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Gunslinger
This book marks a turning point in American Poetry, a turn away from monologic lyric of mid-century poetry.
206 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1975
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520 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 - 30 of 39 reviews
July 26, 2022
There comes the occasional need to clear the poetry that becomes a wax sediment in one's ear by returning to an old standby, a dependable set of poems that fired an imagination decades ago that can still inspire one to think imaginative writing is indeed the method with which one can "break on through". This isn't a slight against anyone I've been reading, though there are hills and dales in the perpetual reading list I keep; it's just that I want the gravity and grit of sentences that distinguished themselves from the common expression.
So I go back to Ed Dorn, introduced to me by poet Paul Dresman back
in the late Seventies, particularly his epic poem "Gunslinger". Equal parts myth making,satire, phenomenological investigation and an expansion on the Charles Olson projectivist project that twined style and diction , personality with the physicality and accumulated history of region, some of what Dorn was up to now reads psychedelic and out of sync, of it's time, the Sixties, but there remains beyond the dated lingo the verve of a writer that understands the absurdity of all manner of defining rhetoric and which finds purpose in exposing what's under the cornerstones of dogma.
The warning sounds again and again in Gunslinger against someone finding themselves described at all; set in a West of the imagination, where one can start over and start again potentially as many times as the imagination permits, being described imprisons one in another person's frameworks; you become what they think you are.The late Ed Dorn wrote a masterpiece with "Gunslinger", an anti-epic poem that prefigures many post-modern gestures from its 60s era starting point. Funny, cartoonish, erudite to the extreme, it also locates a tuned lyricism in the Western vernaculars that Dorn uses: the metaphysical aspect of our legends, the sheer questing for answers as Euro-Americans come treading closer to a West coast that will stop them and force them to settle and create lives from dust and ingenuity, comes alive in way that never escapes the zaniness of Dorn's narrating inquiry into the nature of the search.
____
More on Dorn: Giddy stuff, this, but Dorn is brilliant at the stretch. He gets it done. One finds solace too in is shorter poems. Some are plain-spoken knockouts:
IN MY YOUTH I WAS A TIRELESS DANCER
But now I pass
graveyards in a car.
The dead lie,
unsuperstitiously,
with their feet toward me--
please forgive me for
saying the tombstones would not
fancy their faces turned from the highway.
Oh perish the thought
I was thinking in that moment
Newman Illinois
the Saturday night dance--
what a life? Would I like it again?
No. Once I returned late summer
from California thin from journeying
and the girls were not the same.
You'll say that's natural
they had been dancing all the time.
Tom Robbins' wrote a blurb for one of Dorn's books (Hello LaJolla), "Ed Dorn is a can opener in the supermarket of life." He was one of the great masters of the Western Voice in the 20th century, a voice maintaining rural accents and wanderlust that has been subdivided with Eastern conceits and European irony; his epic poem Gunslinger is something of a post-modern masterpiece after the pomp of Whitman and Charles Olson have worn away; the student has an expansive persona as well, but it is zany, frantic, engaged in constant conversation with the variant dictions he contains within himself. Moving on to the next thing, as you say, is what is always required in this personality; there's always something else to learn, emotions to feel anew, a new dance step to absorb, a new direction to take over all. I like this because Dorn has a way of interrupting himself and getting to what it was he really wanted to say without the initial lines being a waste; one appreciates the mastery of the bold strokes, the odd alignments. One appreciates, as well, his relative brevity. Ed Dorn could take you a journey in a poem and leave you at the side of the interstate in the middle of nowhere, wondering what just happened. I mean that as a compliment.
So I go back to Ed Dorn, introduced to me by poet Paul Dresman back
in the late Seventies, particularly his epic poem "Gunslinger". Equal parts myth making,satire, phenomenological investigation and an expansion on the Charles Olson projectivist project that twined style and diction , personality with the physicality and accumulated history of region, some of what Dorn was up to now reads psychedelic and out of sync, of it's time, the Sixties, but there remains beyond the dated lingo the verve of a writer that understands the absurdity of all manner of defining rhetoric and which finds purpose in exposing what's under the cornerstones of dogma.
