Gunslinger, Edward Dorn, with a critical introduction by Marjorie
Perloff, Duke University Press, PO BOX 90660, Durham, NC 27708-0660,
1995, 200 p, $16.95.
“A Pageant of Its Time”: Edward Dorn’s Slinger and the Sixties, James K.
Elmborg, Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York etal, 1998, 146 p, NPL.
(Studies in Modern Poetry #6, Peter Baker, Towson State University,
general editor.)
Sagetrieb, Edward Dorn: Special Issue, Volume 15 No. 3, Winter 1996.
National Poetry Foundation, Room 302, University of Maine, 5742 Neville
Hall, Orono Maine 04469-5752, 262 p, $9.
The poet starts the strings,
as sleep inhabits the stage,
along the silver of a morning raga,
So this raga disperses
as the shimmering of its sense goes out,
Into the dry brilliance of the desert morning
along the vanes of the willow leaves
along the hallucination of the atmospheric realism
Into the upper reaches of the Yggdrasillic yoga
Over inner structure of the Human Thing
like Unto the formation of the pinnate ash
in which our treehouse sways
and the samara goes wingèd, Oh wild Angelica!
Oh quickbeam! oh quake and sway into waking,
With aspergill enter Into the future. (47)
There is no longer any where to resist the reading of Gunslinger from.
In “A Pageant of Its Time”: Edward Dorn’s Slinger and the Sixties, James
K. Elmborg has written a very good book explicating a great poem.
Elmborg’s claim in his preface that “I think Gunslinger is perhaps the
most important poem of the last half of the twentieth century...(xii),”
is here repeated and restated for the purpose of removing the “perhaps.”
The only poem on this scale with which Gunslinger can be usefully
compared is Thomas McGrath’s Letter to an Imaginary Friend. Elmborg’s
Metahodos, as they say in Black Mountain Speak, is to correlate the
composition of Gunslinger to Dorn’s essential grounding in the social and
economic reality of his understood surroundings. This very useful
practice permits generous and mystery popping insights into passages
hitherto misunderstood by critics and casual readers. “The poem’s subject
is nothing less than the survival of intellect and moral integrity in the
postmodern world” (105), according to Elmborg. It is a worthy subject
for the greatest long poem in American literature.
Alongside the contexualization of the various time periods and
locations where Dorn lived as he wrote the four books of Gunslinger plus
the section called “The Cycle,” Elmborg surveys a substantial portion of
the published critiques of the poem. Elmborg builds and extends those
opinions he finds useful and offers insight into those he finds mistaken
or lacking. An extensive bibliography of “Works Cited” on Gunslinger is
included and it is apparent that interest in the poem is reaching
critical mass. This scholarly aspect of the work provides a pertinent
starting point for further inquiries. The poem has been admitted into the
literature, if reluctantly in some quarters. The work now, as always, is
to locate the poem’s maximal audience.
Elmborg begins his inquiry with a “Preface” where he registers his
opinion of the poem’s importance, and an “Introduction” in which he very
wisely locates the “...1960s as that period from roughly 1965 to
1974¾...” (1). Ten year periods, decades of unitary social significance,
have rarely in this century conformed to the literal decade, ie
1960-1969. Even though “Dorn took up a position stubbornly outside
mainstream culture” (5), Gunslinger was in fact received enthusiastically
from the beginning, at least by people who have given Dorn’s poetry the
fine attention truly original writing deserves. By the time the complete
composition was first published by Wingbow, the encomiums included Thomas
McGuane’s “Gunslinger is a fundamental American Masterpiece,” and Robert
Duncan’s “Let me be among those who acclaim Gunslinger as one of the
poems of the era, of the one we are going into, or the era Gunslinger
begins to create for us.”
This sense from Duncan that the poem begins to create a new era for us
will eventually become apparent to everyone and the issue of the
establishment’s or the academy’s equally stubborn refusal to acknowledge
the poem and recognize the new era itself will be taken up later.
