Abhorrences

by Ed Dorn

A collection of poetry by Edward Dorn.

Genres: Poetry

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Edward Merton Dorn was born in Villa Grove, Illinois. He grew up in rural poverty during the Great Depression. He attended a one-room schoolhouse for his first eight grades. He later studied at the University of Illinois and at Black Mountain College (1950-55). At Black Mountain he came into contact with Charles Olson, who greatly influenced his literary worldview and his sense of himself as poet.[citation needed]

Dorn's final examiner at Black Mountain was Robert Creeley, with whom, along with the poet Robert Duncan, Dorn became included as one of a trio of younger poets later associated with Black Mountain and with Charles Olson.

Reviews

[Jeffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Abhorrences
Poets who started in the 1950s and were relatively anonymous until later, like Phil Whalen or Jimmy Schuyler, have risen in popularity whereas Ed Dorn has taken a tumble. Not bicoastal by inclination, he reveled in the West, living in places like an undeveloped Washington State, New Mexico and Colorado. He was well respected by his peers; Amiri Baraka considered him one of the few honest poets. At the same time—though eventually accused of misogyny, he mentored Lucia Berlin towards her spare, emotionally charged short stories about working women trying to survive emotionally and physically.
Dorn great achievement was the epic poem Slinger, published in 1975. Then it was considered a great work. But speak with young poets today and the chances are they haven’t heard of it, or heard it mentioned just in passing. I think Dorn’s Slinger and Schuyler’s Morning of the Poem are two required reads for young poets in the United States.
Abhorrences, a book he published in the 1980s, suffers from that era, and Dorn’s outrage at the inequities of the Reagan Administration thrust upon its citizens seems fairly quaint in the light of the Trump administration. But there are still interesting things here, and his writing often moves beyond clever to delve into wisdom. For example. His poem The Protestant View points out: that eternal dissent / and the ravages of / faction are preferable / to the voluntary / servitude of blind / obedience (pg. 19). The book often has, as the poet Anselm Hollo pointed out, a wonderful dry humor. In Boulder Mundane, Dorn says: Another Kopy Shoppe opens. / This town is obsessed with reproduction / But few babies are born (pg. 36)
But there is also the sad, bitter side of his leftist politics that failed to free the country, and some very weird sexual stuff about trans and other “deviations” from gender. Or perhaps he was snorting too much of the 1980s drug of choice, cocaine.
This book made me sad. One senses a decline of a writer with a full house of disillusionment in his hand. But when the work rises to the occasion, it is worth the time spent reading it. I’m glad to have visited this, enjoyed it, suffered through his pains and sometimes puzzled over them. In the end I forgive Dorn. He wrote some great stuff in his time and I would love to read his bio. Hopefully some grad student will go to town on this.

[Maeve Howser · Rating 2 out of 5]

T'was a DNF for me.
Halfway through my reading of it I described it to my girlfriend, to which it said "old man yells at cloud." My reading of it then became "centrist grandpa yells at minor inconvenience."
Dorn's poetry feels like a Facebook post by your very conservative grandpa with random line breaks to make the whole thing a more stout rectangle.
On the Maeve G. Howser Pages Until Old Man Author Makes Transphobic Joke Test™️, it scored 96.