The warning sounds again and again in Gunslinger against someone finding themselves described at all; set in a West of the imagination, where one can start over and start again potentially as many times as the imagination permits, being described imprisons one in another person's frameworks; you become what they think you are.The late Ed Dorn wrote a masterpiece with "Gunslinger", an anti-epic poem that prefigures many post-modern gestures from its 60s era starting point. Funny, cartoonish, erudite to the extreme, it also locates a tuned lyricism in the Western vernaculars that Dorn uses: the metaphysical aspect of our legends, the sheer questing for answers as Euro-Americans come treading closer to a West coast that will stop them and force them to settle and create lives from dust and ingenuity, comes alive in way that never escapes the zaniness of Dorn's narrating inquiry into the nature of the search.
____
More on Dorn: Giddy stuff, this, but Dorn is brilliant at the stretch. He gets it done. One finds solace too in is shorter poems. Some are plain-spoken knockouts:
IN MY YOUTH I WAS A TIRELESS DANCER
But now I pass
graveyards in a car.
The dead lie,
unsuperstitiously,
with their feet toward me--
please forgive me for
saying the tombstones would not
fancy their faces turned from the highway.
Oh perish the thought
I was thinking in that moment
Newman Illinois
the Saturday night dance--
what a life? Would I like it again?
No. Once I returned late summer
from California thin from journeying
and the girls were not the same.
You'll say that's natural
they had been dancing all the time.
Tom Robbins' wrote a blurb for one of Dorn's books (Hello LaJolla), "Ed Dorn is a can opener in the supermarket of life." He was one of the great masters of the Western Voice in the 20th century, a voice maintaining rural accents and wanderlust that has been subdivided with Eastern conceits and European irony; his epic poem Gunslinger is something of a post-modern masterpiece after the pomp of Whitman and Charles Olson have worn away; the student has an expansive persona as well, but it is zany, frantic, engaged in constant conversation with the variant dictions he contains within himself. Moving on to the next thing, as you say, is what is always required in this personality; there's always something else to learn, emotions to feel anew, a new dance step to absorb, a new direction to take over all. I like this because Dorn has a way of interrupting himself and getting to what it was he really wanted to say without the initial lines being a waste; one appreciates the mastery of the bold strokes, the odd alignments. One appreciates, as well, his relative brevity. Ed Dorn could take you a journey in a poem and leave you at the side of the interstate in the middle of nowhere, wondering what just happened. I mean that as a compliment.
October 13, 2013
I found this book to be utterly baffling, honestly. Until I got to a couple unexpected velvet underground references. I read it in tandom with Ed Dorn Live, which is a new book of interviews, etc., and it cleared up alot about the guy for me. I never really knew him, but did sit at the dinner table with him once or twice and saw what some of his manners were like.
At his best I'd say he is a great rhapsodic intellect--not like the subsequent boring majoroity generation of poets of whom a great many don't even read their own work well. He is of that earlier generation born around the thirties or into the forties who grew up without television and receieved classical educations, but who were also hip in a way that can't exist now--when the social divisions in the country were still physical, rather than the abstractions we have today in economics and the odd mix of news saturation/deprevation we endure for essentially no reason. Back to Gunslinger: I will need to read this again at some point in my life, maybe after filling in some gaps in my education. Dorn never explains himself, he just lets his wit carry the poem threads; but this is essentially a long wild conversation among some strange characters. The fact that people are actually talking is what sets this apart from a large amount of poetry today--though I won't bother with a further decrying of that type. Anyway, check it out as a must while you can--this edition in is from 1989, and I don't know if a reprint is iminent, though this type of work should never be long out of print.
At his best I'd say he is a great rhapsodic intellect--not like the subsequent boring majoroity generation of poets of whom a great many don't even read their own work well. He is of that earlier generation born around the thirties or into the forties who grew up without television and receieved classical educations, but who were also hip in a way that can't exist now--when the social divisions in the country were still physical, rather than the abstractions we have today in economics and the odd mix of news saturation/deprevation we endure for essentially no reason. Back to Gunslinger: I will need to read this again at some point in my life, maybe after filling in some gaps in my education. Dorn never explains himself, he just lets his wit carry the poem threads; but this is essentially a long wild conversation among some strange characters. The fact that people are actually talking is what sets this apart from a large amount of poetry today--though I won't bother with a further decrying of that type. Anyway, check it out as a must while you can--this edition in is from 1989, and I don't know if a reprint is iminent, though this type of work should never be long out of print.
