MPR’s Tom Meersman profiles poet Edward Dorn. Segment includes Dorn speaking and reading at Macalester College as part of this week's Midwestern Writers Festival.
Meersman is associated with the Black Mountain poets. His most famous work is “Gunslinger.”
Transcript:
(00:00:00) Poetry is now mostly government product. Therefore we can dispense with the critical apparatus. The grades assigned to beef will do nicely. Prime Choice good commercial canners utility
(00:00:19) humor is a frequent vehicle for Edward Dorn whose poems have been published over the past 23 years in dozens of magazines and eight books a native of Illinois Dorn left the Midwest and the early 1950s to attend Black Mountain College in North Carolina there under the direction of Charles Olson Dorn met others who were to become famous as the Black Mountain poets Robert creeley John Cage Robert Duncan Joel open Heimer Michael room acre. Doran's range of subjects in poetry could rightly be called eclectic and is treatment of them ranges from the more personal and private to the playful and satiric. He's perhaps best known for Gunslinger along serial, narrative poem written over a span of eight years considered by some to be as Masterpiece. Dorn's most recent publication is called hello, La Jolla and several of its entries poke fun at Contemporary American culture.
(00:01:13) And since this was a book of commitment to you know, really In front public issue as obliquely as possible some of the pages of course still shine with unfulfillment the next one for instance and opinion on a matter of public safety. Airbag sounds like eminent
(00:01:38) sickness.
(00:01:41) This device should not be permitted. General Motors was right to suppress it and wrong to have relented and NATO should stay out of it. Driving is based on alertness whether that be loose or tight those who let their attention wander must not be encouraged to survive by a bag full of
(00:02:02) air.
(00:02:10) In a way, I doubt if the airbag will ever be brought up again. I can't it just doesn't make sense. They must have sensed that that wasn't going to
(00:02:16) float.
(00:02:22) Then the there is a kind of tennis poem. I don't know really what to think of that. It's called You're supposed to move your head not your eyes and it has a kind of a quotation at the beginning to be good at sports. You must be spiteful and horrible. Billy Ellen trap You're the most move your head. Not your eyes. We now live next to the tennis court. Yellow green ball seemed to be the thing this season for phrases we get vicious shot, or I knew you were going to do that. Last Saturday we watch the finals inside. Villa says got an arm like a gorilla and it appears it also serves as his main instrument of thought since it Returns the ball to so often to the same place footnote a a tennis intelligence is subtle up to but not including the shot. Outside on our court the less consecutive thocks and thugs labor Along on Raw audible time dramatised by the brains impatience with Bleak netted balls. Connors paranoid study of his strings reminds the nation. That tennis is the only game in which the instrument suffers the blame for error. Footnote be even the dentist that meanness class of Sportsman when he breaks your tooth doesn't exclaim shit as he could actually stares at his pliers. Football both types is perhaps least dilated by this instrumental paranoia. The pastor does not glare and hatred at the hand which overthrew the pass notice the kicker inflict punishment on the foot that missed the goal. The hundred is not throw away the gun that missed the duck and so forth. The golfer and his putter really don't
(00:04:33) count beneath. The humerus endurance poetry is a serious strain consistent with his belief that many things that are funny are not funny and that if there's a laugh in it, there's also knowledge in it the serious side of humor controlled his readers into seeing things as they really are something Dorn feels is increasingly important in today's world perhaps it's a growing sense of social responsibility that has led Dorn to compose more of his recent poems in series and to Writing short essays.
(00:05:02) The next piece is the the first part of one entitled Cole Gillette and the North East quad. Wyoming is anyone who's looked at? The map must know is an entirely surveyed state in the Northeast quadrant is coal solid coal. In the Southeast is the population Casper Douglas was Cheyenne Laramie. In the Northwest is everyone knows is the park
(00:05:39) mountains Indians.
(00:05:43) And in the Southwest is still the Wild West Rock
(00:05:48) Springs.
(00:05:52) The only other thing in the socio-political sense to say about Wyoming actually is that 80 shouldn't be thought of as Wyoming because Interstate 80 is the longest town in the world. And I mean in the sense of that goes from Chicago to San Francisco. And so in that sense, it's a constituency all of its own presumably like one grand Chamber of Commerce Boulevard. This is the grand terrain of Conquest speculation and violence. A bashful character like Bigfoot stranded out here wouldn't last five minutes. Open mining of coal is a bold operation and makes its presence felt physically. a big crude cesarean delivery quite unlike the invisible statistical nervous sweat. Don't breathe reality of uranium. Yellow cake is kept with the dangerous products coal has the reputation of a big relatively honest lump. The route kol kol is common to all Teutonic Nations. The Romantics a carbo and Shaban de terre Coal is an amorphous substance and cannot be strictly defined as a crystallized or definite mineral can. The first large measure of coal taken in Wyoming was by the railroad in its first penetrating lash across the late great American semi-desert. The railroad still takes the coal this time as carrier. In Wyoming you can see brand new railroads from tracks to Rolling Stock. The only other place you can see this mechanism as new as the 19th century saw it. Isn't a toy shop at
(00:08:13) Christmas poet Edward Dorn reading at Macalester College as part of this week's Midwestern Writers Festival. I'm Tommy Richmond.