed.

I'm not sure how reviews about Lew Welch got attached to this record, but this is Ed Dorn's Selected Poems. I am very sorry to see that it's out of print because this excellent selection and Etruscan Book's High West Rendezvous together make up the best sampling of Dorn's work I've read outside of Gunslinger. (Read Gunslinger too.) I dream of the day a complete Poems appears, but until then the best of the best can be rounded up in this Selected and High West Rendezvous (for his later work). Both are recommended without reservation.

Buy and enjoy the whole thing (Ring of Bone) instead. Lew Welch may have been less certain about this and that, most of his life, than this selection or refinement suggests. When a writer disappears suddenly, the entire remaining mess is often interesting. Selections reveal much about their editors, of course.

Lew Welch experimented with Life in These United States before choosing the Life of Poetry. Ring of Bone, collected and lightly/deftly edited and introduced by Donald Allen shortly after Lew's disappearance, reveals a man with more open eyes/ears and wider empathy than fellow (and dearly beloved) sons-of-witches who never wavered. Or never obviously wavered. Or never wavered all the way out of this world without a trace. The difference in tone and impact between this book and a later selection edited by Gary Snyder is profound. Amazon treats both as same for review purposes, but this is not so. Currently on back order, which is a bit frightening, since much of the less elegantly crafted or only semi-finalized writing included in this collection but absent from Selected Poems feels essential to me. Not just what Lew himself may have imagined, in the end, he should have written and released, but a wide smattering of what he did write, the bulk of the whole thing. In a clamshell.

This book was my first introduction to Lew Welch and I came out of it feeling as if I knew him. It includes poems, songs and even a couple drawings by him and in its own dizzying way documents Welch's search for his totem animal. Early in his life he feels he is Leo, a lion, but eventually accepts that he is a turkey buzzard. Full of nuances and silliness, I have to read it four more times to unravel his (then) contemporary and ancient allusions.

One example of his simple brilliance:

(included in a section in which he sums up his education, subject by subject)

BOTANY

Consider the Passion Flower:

Who'd ever think a plant would go to/ so much trouble

just to get f--ked/ by a Bee.

Any serious person would love Ed Dorn, and I've been an admirer of his through poetry readings (at UCSD, when I was a student there), into earlier years when he was at Black Mountain College (when I wasn't born), and through the great works: Slinger, the North Atlantic Turbine, the Collected Works, and all the editions in between and later. I was so saddened when I learned he'd died; I wasn't so patched in that I heard about it right away, but the passing left a void.

Dorn wrote political poetry, but also great poetry; he avoided the fuzziness of the Beats while capturing their passion and engagement with life. He was a scholar -- especially of the American West -- and he made much of what he could do. This biography by Tom Clark is a completely solid one -- it catches the essentials, perhaps more strongly in the later years than in the early ones (thus the one-star deduction). Tom is an accomplished writer, essayist, biographer, and poet in his own right, and that mastery shows. But if you're interested in one of the great minds, and one suffused with a gentle (and at times not) skepticism about the West and its geography, you will find this of value. And then, please DO load up on Ed Dorn and his essays and poetry volumes. You will find that they do not pall, and that all you bring to them add to their strength, and to yours.

Any serious person would love Ed Dorn, and I've been an admirer of his through poetry readings (at UCSD, when I was a student there), into earlier years when he was at Black Mountain College (when I wasn't born), and through the great works: Slinger, the North Atlantic Turbine, the Collected Works, and all the editions in between and later. I was so saddened when I learned he'd died; I wasn't so patched in that I heard about it right away, but the passing left a void.

Dorn wrote political poetry, but also great poetry; he avoided the fuzziness of the Beats while capturing their passion and engagement with life. He was a scholar -- especially of the American West -- and he made much of what he could do. This biography by Tom Clark is a completely solid one -- it catches the essentials, perhaps more strongly in the later years than in the early ones (thus the one-star deduction). Tom is an accomplished writer, essayist, biographer, and poet in his own right, and that mastery shows. But if you're interested in one of the great minds, and one suffused with a gentle (and at times not) skepticism about the West and its geography, you will find this of value. And then, please DO load up on Ed Dorn and his essays and poetry volumes. You will find that they do not pall, and that all you bring to them adds to their strength, and to yours.

The information in this book is very useful for starting a small advertising business. It offers information from setting up your agency to pricing each job. It's a small price to pay for the knowledge that I haved gained from this book.

This book refers to telefaxes and manual pasteup. It may have been partially updated recently, but it is not terribly useful and certainly not worth the price. Buy the Graphics Art Guild Handbook instead.

When our company placed this order we could barely wait to receive the book. What a complete dissapointment! For the money I expected more than a flimsy, digest-size, 143 page book with 14 point type and the pages were only 1/4 to 1/2 worth of type. For example, one chapter titled "How Much Spec Work?" was only 9 sentences. Another chapter titles "Develop a Presentation Kit" didn't have any verbage on the topic, instead it simply showed 4 line-art images. Save your money! Who ever was responsible for putting a price tag based on the information/content given in this book should be ashamed of themselves!!