Elmborg’s “Pageant,” a six chapter book with notes, index and
bibliography, considers the work in chronological sequence. Chapter one,
“Between Here and Formerly,” takes for its title, as do the other
chapters, succinct lines of poetry from the text of the poem. Elmborg
applies his intended method of correlating the poem to its social and
historical era, first to the Dorn poetry that preceded Gunslinger, on his
way to writing what “...might be described as a biography of the poem”
(xii). Dorn’s career can be viewed in approximately three components,
pre-Gunslinger, Gunslinger, and post-Gunslinger. Throughout the stylistic
development, Dorn has not wobbled on his pivot. “While Gunslinger seems
in many ways radically different from Dorn’s previous poetry, it grows
naturally from his earlier career. Gunslinger is neither intensely
personal nor overtly political, but it does employ the Western motifs of
Hands Up!, the geographical method of ‘The Land Below’ and Geography, and
an awareness of the systems of language and power that Dorn explores in
North Atlantic Turbine” (16). Elmborg also points out that the terminal
poem in North Atlantic Turbine, “An Idle Visitation,” is in fact a
version of the opening sequence of Gunslinger, which contains the literal
signal of the enhanced attitude: “I have no wish to continue/ my debate
with men” (5). A “tectonic” shift has occurred and Gunslinger is the
result.
It would be tedious in a brief review to discuss the tremendous
insights in each chapter of Elmborg’s text. His methods are sound. From a
combination of a close and since close, sympathetic and enthusiastic
reading of the text, with quotes from Dorn’s interviews and other
occasions when Dorn responded to questions about the poem, with generous
references to the locations and social circumstances of the poem’s
composition, and further with the aforementioned survey of the other
correct and incorrect critical responses to the poem, Elmborg makes a
very strong case for the immediate admission of this poem into the canon
of great literature. Elmborg is at his most useful in elucidating “The
Cycle,” in correlating the circumstances at Lawrence, Kansas, to the
poem, and at documenting the shifts in attitude from one book to the next
of the poem itself, for Gunslinger, like all great literature, manifests
a dynamic engagement with its circumstances, rather than a static one.
A great treat awaits those who are yet ignorant of Gunslinger. Elmborg
has a good time discussing the attempts that have been made to place
Gunslinger in a genre. Is the poem comic opera, comedy, an anti-epic, an
allegory, mock-epic, or a romance. It is all and none of the above. These
futile attempts to pigeonhole a work that breaks down categories, defies
authority and reduces if not eliminates distinctions are themselves
somewhat comical. Literature exists outside the university English
Departments. While some of it is there being routinely contaminated with
redundant exegisis, literature’s more permanent repose is the minds of
people willing to have their states elevated and their intellects
instructed while their emotions are assuaged and purged. Obviously a
single great poem cannot break the university monopoly on irrelevance,
but Gunslinger is certainly one of the ones that is having that
unintentional effect. It is also, for the record, the greatest
contribution to civilization made on cocaine since Sigmund Freud’s The
[Mis]Interpretation of Dreams.
In order to travel to the end of the poem with its merry band of
travelers, it is necessary to come into the poem on the right wave
length. From up here on the mesa where Gunslinger has lifted us, the
verse works like capillary action. Which way was that preposition going?
Who put the squeeze on you now? The comedic effect is achieved and its
valence is determined by the sheer differential of the perspective. It is
not necessary that comedy be light or dark. It can be heavy and light
handed simultaneously. Shakespeare’s best “tragic” plays are and so is
Gunslinger. Its effects are transformational rather than transcendental.
Very good. Then you must
never consort with the Perfect,
stick to the Absolute, it’s
pliable, and upon it
you seem to play any tune
you choose. (48)
In order for a poem to be an epic, something heroic has to take place.
In the case of Gunslinger, that heroicism is language itself. One of the
talking characters in the poem is “I.” “I” plays a role not unlike that
of the straight man who keeps asking questions that the answers to are
more or less already understood by his companions. That is, until they
discover that he is dead.
