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Hello LA Jolla
Book by Dorn, Edward
- GenresPoetry
92 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 1978
19 people want to read
About the author
Ed Dorn
41 books15 followersEdward 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 21, 2013
Ed Dorn has been on my radar for awhile. He's one of the Black Mountain poets and is supposedly a massive influence on contemporary poetry. The book to read, according to a few friends, is Gunslinger but I couldn't find it at any book store in NYC, so I have to wait...
This book is slim (91 pages) and filled with short poems that seem more like jokes or zen koans. Many of the poems have footnotes (did Dorn do that before Bartheleme? is David Foster Wallace taking his cues from Dorn?).
Anyway, again, I've been reading this stuff to myself and then out loud. I'll take my old friend who is back from Berlin to a tea shop in Chinatown and read. I'll read to the girl who always stops by the book store and tells me her problems. I'll read to my friend who I always see in the morning at the cafe, and I'll read to the girl who works at the cafe. I'll read to random customers who come into the bookstore. Basically, to whoever will listen because although Harold Bloom argues that poetry is a surrogate memory system, for me poetry is something that can only be understood fully if it is read both out loud and to myself.
But this book?
Dorn starts off with a PREFACE:
These dispatches should be
received in the spirit
of the Pony Express:
light and essential.
Which is true. Their shortness is what give them the zen koan flavor and Dorn's playful and surprising way with words is what made the girl at the bookstore and my friend at the cafe laugh out loud.
This book is slim (91 pages) and filled with short poems that seem more like jokes or zen koans. Many of the poems have footnotes (did Dorn do that before Bartheleme? is David Foster Wallace taking his cues from Dorn?).
Anyway, again, I've been reading this stuff to myself and then out loud. I'll take my old friend who is back from Berlin to a tea shop in Chinatown and read. I'll read to the girl who always stops by the book store and tells me her problems. I'll read to my friend who I always see in the morning at the cafe, and I'll read to the girl who works at the cafe. I'll read to random customers who come into the bookstore. Basically, to whoever will listen because although Harold Bloom argues that poetry is a surrogate memory system, for me poetry is something that can only be understood fully if it is read both out loud and to myself.
But this book?
Dorn starts off with a PREFACE:
These dispatches should be
received in the spirit
of the Pony Express:
light and essential.
Which is true. Their shortness is what give them the zen koan flavor and Dorn's playful and surprising way with words is what made the girl at the bookstore and my friend at the cafe laugh out loud.
January 9, 2018
I don't know if there's much record of Dorn closely reading Spicer, so it seems to me that for one book he independently arrived at the same font of transmission Spicer felt beckoned by, fine-tuned of course by sardonic footnotes, enjambments redolent of Creeley, titles almost as long as the poems themselves, & quasi-correctives to a world of poetry gone much too static & in love with its own cascading noise pollution. Dorn wouldn't do anything before or after with this same sort of dry, Spicerian declarative voice, & for that it's well worth seeking out—it has been reproduced in the Collected volume Carcanet put out in 2012.
Beyond its value as a work of singularity in Dorn's formidable œuvre, it has some of his finest epigrammatic works & flashes of epiphanic light, like bolts on a cloudless day, & we are left "bewildered by its blue," as Spicer would have it:
"If Somebody Asks You Where You Come from Remember"
There are two categories of soil
The soil of transport (a)
And the other is the soil of disintegration
Which can be found anywhere
but especially in mountains.
Runoff goeth down to the valley,
into the soil of transport.
(a) And that would be anywhere between the Appalachians and the Rockies.
Beyond its value as a work of singularity in Dorn's formidable œuvre, it has some of his finest epigrammatic works & flashes of epiphanic light, like bolts on a cloudless day, & we are left "bewildered by its blue," as Spicer would have it:
"If Somebody Asks You Where You Come from Remember"
There are two categories of soil
The soil of transport (a)
And the other is the soil of disintegration
Which can be found anywhere
but especially in mountains.
Runoff goeth down to the valley,
into the soil of transport.
(a) And that would be anywhere between the Appalachians and the Rockies.
Read
January 6, 2026“An embarrassed language/ in which Freedom: is thrown like a shrunk bedspread/ over Liberty…”
“I’d live on the Moon / if the commute were/ a little less.”
“I’d live on the Moon / if the commute were/ a little less.”
August 2, 2007
These epigrammatic poems are good, but slight.
November 25, 2020
Read this after reading Sherman Paul's Lost America of Love. While I have read Dorn in the past, he never really stuck with me and this remains the case.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews