Space and location in Ed Dorn's poetry
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Dorn's interest in space, and processes of spatialisation, runs throughout his work. The titles give it away. His third collection, published in the mid sixties, was called Geography. Slinger, a long poem in four sections written through the late sixties and early seventies, draws on the mythical space of the American west while a later work from the 1990s is called Rocky Mountain Spine. Idaho Out, a poem based on a physical and a conceptual journey through rural America, was first published as a chapbook in 1965 by Fulcrum Press. It later appears in Geography and then The Collected Poems 1956-1974. There is a preface to the chapbook which does not appear in either later collection, in which Dorn says the following: History has always seemed to me lying right on the table, forgetful of age, or not present at all. And geography is not what's under your foot, that's simply the ground. Idaho and Montana are political assumptions surveyed from what was at one time the apple of someone's eye. The name never was more than a sign of appropriation, and most people still don't know where it is or what it looks like. A poem about such a place is equally arbitrary and no more apt to confirm it. (Dorn 1965 Preface)Dorn is identifying a particular human geography, influenced, as the language is, by the physical characteristics of the landscape, but also one in which there is a reflexive relationship between the people who live in a particular place and the construction of that space by economic and political forces. This sets the stage for the poem, one which combines a narrative of a journey and an understanding of places. Dorn does not attempt to pin down the place but emphasizes the variety of possible perspectives and the arbitrary relationship between the language within the poem and that which it seeks to describe. The history doesn't lie behind the poem but is brought to the surface and incorporated within the map he draws across the landscape. Dorn constructs a topographical poetry whose form reflects the landscape and identifies the forces that constructed it. He seeks to re-appropriate the full meaning of the landscape within the poem through the identification of spaces as political constructions and begins with a quotation from Carl Sauer "The thing to be known is the natural landscape. It becomes known through the totality of its forms" (Dorn 1965). In order to try to achieve a representation of that totality Dorn draws on personal observation, local and national history and geography and their intersections. The narrator of the poem slips in and out, sometimes directly addressing the reader in order to lead her through the poem and the landscape ("Let me remind you we were in Florence/Montana"), at other times relating the history of Idaho and Montana. The history and the geography of the places is reflected by and within the people who live there. or the approach fromThroughout the poem Dorn stresses the relationship between people and the place in which they live. He combines within the poem different histories of places, the history of the Native American as well as that of the first pioneers, and the final colonisation via international capital. . In Slinger, begun some four years later in 1969 but not finished until 1975, Dorn moves out of the real landscape of Idaho Out into a mental landscape; in Slinger the geography is conceptual rather than actual. The real characters disappear and the action takes place on a "stage" (a stage coach) on which the actors play out different roles. The "I" of Idaho Out, the narrator leading the reader through the landscape, is replaced by an "I" who doesn't know what is going on, and who dies only to come back to life when drip fed five gallons of LSD. "I" does not give a number of different perspectives on a single (essential) object or event but stresses the arbitrariness of each point of view. The agency of the narrator in Idaho Out, albeit an agency which is unstable and under attack, becomes the performing "I" in Slinger, an "I" which is simultaneously first and third person and who is carried along by the stage coach and the other actors. There are precursors of the extended hip narrative of Slinger in Idaho Out, particularly where the narrator directly addresses the reader in "But I was escorting you out of Pocatello,/sort of North" (Dorn 1965). But where Idaho Out is rooted in the American West, Slinger draws on the idea of the American West, past and present, to develop an imagination driven, intellectual universe. This is your domain.When the horse is asked how far it is from Mesilla to Vegas he replies "Across/two states/of mind". The preface to section 111 is "The inside real and the outsidereal". In an interview with Roy Okada (Allen (ed) 1973 p39) Dorn refers to "a terrain of the mind" and later on to Slinger as a "psychological drama" (ibid p49). In a discussion with Robert Bertholf he says "I am talking about the form of Gunslinger in a way not being arbitrary, but registering just under the fact about society at large" (ibid p63). The movement from Idaho Out to Slinger is from an emphasis on locale, the