I is dead, the poet said
I has turned at the end of the row
a truly inherent versus (56)
The question of what becomes of “I” is answered thusly:
Life and Death
are attributes of the Soul
not of things. The Ego
is costumed as the road manager
of the soul, every time
the soul plays a date in another town
I goes ahead to set up
the bleechers, or book the hall
as they now have it,
the phenomenon is reported by the phrase
I got there ahead of myself
I got there ahead of my I
is the fact (57-8)
Keep in mind that these characters are riding in a stagecoach with a
horse capable of speech and of rolling joints and that the six driverless
horses have just stopped to pick up a hitchhiker named Kool Everything.
Kool Everything is transporting a five-gallon can of LSD and the issue of
what to do with I’s body lest it decompose in their laps gets resolved by
pouring I full of the LSD.
What then, if we make I
a receptable of what
Everything has,
our gain will be two fold,
we will have the thing
we wish to keep
as the container of the solution
we wish to hold
a gauge in other words
in the form of man.
It is a derangement of considerable antiquity. (60-1)
These characters are on a mission which is picking up momentum:
Our mission is to encourage the Purity of the Head
pray we dont lose track of our goal. (63)
In the middle of all this psychedelic riffraff, a trip conducted along
the lines of many million others, with the constant breaking and entering
of the conversation stream by individuals loaded down by their own
weight, many very positive admonitions break thru. The “Purity of the
Head” is a noble goal, or at least it ought to be in what is left of The
Enlightenment. Dorn has composed a great poem in a time of colossal
social stupidity that has been effectively disguised, if not entirely, by
the media and their hand maidens in the university system.
there is a civil scar
so cosmetic, one can’t see it. (146)
In order to get under this scar and see it for what it really is, “I” had
to die.
I carries the Broken Code
the key to proprioception,
is it possible he has become the pure Come
of become, asked the Poet (66)
Whats happening to my batch, Kool enquired
Your batch is now The batch
expropriation is accomplished
we stand before an original moment
in ontological history, the self, with one grab
has aquired a capital S, mark the date
the Gunslinger instructed,
we’ll send a telegram to Parmenides. (67)
I returns later in “Book IIII” as the secretary to Parmenides.
Meanwhile the readers are treated to a feast of “presysntactic
metalinguistic urgency,” “terrific actualism,” an “ABSOLUTE LINGUATILT
SURVEY SITE,” “a cherry pit/ emerging from the anus of George
Washington,” and a “double hydrocarbon” hustling the future. The group of
course is curious as to what I’s immersion in the batch was like.
Like trying to read a newspaper
from nothing but the ink poured into your ear
First off,
the lights go out on Thought
and an increase in the thought of thought,
plausibly flooded w/ darkness,
in the shape of an ability
to hear Evil praised, takes place
than a stroll through various
corner-the-greed programs
where we encounter assorted disasters
guaranteed to secure one’s comfort
After that,
an appropriate tightening down
on all the débris left over
from the Latest original question, yet
How rich with regal spoils
It was all Data Redux
caught in the ombrotrophic mire
but I sure got my Mood elevated (159)
One of the apparent discomforts of the academy with Gunslinger is the
fact that the anticipated final confrontation at four corners between the
Mogollones and the Anythingarian Single Spacers controlled by Robart (the
Gunslinger transmorgrification of the historical Howard Hughes) never
takes place. What traditionalists must be reading as a dramatic letdown,
no stage littered with dead bodies such as the murderous climax of Hamlet
for example, seems in fact to be the escape of a peculiarly indomitable
villainy. It is as if there were yet possible a sequel after the purity
of the head was reestablished and maintained, where the wrecking ball
transnational politics and economics has taken to The Enlightenment, the
environment, and ordinary people world-wide, could finally be shutdown.
The psychedelic heroes “...dont care who wins/ None of that bunch trusts
us/ and if they werent so careless/ they’d trust us even less” [.]
As it is, Robart on what is described as “Not exactly an ordinary
cow,” (196) is headed if not for the border, perhaps “it’s a naked
singularity/ he must be headed for Siberia!” (196). Gunslinger by this
time employs more and more Spanish in its lines as well as such new
characters as Taco Desoxin, among others, who show up where “we also kick
the perpendiculars outa right anglos” (167) and things on the
confrontation plane are described as “It’s like Brutalidad,
quarks/.../holding a hatful of dinosaur piss” (194). It is typical of the
timelessness of this poem that just when you think your totally in outer
space, “dinosaur piss,” or in the case of this week’s (7-20-1998)
newspapers, it’s dinosaur shit, that has been unwrapped and is now being
mined for its DNA.
