Edward Dorn's Collected Poems (2012), fifth selection (from Twenty-Four Love Songs, 1969))

Some favourite passages from Twenty-Four Love Songs (1969):


My speech is tinged
my tongue has taken
a foreigner into it
Can you understand
my uncertainties grow
and underbrush and thicket 
of furious sensibility 
between us....

the first half of '3'

...pleasure

unrung by the secretly expected

fingers of last sunday

from '6'

now everywhere I turn

and everytime there is

that full thing with us

I am cottered

from '10'

We made the journey by train

it was cold now and then

a day scored by a cloud

the heat we had we had in our pockets

and occasionally we took some

what more can be said

more than the existence we have

second and final stanza of '14'

There is no final word

for how you are.

An emotional response

can be the reputation to

which all inquiry is referred

and let go at that.

opening stanza of '24'

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Edward Dorn's Collected Poems (2012), fourth selection (from Geography, 1965)

Some favourite passages:


On the bed of the vast promiscuity
of the poet's senses is turned
the multiple world....

opening lines of "Song: The astronauts"

bent is an attitude

I've settled on now

        to define a man

whose attention is forced down

from "The problem of the poem

for my daughter, left unsolved"

...before the bite of the sun quelled the bite

of the stars, we left....

*

The eye

can be arbitrary,

but its subject matter cannot.

Thus the beauty of some women.

from "Idaho Out"

The occasion for this excursion is in the selected strings

of a life gone terribly lonely. It will be a march.

A frail cloud moves with silence into the window.

No sound in the store. No bell on the door.

*

...in the woven light

of a backroom.

*

...in the ennui of the falling sun....

*

...all things have an insistence of their own.

from "Six Views 

from the same window of the Northside Grocery"

 ...indolent winter stars

are in her eyes

          indolent as she resides

all seasons by the fork

of my desire.

the last lines of "Love Song"

...a growth

of indetermination

while waiting 

out the season

*

I am a casual fool

now

I do so regard

the labor 

of my own

                  careful

peace of mind.

from "Poem in Five Parts"

this is no judgement, this is

the weight of dissimilar things bound together

by a strictly regulated common deprivation

the low and the high, no middle, held in a smiling equilibrium

you may eat only the shit I give you.

*

I became that land and wandered out of it.

*

...my wounded middle years,

                                                a practical self-pity

*

My mother, moving slowly in a grim kitchen

and my stepfather moving slowly down the green rows of corn

these are my unruined and damned hieroglyphs.

*

...and the land was pledged 

to private use, the walnut dropped in the autumn on the ground

green, and lay black in the dead grass in the spring.

from "The sense comes over me, and the waning

light of man by the 1st National Bank"

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Edward Dorn's Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2012), third selection

Some favourite passages from Hands Up!, 1964:


the deer eye opens in the mind
on the acoustics of the hunt....

from "The Deer's Eye the Hunter's Nose"

Walking is what I associate 

with Ledyard, distance as sheer urge....

*

Mystic sheer distance was in thine eye,

that beautiful abstract reckoning,

the feet, walking: for no other reason

the world.

from "Ledyard: The Exhaustion of Sheer Distance"

...for an eye to offer coherence

at times,

you have to use your head as an arbiter,

a relief, for it all.

*

Cheerfulness is still a misleading humor.

Much is blinding

besides the sun. Yet I am sure you see.

The hour is important.

from "The Land Below"

Fog fell down our mountain.

*

The day he died--

the slow quiet break. 

from "Hawthorne, End of March, 1962"

we scoured the ground of the earth

to start fires

in these rickety geographies

we knew better than to call home

from "Oh Don't Ask Why"

 

Finding myself in america

slowly walking around the deserted bandstand, waiting

for the decade, and the facetious new arrivals.

last lines of "A Fate of Unannounced Years"

And two passages from Nine Songs, 1965:

 

how long can love

suffer in the cross streets of this town

marked simply by the clicking railroad

and scratch of the janitor's broom

 

last lines of "3"

 

 

...sustained by the long passion for darkness

man is.