October 26, 2010
Oh Eddie YOU ARE the bossiest. You are the catchiest scroll of yarn. You are atangling into genflection, the post script, the making of a building with little windows and little doors. Billions and Billions. As I was saying at the Odium, a homeless preist wheeled by. You are so out loud, Eddie. So utterly and plowing and as you were saying Saying takes a breath. He replied. He echoed. He yelped. Yuckyuckyuck you American. You Eddie the Watcher, you Orange Yarn, you outline in the coolness, day breaking down, so we decide to play it out. Take heart. Take it to the NAMER in GALLOSHES. IS THAT HOW YOU SPELL GALOSHES?
January 25, 2021
Refreshingly weird given the now and then state of monologic, lyric-I, aha poetry. A bit boring with the theory stuff. I like the drugs and pop culture. Brilliantly imaginative. Would like to see more poetry like this in "top" journals and less light, uplifting, paint-by-numbers verse coded as literature. But so it always has been, so it always shall be. Still, post-pandemic may stir up some trouble in Poetry Land for a bit. Here's hoping.
August 2, 2007
Brilliant epic poem, a faux-western complete with talking horse rolling massive joints and playing poker, a character named i who dies, and lots of psychedelic ontology. One of a handful of long poems post-Maximus that matter, Gunslinger establishes Dorn as a 60's icon, a pedastal that he never got used to being on. If you haven't read it, you've missed out on one of the most enjoyable works of poetry of our time. Simply a masterpiece!
September 8, 2014
I can appreciate the cleverness behind this poem. Unfortunately, after about a 100 pages, the cleverness was not enough to sustain me. It soon became clear that Dorn had created a world that only he could truly penetrate. I wave the white flag.
August 26, 2009
um, yeah mind blow-r. to call this an epic poem is an understatement. this is an epic unconventional braided tale(s) of glorious proportions. the wild west circa the 60's (makes me think of w. s. burroughs' use of 'the west'). undeniable word choice, unexplainable concepts. endless avenues of divine chaos that i could never, in a lifetime, explain. the poem is about Everything. edward dorn where have you been all my life, really?
December 17, 2018
Honestly, going into this book I felt it was so over my head, but the introduction and the essay at the end helped a great deal in contextualizing it. More than that, though, just continuing to read this longform poem and letting it wash over me was the right path to take. I laughed out loud several times, smiled wryly more times than I could count in appreciation of fantastic wordplay and satire, and oh, the typography! Clever, interesting, and complicated.
July 5, 2007
For the most part psychedelic drug-influenced epic poems are more fun to write than read, but this feller did make me chuckle a lot with really obscure puns, most of which over my head. A spaced-out 60s take on the Wild West. The poem set in the middle (Book II) was just too too difficult but the dialog that frames it in the other books is funtastic.
August 8, 2008
A druggy mock-Western pop art Epic that follows characters with names like Kool Everything and Dr. Flamboyant... and, um, there's a talking horse... and it, um, rolls joints. I read this book online because I didn't want it sleeping on my couch.
September 6, 2007
The funniest, most mind-expanding, most challenging, poetic epic of the last fifty years, or more. Read it!
April 15, 2008
One of the most amazing books of poetry. Dorn's use of the pastich, kitsch, and theory create a pscyodelic hodgepodge of stragne imagery.
November 17, 2008
How to hear the many voices of time...
August 15, 2013
So rich. Pairs nicely with either scholarly glee or a couple grams of white widow. Or both. Digressive, entertaining, madcap, cartoonish, brilliant.
January 20, 2022
Gunslinger combines the four books previously published by Edward Dorn (a sort of serial approach to the epic poem, which is appropriate given the pulp elements throughout)
I rate the books as follows:
Gunslinger Book I - 5 Stars
Gunslinger Book II - 4 Stars
Gunslinger Book III - 4 Stars
Gunslinger Book IV - 3 Stars
Note the gradual decline. I read the first two books effortlessly, the third book with a little effort, and the fourth book with a lot of effort. Dorn, it seemed, lost his direction; he became aimless. His characters, too, seemed to lose their direction. They started off with a clear objective (see: my review of Book I) but descended into a sort of aimless drifting. By the end I had the uncertain feeling that the characters no longer occupied a setting - Dorn had neglected to furnish them with a setting, and so they hovered on the page. Even their bodies were called into question... Not intentionally. (At least it didn't read as intentional.)