Oh no, Zlinger, Lil trembled
must you leave now, we’ve just hit the Top
and you belong to us (198)
The last strophe in the poem is in unitalicized Spanish, the language
that much of the rest of the history of the American West is now slowly
being re-written in. One of Gunslinger’s gentle admonitions is “Do not
deny in the new vanity/ the old, original dust” (193). I think what’s
really frying the academic bunnies is a reluctance to admit that they and
their progeny will have to learn Gunslinger well enough to one day teach
it as the preeminent example of American Realism.
Entrapment is this society’s
Sole activity, I whispered
and Only laughter
can blow it to rags(155)
And if that won’t drive you to reach for your stash of drugs in this
multifaceted pharmaceutical catastrophe, what will? What elevates
Gunslinger into an echelon above The Cantos [the beak of Pound’s ego
problem] and The Maximus Poems [still strungout on the poet’s
considerable ego] is the process of putting “I” into suspended animation
for most of the poem resulted in the “ego” function being dispersed into
many other characters. Pound and Olson compose largely in a monotone from
a single enlightened perspective and the result too often is monotonous
political cant, however righteous, and not poetry. The salubrious effect
of Dorn’s inspiredly different approach is the delivery of the poetry
from many competing perspectives, much as in a great Shakespeare play
with its many talking heads as contrasted with the dreadfully dull
Miltonic sappiness of Paradise Lost. Get back and read the poem and have
your state elevated. Get into the new era. Take Dorn and Elmborg with
you. They can save you a ton of time.
The Sagetrieb special Dorn issue is like six small books in one
including a facsimile reprint tipin of Bean News, the psychedelic
newspaper that followed the action of Dorn and his acolytes. The other
five parts in aesthetic order are a forty page spread of recent Dorn
poems, great essays on the work by Peter Michelson and Burton Hatlen, the
annotations to Gunslinger by Stephen Fredman and Grant Jenkins, and an
essay by Grant Jenkins. We’re absent the space and time to adequately
treat the depth and complexity of all the ideas generated by the essays,
but I will try to describe the work and recommend it be taken seriously.
“The Denver Landing 11 Aug 1993” is a top drawer satire on what could
be called the Pope’s rowboat ride to Denver and the filthy “counter
reformation.” This poem could be drop shipped whole into The Temple’s
aborted sequence on “The Rest of the Reformation” as it is loaded with
primary reasons. In “Aboard the Tan Am With Odin, a Dog of Judgment” Dorn
demonstrates he knows how to get inside a metaphor and extend it every
laterally. Here we find:
Business is a form of terror¾you leave the victim,
the customer, even the mere low-end shopper wasted,
drained of cash and will and shackled to the future¾
Dorn’s commitment to the work is also clearly restated: “The sheer
writing of the poem must be our shelter.”
Odin ran his tongue over his impressive teeth
and observed: from the minute that species
stood up and walked the planet was doomed.
The poem “Jerusalem” from the series “Languedoc Variorum: A Defense of
Heresy and Heretics” employs effectively on the page, a hypertext style
of the poem per se on the top of the page, the middle of each page is
given to “Subtexts & Nazdaks” and the bottom is a sendup on the stock
tickers at the bottom of the TV screen, all three sections separated one
from the other by a string of paragraph signs and a religious club
symbol. Shall we wait around in the gutters for the moment when “the
Living shall Email the Dead.” This is high grade poetry from a master
poet still at the peak of his powers.
Peter Michelson’s essay, “Edward Dorn, Inside the Outskirts,” is
exceptionally good on Dorn’s methods, preoccupations and results.