real landscape that confronts him and the relationship between that landscape and the poetic forms he constructs, to the more deeply spatialised and synchronous structure of Slinger. Michael Davidson in To Eliminate the Draw: Narrative and Language in Slinger comments: According to Dorn the local has been lost: in its place is a variable fiction created by global capitalism and manipulable by those few who have the cunning and will to use it. The central recognition in these poems is that man has become a function of a series of signs, dispersed from distant data banks. (Wesling (ed) 1985 p113)Later in the same article he says: The space of the poem is the West in its largest sense. Not only is it the West created by television and the movies; it is also the West of exploration and exploitation (ibid p168).In Idaho Out, Dorn is describing the construction of places, in Slinger he is using the construction of a psychological or intellectual space to underpin the form of the poem as well as using the character of the Slinger to shoot holes in the spatial fabric. Davidson again says "By dissolving the laws of sequence and causality the Slinger may eliminate the contingent nature of times and places and thus penetrate time and space" (ibid p124). Dorn unfailingly describes Slinger in terms of a narrative poem. Yet there is no internal temporal structure or sense of things happening one after the other. Most of the time of the poem is outside time. The roads on which the stage travels are not the roads on which everyone else travels, the travelers never arrive at their destination. The journey in Idaho Out can be traced on a map, to trace the journey in Slinger requires not just a road map but a series of overlapping sets of cultural, philosophical, linguistic and ideological maps. Dorn's later work is increasingly dislocated, without locale. In Hello, La Jolla from 1978 the poems are written on the hoof, the preface comparing their medium of transmission to the Pony Express. In the first poem he says: A poet's occupationHe has gone from a poetry of the places which make up America to a poetry of the space that America has constructed. He tunes into to the messages of that space, whether on the radio, newspaper or whatever the medium. He is critical of the impact of the process of spatialisation on the places inhabited on a day to day basis and the lives people lead in those places. In the poem The Upwardly Mobile and the Backs which Provide the Ladder he says: Isn't it ghastlyThe opening line mimics the tones of the "upwardly mobile". The whole poem is a commentary on the impact of people losing their place and their relationship with what they produce, only to have it replaced by a commodity which has had the traces of its origin removed. The final section of Hello, La Jolla is entitled "One O One, that great Zero/Resting eternally between parallels". They are poems written while driving. The IOI section was written oneBeing on the road is to be between places. The motorway service station is the epitome of a non place, its products unrelated to the locale, shipped in from afar. The driver's view is locked onto the road ahead and the only entertainment that which comes over the airwaves. Villages and towns are bypassed and everywhere becomes like everywhere else. While on the road Dorn is "beyond considerations of time and place" so he creates poems which are mosaics of the bits and pieces he comes across or hears on the radio; remembered fragments of news and the occasional road sign. He even entitles one poem A Sense of Place: I'd live on the MoonHe confirms the view of the world from the road as "like/ a chicken farm" (Dorn 1978). The traveler/poet becomes the "great zero between parallels", emptied out of reference, and it is on the road, between places, that Dorn tunes into the American psyche and turns it on its head. He continues this critique through Yellow Lola and Abhorrences, published in 1980 and 1990, road testing the language that comes to his attention through a variety of media and finding it lacking. If his work through the eighties dislocates the reader from his place in America, Languedoc Variorum dislocates the reader at the level of the page. The title itself, a "variorum", is a word used to describe the different versions of a poem and emphasises the instability of the text and the possibility of multiple and diverse versions. Each page is split three ways, with two horizontal lines. The top portion of the page is entitled Jerusalem. The lower part, which is split by a row of crosses, is entitled SUBTEXTS & NAZDAKS. The NAZDAK is both a character in Star Trek and also a slang term for the Nasdaq, a stock exchange dealing in high tech stocks. On each page there is therefore a "main" text at the top, followed by a subtext and then a NAZDAK. The "main" text is about the crusades and the role of Simon de Montfort, written during Dorn's stay in Montpellier a couple of years before his death. The next text down is a commentary (a subtext) in a different font and a smaller size, and the third section is the NAZDAK, written in capital letters in the style of a stock exchange report. There appear three continuous texts running from page to page, independent yet with intersections. So it should be possible to either read a full page at a time, and try to keep all three poems going at the same time, or to follow one poem through by reading the relevant section on each page. The reader is presented with a series of options in the way they construct the text. Within this complex matrix Dorn sets out to cause further disruption. No one section is allowed to settle. The top section seems to get going and then is interrupted by a poem based on work by DH Lawrence, and the line spacing goes from 1.5 down to 1. This is followed by a poem about the Bogomil, a dualist religious sect from the Balkans (Dorn's interest is in their heresy) which believed that the visible and material world was created by the devil. The rest of the section is made up of a short poem on Shoko Ashara, a longer one on Tomas Torquemada, the first Inquisitor General and a poem about Simon de Montfort, a ruthless crusader, called Notes on Beziers: the past as cauchemar (nightmare). The middle section is the most complex. Unlike the top section it is not divided into separate poems but into sections or paragraphs, each one beginning with a ¶. The section has a general heading of SUBTEXTS & NAZDAKS. The first part of this section contains a combination of personal comment and invective, aphorism, historical information and memory. The poem in total, or the three poems together if that's the way they are taken, seems to have something to say about history. And in this middle section Dorn inserts himself, through a combination of acid commentary and personal memory, between the religious wars of the top section and the gibberish of international capital in the bottom section, to give a personal history. Different analyses or typologies are suggested by this structure, yet when they are followed through each reveal instabilities. The top section is history from historical sources, and about countries and peoples, the middle is the subjective history of the individual and the bottom section is the base, the economic underpinnings. The structure also suggests heaven, purgatory and hell. The sections do form links with each other, but not consistently It is more as if the different parts leak or bleed into each other, mixing and muddying, rather than one section being explicatory or illustrative of the other. On page 38 the middle section begins with an aphorism that could come straight out of Yellow Lola. ¶ The Virtues are far less interesting than the Sins and therefore far less widely practised.The next paragraph in the middle section is written as straight history. ¶ In 1621 (Plymouth Colony, 1620) George Calvert, Lord Baltimore went out to Newfoundland under a proprietary patent from James 1 but the climate drove him off ... (ibid)The bottom section in the middle section on that page goes back to: ¶ The majority is nearly always against and at odds with the policies, economic, social and political .. They will invariably say Fuck You take a Haiku (ibid)Dorn is using a variety of voices to present his story. Compare this cacophony to the steady beat of the poetry in the top section. After that the story gets practical. God's firstbornIn contrast the third section is a stream of off the cuff and hyped up statements couched in the discourse of the stock exchange, the Nasdaq. It is written in bold capitals with no lineation and the use of the dash as the main punctuation mark. Simultaneously funny, horrific and offensive they mock a language which seeks to disassociate cause from effect, by making a series of humorous links. If history in his previous sections, whether the measured poetic history of the top section or the personal sideswiping of the middle, is about tracing cause and effect, then the international finance of the stock exchange is about denying that cause and effect. It is hell, which is down below and at the bottom of the page. For example: PIG HOCKS GLUT THE MARKET - GET OUT - BODY PIERCING UP A QUARTER - BACTERIA COUNT SHARP INCLINE - VIRUS BURST STEADY - HOLY VIRGIN UP A NICKLE This is ticker tape language, running ceaselessly off the machine, weaving together language from different sources within a typeface which suggest homogeneity. Within the format of the announcement or the headline Dorn will suddenly veer off track, following a reference through to an unlikely conclusion. Dorn uses the page as a site on which to build his
poem, using the visual element to enhance the effect of the poetry and
set up systems of cross referencing that would otherwise not be present.
Dorn is able to intertwine personal, social and economic material, and
through the use of the split page he can make obvious different functions
of languages, the uses different discourses can be put to and the different
ways they influence expression. He is using the page as a sort of map or
a plan into which he can locate his different poems. The page becomes a
representation of the different spaces language might inhabit as well as
a representational, lived space which the reader enters and uses.
Bibiliography Allen D (Ed) 1980 Edward Dorn -
Interviews, Four Seasons Foundation, California
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