In my review of Book I, I considered the inspiration for this remarkable work, unsatisfied with the proposition that it was the product of the psychedelic sixties. By the time I reached Book IV, however, I was ready to accept this proposal. In the end, Dorn's psychedelic poetic vision burnt out like so many users of psychedelics - with a whimper, not a bang.
I rate the books as follows:
Gunslinger Book I - 5 Stars
Gunslinger Book II - 4 Stars
Gunslinger Book III - 4 Stars
Gunslinger Book IV - 3 Stars
Note the gradual decline. I read the first two books effortlessly, the third book with a little effort, and the fourth book with a lot of effort. Dorn, it seemed, lost his direction; he became aimless. His characters, too, seemed to lose their direction. They started off with a clear objective (see: my review of Book I) but descended into a sort of aimless drifting. By the end I had the uncertain feeling that the characters no longer occupied a setting - Dorn had neglected to furnish them with a setting, and so they hovered on the page. Even their bodies were called into question... Not intentionally. (At least it didn't read as intentional.)
In my review of Book I, I considered the inspiration for this remarkable work, unsatisfied with the proposition that it was the product of the psychedelic sixties. By the time I reached Book IV, however, I was ready to accept this proposal. In the end, Dorn's psychedelic poetic vision burnt out like so many users of psychedelics - with a whimper, not a bang.
February 20, 2024
Read on and off through a couple of weeks in Europe and England. I remember reading of this ten years ago in my brief foray into grad school and being very excited about the prospect: a late modernist epic with its feet in genre fiction, coming out of Black Mountain and under the influence of Prynne. I believe I got two pages into it at the time. It's not that it doesn't come off, exactly; like Christopher Logue's Homer episodes it feels tangential to any of the points it intersects with a wider culture or aesthetic; I value Logue's Homer more because I feel glad of any route into the Iliad whereas I can just watch Rio Bravo. Perhaps another time I might be able to reread it and really get on its wavelength; I think a more sympathetic reader might being themselves more into alignment with Dorn's sensibilities and get something out of what to me reading now often felt like an inconcilable clash of modes: the hokey Pynchonian humor, not ideally suited to free verse; the working-through of the poetic impulse [the poem has a character named 'I' who dies and comes back; less by the book, the 'Literate Projector' which turns film into text]; the lyric moments I found myself hanging on for.
and she was vulgar and strong
as pure salt
and intution came to her
like the red deer to the lick
and she was vulgar and strong
as pure salt
and intution came to her
like the red deer to the lick
July 18, 2024
I feel bad rating something lower because I didn't get it but this seems really tough if you're not spending an hour on every page or really really familiar with 60s pop and drug culture. The only reference I got was when he seems like he's talking shit about miles davis's late-sixties Era and implying he was selling out there, which I would disagree with even after the release of In a Silent Way but is a very strange thing to say before that even came out. I could be 100% wrong there as I said I didn't really understand this.
The first book gets a five stars from me - it was very enjoyable and I felt like I could think about what was going on. By the time I got to the other books I was pretty fatigued with it and he keeps adding characters that are hard to keep straight or understand why they're even there in the first place, so the rest gets a 3. I could round up to a 4 on average but I'm not going to.
The first book gets a five stars from me - it was very enjoyable and I felt like I could think about what was going on. By the time I got to the other books I was pretty fatigued with it and he keeps adding characters that are hard to keep straight or understand why they're even there in the first place, so the rest gets a 3. I could round up to a 4 on average but I'm not going to.
April 13, 2022
One of a kind and what kind ain't exactly clear. Dorn's epic/allegory/hallucination combines a psychedelic western with multi-leveled philosophical, poetic explorations without worrying too much about coherence, local or global. It's fun, but you definitely need to surrender to the voice and flow. Weird mutant offspring of Charles Olson and Ezra Pound with Kerouac lurking in the shadows. You'll know within a few pages whether you want to stay on board for the ride.
December 8, 2023
light 4, maybe 3.5. I could see myself rereading it and getting more out of it a second time. Although sometimes lost in absurdity I feel the book is enhanced by this. It get across a feeling rather than trying to convey an exact sentiment, which I feel is indicative of good poetry.
