Dorn - Gunslinger

Praise for Gunslinger Gunslinger is perhaps the strangest long poem of the last half-century: a quest myth wrapped around an acid-inspired western comic strip adventure in which a gunslinger, astride a drug-taking, talking horse called Levi-Strauss, searches for Howard Hughes. PATRICK M C GUINNESS , The Guardian There is nothing else like it in poetry. Publishers Weekly A dramatic poem of the first order for our day. ANDREW HOYEM , Poetry Gunslinger is perhaps the most important poem of the last half of the twentieth century. JAMES K. ELMBORG An immense bundle of swift-moving fun from the beginning.

But the underlying spirit of it is immensely entrepreneurial and buccaneering and disrespectful and altogether a kind of advanced parody of the whole business of episodic serial writing (the fabular and fabulous in the fable). The entire American adventure is laid out there with great wit and humour. J. H. PRYNNE One of the major North American long poems. TOM RAWORTH , The Independent (London) This is a jokey poem, high-spirited and good-tempered, carried forward on a steadily inventive play of puns and pleasantries.

DONALD DAVIE GUNSLINGEREDWARD DORN 50th Anniversary Edition With an introduction and a new foreword by Marjorie Perloff DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Durham & London Gunslinger Edward Dorn (Jennifer Dunbar Dorn) Foreword 2018, Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Cover designed by Matthew Tauch Cover art: Photo by Maciej Bledowski / Alamy. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dorn, Edward, author. Title: Gunslinger / Edward Dorn ; with a new foreword by Marjorie Perlof. Description: 50th anniversary edition. | Durham : Duke University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018010544 (print) | LCCN 2018018678 (ebook) | ISBN 9781478002307 (ebook) | ISBN 9781478000631 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781478000853 (pbk. : alk. paper) Classification: LCC PS3507.O73277 (ebook) | LCC PS3507.O73277 G8 2018 (print) | DDC 811/.54dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018010544 To Eliminate the Draw: Edward Dorns Gunslinger was originally published in American Literature 53, 3 (1981): 443464. 1981. All rights reserved.

A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn from Charles Olson, Collected Prose, edited by Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. 1997 by the Regents of the University of California, Estate of Charles Olson, University of Connecticut. Published by the University of California Press. Contents To Eliminate the Draw: Edward Dorns Gunslinger
MICHAEL DAVIDSON A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn
CHARLES OLSON On the Fiftieth Anniversary of Ed Dorns Gunslinger Book 1 of Gunslinger, published in the cataclysmic year 1968, begins with the Slingers quest to find an inscrutable Texan named Hughes / Howard, last seen in Boston but having, according to rumor, moved to Vegas / or bought Vegas and moved it. In my introduction to Gunslinger (1989), I noted that Dorn once referred to Hughes as an extension of the earlier, nonelectronic, financial geniuses like [James] Fisk and [Jay] Gould. And I added, Dorns representation of Hughes anticipates, for that matter, the current legend of Donald Trump and his empire.

When I reread these words recently I was quite startled. I cant remember having even known of Trumps existence back in the 1980s; I never paid attention to the endless tabloid stories about Trump Tower, the Trump divorces, and so on, and I must confess that I have never watched a reality show. Subliminally, however, Trump must have already been part of our collective unconscious and hence of my own. But celebrity is not, after all, equivalent to fame: whereas Hughes, however sinister, was a genius in engineering, aeronautics, and film-making, Trumps appeal is closer to the circus world of Barnum & Bailey. From Hughes to Trump: it seems a clear-cut example of Marxs aphorism that great men always appear twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Ed Dorn was unusually prescient in understanding how this evolution works: his Howard Hughes begins as a figure of mystery and charisma, but as the poem progresses, he increasingly becomes a Trumpian comic-book character, a mere cypher, who before long disappears from the poems scene, as does its Western geography, which gives way to the marvelous accidentalism at the end of Book IIII, where the poet announces that he is Moving to Montana soon / going to be a nose spray tycoon, even as the Slinger himself declares: Ill go along with the tachyon showers which are by definition faster than light & faster than prime Ill be home by suppertime.

In his afterword to Dorns Collected Poems , published by Carcanet in 2012, Amiri Baraka, one of Dorns oldest poet-friends, reminds us that in a late poem called Tribe, Dorn writes: My tribe came from struggling labor Depression South Eastern Illinois Just before the southern hills start To roll toward the coal country Where the east/west morainal ridges Of Wisconsin trash pile up At the bottom of the prairie, socially Where I was brought up of and on during The intensity of the depression, parents Wandering work search, up and down The bleak grit avenues of Flint Michael Mooreland from the beginning . Im with the Kurds and the Serbs and the Iraqis And every defiant nation this jerk Ethnic crazy country bombs But Im straight out of my tribe from my great grandma Merton Pure Kentucky English. Whats so interesting, Baraka comments, is that Dorn always reflected that tribal anguished sense of being somehow distanced from an America he was obviously deeply a part of. It is that conflict, he posits, that put Dorn in a unique position to write his gestural epic about a Wild West that is actually refracted through endless media and pop-culture prisms. Gunslinger is itself a kind of reality show, anticipating, in an uncanny way, the rhetorical games and bizarre pronouncements that paved the road to the White House for Donald Trump in 2016. Dorns is indeed Michael Mooreland.

Butand this is what makes Gunslinger a unique long poemhowever sharp the poets critique of the Western landscape and its denizens, its tale must be taken comically. Had Dorn been alive to witness the 2016 U.S. election, he would, I believe, have had no more patience with the solemn, self-righteous attacks on the president that flood our daily papers than with the members of his own tribe in the hills above the coal country who voted for Trump. This point is astutely made by another Dorn poet-friend, the Cambridge don J. H. Prynne.

Known for the difficulty of his learned and scientifically sophisticated poetry, for his reclusiveness, his refusal of all media presence, Prynne flew halfway around the world to attend Dorns memorial in Boulder in 1999. In his eulogy, transcribed for the Collected Poems , he emphasizes the rare precious quality of absolute independence of voice in Dorn. Even in the face of 1968 tragic frenzythe LA and Chicago Riots, the Vietnam War, the French uprising, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert KennedyDorns voice, Prynne remarks, was never political in the sense that there was ever any party he had any time for whatsoever. Whenever the party got to organize, he was out of it. There was no question.

The only people he had time for were the people whom the parties professed to speak on behalf of, whom they would employ as part of their rhetorical argument to mobilize whatever advantages they wanted for themselves. His sense of hypocrisy was extremely acute. I think this is a very telling statement. Sometimes, Dorns satire can look unnecessarily harsh, too flatly negative. But as Prynne notes, the poets central purpose is to keep the language from falling into the hands of those who want to promote it as an oppressive instrument. To accomplish this, the poet must avoid the programmatic, the institutional, the endless claims for American exceptionalism made by both political parties.