Michelson is right on a hundred and fifty points and only mistaken on
only one or two. He reminds us that Dorn’s preoccupation is with rational
attention, mentions the Rexroth effect on Dorn and suggests that it may
be even more pervasive than the Olson effect, correctly locates the great
poetry in the repartee, and points out the purposes of the various
philosophers subsumed into the text and backgrounding of Gunslinger.
Michelson rightly dismisses the noise that Epstein and Gioia throw into
the arena, but he is mistaken in the phrase “practitioners of public
poetry,” even though his examples, Ginsberg, Dorn, Rich, and Baraka, are
as well known as we can make them. There is no such thing as public
poetry in the United States. I’ve lived and worked my entire life among
the public. Only the merest, infinitismially small number of them have
even the faintest idea what poetry is and they are not apt to be induced
to learn. Dorn in a poem entitled “Dismissal,” speaking of Ezra Pound:
He was detained not because
he was the Greatest Poet,
they couldn’t have known that anyway
nor would they have given a hoot
far from it.
The public can tell you the names of Pound and Ginsberg but they haven’t
read more than two lines of the work. Poetry is public in the same sense
that the judgments of the superior courts of Okanogan County are public;
you can find them if you have to but nobody knows ahead of time what they
are. That poetry is intensely debated among those people who seek their
sacred paths within a six-foot radius of university English departments
doesn’t make the work public.
Burton Hatlen’s “Toward a Common Ground: Versions of Place in the
Poetry of Charles Olson, Edward Dorn, and Theodore Enslin,” is a high
quality piece of criticism. He nails several of the essential Olson
limitations, some of which can be found in Olson’s preoccupation with
Jung, and the pathological degeneration of Olson’s mythos regarding the
relationships between male and female, man and woman. “The explanation
lies, I think, in Olson’s increasing tendency simply to collapse the
personal, the local, and the historical.” It could also be the
degenerative effects of a Catholic propadeuticism.
Hatlen under the influence of much classical backgrounding,
persistently insists that Gunslinger is a mock-epic, a term he may not
find pejorative, but it is. He claims “...the effect is to dissolve all
epic certainties in a corrosive bath of irony.” I’m willing to
acknowledge the poem giving us a bath in corrosive irony, but if ever a
culture deserved to be linguistically eviscerated, this is it. I’ve read
enough epics to know that certainty is not one of the things they left me
with. Gunslinger, referred to above as an example of realism, leaves you
on the street alone in a vicious system at the mercy of such friends and
other arrangements as you can make. This truth, being the truth, is the
most useful kind of certainty. I’ll take Hatlen on Enslin at face value.
Hatlen admits that what he misses in Dorn and Enslin is “a sense of the
possibility of a politics that might allow us to act within a public
scene, in our historical moment.” Could anyone possibly be getting or
ever require such a sense of politics from a close reading of
Shakespeare? Hatlen seems in fact to be lamenting the absence of Olson’s
most crippling limitation: the notion that there could ever be a politics
that would resemble a solution.
The “Annotations” to Gunslinger are by turns, instructive, amusing,
irrelevant and obvious. They’ll be most useful to people completely in
the dark. Jenkins’ “Ethics of Excess” apparently written while he was a
student, (it is well known what being a student can do to de-arrange a
mind) is confused and too heavily laden with extraneous references to be
of much use. To have his ideas taken seriously they will need to be
detoxified, as in a book length Chomskian treatment where the juice would
probably not be worth the squeeze. “Dorn breaks a great, unwritten rule
of narrative: consistent character names.” I thought consistency was the
hemoglobin of bleeding harts. Inconsistent character names do not
diminish the work of Dostoevsky. It’s only a typo, but reference is made
in Jenkins’ essay to Dr. Flamboyant’s “Turning Machine.” It’s cited more
accurately if incompletely in the “Annotations” at page 135, line 20 as a
“Turing Machine,” so at least the double entendre on “tour” is
maintained. A turning machine sounds like a railroad roundhouse or a
rotisserie rather than a model for computer simulation. In his Coda,
Jenkins writes, “I cannot end this essay without qualifying or unsaying
some of my statements about the ethic in Gunslinger.” “Unsay?” Isn’t that
why Dorn referred to Universities, among other places, as natural centers
of double talk.
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