The characters are interesting and unique, and the speaker is clear even when not indicated. The story is interesting but abstract enough to be lost and picked up at different parts of the poems.
The characters are interesting and unique, and the speaker is clear even when not indicated. The story is interesting but abstract enough to be lost and picked up at different parts of the poems.
July 25, 2024
I liked this but I also feel like this was lost on me.
I enjoyed the writing very much and there’s like a funny quality to the narrative that kept me going but like, the actually story and themes I simply couldn’t grasp.
This edition has an introduction which is what really clued me in to the happenings of this book.
I enjoyed the writing very much and there’s like a funny quality to the narrative that kept me going but like, the actually story and themes I simply couldn’t grasp.
This edition has an introduction which is what really clued me in to the happenings of this book.
October 16, 2017
GUNSLINGER is a funny, wild ride through language and philosophy. There is no other direct way to describe the long-form poem other than this: it's a narrative about an alien turned cowboy traveling through the Southwest with a bizarre cast of characters.
September 21, 2020
Astounding. A Pynchon novel rendered in verse, and maybe with even more on its mind. The end-stage of the American spirit, traipsing across a plastic desert, in search of the Godhead of industry. I'm going to have to return to this often.
January 18, 2020
I always did love Dorn. I think this is one of his better works. Recommended.
December 13, 2022
Deep-dive lyric poetry on a formidable scale, endlessly fascinating, gun, and gorgeous. It feels lived in, sacred and profane.
December 15, 2022
Brutal
Me gustó el caballo que fuma marancandinguana
Me gustó el caballo que fuma marancandinguana
May 3, 2021
The sixties, maaaan
In all honesty I DNFed about 3/4th through. Maybe I’ll enjoy this more if I read it in one sitting on a day I crave Woody Allen humor but can’t bring myself to steep that low.
In all honesty I DNFed about 3/4th through. Maybe I’ll enjoy this more if I read it in one sitting on a day I crave Woody Allen humor but can’t bring myself to steep that low.
December 22, 2019
A trip. Great use of language, even if a lot of it didn't exactly make sense.
January 16, 2015
Art poetry is not entirely my bag but I checked this out because I dig the mythology of the American West, especially the bent versions of it. This is a picaresque epic poem about a gunslinger, a talking horse, a girl, a few other people who honestly I stopped paying enough attention to keep apart. It's surprisingly silly and outright funny in parts -- lots and lots of puns, some great, some ... not really worth recording for posterity. Like if my friend said some of these things while stoned (e.g. spelling the word "shit" as "xit" it would be amusing a few times and then dumb and then we would not bother remembering it or writing it down. Ed Dorn does not feel the same way. This book is definitely at least in part about drugs, and if you are not on those drugs, it is not super interesting in big parts. There is a real line-level genius at work. Not sure why he only does that like <10% of the time. Definitely not recommended unless you like irreverent stoned poetry A LOT. Still, a few chestnuts from this are going in my notebook of delightful mind diamonds.
this like a bob dylan album with one good song on it. and also no music.
this like a bob dylan album with one good song on it. and also no music.
June 25, 2023
The kooky puns and homonym and dad joke play in Dorn’s amusing poetry rifle on luring you to each page to chuckle and muse. He’s a master of wordplay that probably deserves its own category separate from more serious aesthetically beautiful poems. Dorn’s lines are like jokes, puzzles and nerdy references to science and meta science.
In turns it’s something like listening to Rod Stewart and Ron Wood tell stories about the old days while giggling over a reefer (if that xit even works on them anymore), or like overhearing a conversation between card playing ancients as they avoid the liquor and are carefully watched by their worried caretaker offspring.
It is a bit like s Goon show script, Spike Milligan dredging his most freeform wildness.
Just great fun the second time around. Now I’m going to read what i missed from art teachers.
In turns it’s something like listening to Rod Stewart and Ron Wood tell stories about the old days while giggling over a reefer (if that xit even works on them anymore), or like overhearing a conversation between card playing ancients as they avoid the liquor and are carefully watched by their worried caretaker offspring.
It is a bit like s Goon show script, Spike Milligan dredging his most freeform wildness.
Just great fun the second time around. Now I’m going to read what i missed from art teachers.
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