 

from "9"

 

 

 

Edward Dorn's Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2012), second selection (The Newly Fallen, 1961)

Some favourite passages from this book:


...oh mother
I remember your year-long stare
across plowed flat prairielands.

last lines of "3 Farm Poems"

...what a grey morning I am.

from "The Open Road"

March us home through the spring rain

the belief, the relief

of sunday occasion.

 * 

...the triumph of a march

in which no one

is injured.

from "Sousa"

...may their failure be kindly, and come

in small unnoticeable pieces.

last lies of "Like a Message on Sunday"

The slight stories of explanation

were never meant to be remembered, they are

as change, counted, and then pocketed:

                                       O was one

of their determining inventions

zero, for an empty class, a symbol for nothing,

endowed the void.

from "Our Camp"

Now the yellow strings

Of dusk hang in the air....

from "A Country Song"

 

Edward Dorn's The Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2012), first selection (Early Poems, 1954-1960)

[from a poem on England...]



...the haggard
diaries of quickly here & there, like a blooded hound
with his leash in his own mouth, ringing

in the articulate air a cultural error.

*

The last gaze at stones in a calamine expanse

wherein dusty snow sifts her tin kiss to

                 tradition

                       here

                                  where

                                                 even Eros would be ill dressed.

 from "Relics from a Polar Cairn"

Today I am a vast dirge.

Today I have not flown....

*

Today I am impatient with small horrors.

from "The Revival"

Oh I love plants but where I am the weather

drives the birds away

*

Whorled, like a univalve shell

into herself,

early to bed, nothing

in her head, here and there

from "The Hide of My Mother"

...all in an enkindled February....

*

...at night too Pocatello wasn't Pocatello but a jewel

the red and the blue and bright amethyst, something you could never narrow down to gas in glass tubes.

*

...he went on anyway describing the possibilities, that's love

in the mist of indifference.

*

Everywhere I am, I feel I am everywhere else.

from "For Ray (the 6th)"

What a shock

to get over the embarrassment of using language.

That's why I write to you every day

I no longer have that tedious care.

the last lines of "The 7th"

As the expression goes, do yourself a favour, and buy Edward Dorn's The Collected Poems directly from the publisher, Carcanet Press. How could you regret it?

Selections from Edward Dorn's Gunslinger I & II (Fulcrum, 1970)

A rich and strange book. I'll be returning it to The Poetry Library this week should someone else wish to experience it.

from Book 1 (easier to excerpt as the narrative is just beginning)--

He would show you his map.

There is your domain.

Is it the domicile it looks to be

or simply a retinal block

of seats in,

he will flip the phrase

the theater of impatience.

*

my mare lathers with tedium

her hooves are dry

Look they are covered with the alkali

of the enormous space

between here and formerly.

*

STRUM

strum

And by that sound

we had come there, false fronts

my Gunslinger said make

the people mortal

and give their business

an inward cast. They cause culture.

*

Stranger you got a pliable lip

you might get yourself described

if you keep on.

*

and as the disputational 44

occurred in his hand and spun there

in that warp of relativity one sees

in the backward turning spokes

of a buckboard, then came suddenly

to rest, the barrel utterly justified

with a line pointing

to the neighborhood of infinity.

The room froze harder.

*

Your vulgarity is flawless

but you are the slave

of appearances--

*

You make the air dark

with the beauty of your speed,

Gunslinger, the air

separates and reunites as if lightning

had cut past

leaving behind a simple experience.

*

to her swelled black mound

her startled faun

which has the earthy smell

of slightly gone

wild violets

from Book 2--

I didn't know you had a drawl, Slinger

I dont, I slow up at noon

from the inertia of National Lunch

and from the scatteredness

of the apexed sun which attempts

at that point to enter a paradox--

namely, The West which is The East.

Edward Dorn

Gunslinger 1 & 2 (London: Fulcrum, 1970)

The entire Gunslinger is available from The Book Depository.